WAR OF THE WORLDS

“Inventing the wheel ruined us as a civilisation. Instead of looking within for the way to our dreams, we started exploiting our environment for quick fix solutions.” The class of under graduate students looked at me with skepticism in their eyes and chewed up pencil bottoms in their mouths…

The topic for the day was ‘Did we take the wrong turn?’ and the training tool was a book by Michael Blake, also made into a sensitive and beautiful film by Kevin Costner, called “Dances With Wolves”, an all-time favourite and one that I find deeply moving. It is the story of Lieutenant John Dunbar, who comes close to losing his leg, and is sent off to a frontier outpost on the prairies. Here the earth shakes like a drum skin as great herds of ‘buffalo’ charge from horizon to horizon and the sky is rent by the shrill whoops and cries of (American) Indian hunting parties. When Dunbar reaches the post, it is empty.

Dunbar begins a lonely vigil but eventually befriends a wolf and a neighbouring tribe of Sioux Indians. The war hero learns to appreciate their culture and their empathetic bond with the wilderness. Dunbar gradually realises that his own people are just acquisitive invaders who’re callously destroying the people whose understanding of their world goes much beyond that of his own kind. Dunbar goes over to the other side. He hunts and fights alongside the Sioux, in a battle to save not just a tribe, or its culture but their whole world and its ways, against an enemy that is stronger and cannot love or understand, but only wishes to possess all that is precious and beautiful.

It is an old battle between the lover and the ravisher, replayed in “The Last Samurai” and now again in James Cameron’s “Avatar”. It was while watching “Avatar” that I was reminded of that old hypothesis that we perhaps ended up down the wrong road, far away from where we were meant to be…

Movies like “Dances With Wolves” and “Avatar” pit the old ways against the new; where the second born, emboldened and hardened by technology and driven by a constant Oedipal lust, threatens to ravage and raze Mother Nature, and cannibalise her first born. But the pertinent question over here is, that if the natives or the Na’vi are such wise and wonderful people, then why are they weaker than their modern mechanised counterparts? Why is their saviour not one of their own?

The answer – stagnation! And whatever becomes stagnant must die. The world of the Na’vi and Indians is a world that was stuck in time and forgot to grow. But our world, the world of technology, is constantly growing, experimenting and pushing its limits, and becoming more powerful by the hour. The old worlds that crumble were as much on the wrong path as we are today. Both our world and that of the Na’vi’s is a world built on exploitation. The only difference is that while the Na’vi and the native Americans stop at horses and dragons, we’ve moved on to other more lethal resources like uranium and ‘unobtainium’.

I believe man is supposed to become a god or at least like what Sri Aurobindo said ‘…man arose out of animal, so out of man superman shall come’ but the day man thought that the only way he could go faster than his legs could carry him was by riding a horse or a wheel, he chose to become a demon instead of a deva. From that day to this, our growth has been sublime yet exploitative, enslaved to the very sources of energy that we pretend to subdue. The day they disappear, so would our growth. Stripped of technology and our tools, we still remain the naked ape we’d always been. What is worse is that our dependence on external resources has made us selfish and insecure.

And the solution? Well, one day I was browsing in a bookstore after spending some time talking to students about the goodness of Gandhi and wondering why goodness cannot protect us from a bullet fired in hate. Then, I found a book called “The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali”.

Born in 300 BC, Patanjali wrote his treatise “to eradicate ignorance and show mankind ‘the way’”. You can find versions of it in any bookstore. The first few chapters focus on ‘the path’ and third on the fruits of the path. In a nutshell, the book says that if we devote our lives to ‘doing good and being good’, and most importantly, we focus on the world within us through focused meditation, we’ll find all the power we need, even at the physical level, right here within us.

Do I believe it? Oh, I so want to, and it seems logical too, doesn’t it? But the proof of the pudding lies in the eating, so while I go look for someone who’s tried walking along ‘the path’, you go and pick up that book… at the very least it’ll make us nicer people.

