A PLAGUE UPON THE EARTH

I was staring out the window of the 7.35 train to Tambaram on my way to college, when something caught my eye. A dog, just over a year or so old, chasing a butterfly between the tracks, a sight which could make anyone’s eyes soften. But even as I watched, this cute sight turned into a horror movie. The dog unwittingly moved onto one of the tracks. I watched with a sinking feeling in my stomach as a train advanced towards the poor thing. My prayers for a safe escape were in vain. In the blink of an eye, a creature of beauty became the mangled remains it was now.