THE OLD TIGER SHALL ROAR NO MORE

There’s a forest that grows by the banks of the Suheli that is weeping today. If you walk along the river, into the dappled shadows and wait for the wind to settle, for the brown leaves at your feet to stop their noisy rustle, you will hear the trees sigh and see their wooden hearts heave with grief, for the forest is an orphan today… The silence of the forest, punctuated by the moans of a lonely tiger will tell you why this shroud of grief cloaks the forest, for the forest and its denizens are mourning the passing of one of their own, that great tiger amongst men, the brave and beautiful ‘Billy’ Arjan Singh.

On the first day of 2010, I was far from the Suheli, spying on a pair of amorous tigers in Ranthambhore when a friend, a fellow admirer of the man his biographer called – The Honorary Tiger, called to say that ‘Billy’ was no more. I was saddened in an intimate sort of way. Surprising, for I’d only met him once…

Nearly a year ago, I met the 91 year old Billy in his lair. I’d met him earlier though, through his books, and then there were legends I encountered when I reached Palia, the town bordering his forest home in Lakhimpur Kheri. A friend’s uncle, my host in Palia, told me “He is old but his arms are still as strong as steel… in his youth he could heave a tractor’s axle around…” At the bazaar, the doodhwala spoke reverentially, as if talking about a local deity. “Billy sahib toh sher hain… Uu hain toh jungle hain, nahin toh je log kabka katke chulha mein phoonk dethe…” Our driver spoke of the man’s indomitable courage and determination. Apparently, not long ago, Billy was driving into the forest when he came across a truck laden with timber. There were five loggers, armed with axes at the very least, but Billy just strode up, snatched the keys away from the driver and handed them over to the cops. Though Billy was outnumbered, the miscreants were in awe of the man. Billy was fearless in his defense of the forest.

Billy wasn’t always this benign though. Born into the Kapurthala royal family with an Anglo-Bengali twist, he was a hell raiser, a soldier in the great war and by his own admission, a “callous and brutal” hunter. One evening, young Billy saw a gorgeous leopard in the forest, its eyes shining in the fading light, took aim and fired. The bullet hit home. As Billy walked up to his fallen prize, he
saw the animal gasping as it lay dying. The great beauty and strength of the creature now lay rolling in the dust. Life seemed to ebb and fade from its eyes like the setting sun… Soon it was dark and dead.

Something died with it that day. Billy never touched a rifle again, unless he was called upon to remove a man-eater, and even that he did with great reluctance.

Instead, the warrior prince of the forest devoted himself to protecting this great wilderness on the Indo-Nepal border that had given him meaning, and that battle gave him purpose. He fought off poachers and loggers, hand raised tigers and leopards and successfully reintroduced them in the wild and pursued political will until it relented and gave that tract of forest land government sanction. Thus was born the Dudhwa National Park.

Waiting for him in the courtyard of his house at the edge of the forest, I was expecting to meet a proud and battle-weary monarch. But the little bald man with the iron grip who met me was like an endearing grandfather, whose opaque blue eyes lit up like a child’s when he spoke of Tara the tigress, the days of his youth and the works of Wodehouse. Then he spoke of a dysfunctional democracy killing the tiger for it didn’t have a vote; how he was too old to keep fighting… Suddenly, he looked old, vulnerable. I wanted to hold him, comfort him and lend him some of my strength and time, for he seemed to want it so, not for himself but for the forest he loved, but was too proud to ask…

I shook hands and promised to return with a Wodehouse, but alas I took too long… Billy now roams the woods in the heavens. He’d written in one of his books, “As I gaze into the crystal ball, I see green mountainsides… river valleys and limpid waters… but no dolphins frolic in the waterways, no swampdeer churn the shallows into a rainbow mist… I do not hear the ethereal resonance of the tiger’s call… or the metallic trumpet of the sambhar…, for the King is dead.”

Indeed, the King is dead, but in his wake, is it too much to hope that at least what he lived for, and with it all who live in it, around it, off it, will live on, in peace, and one day, in harmony too?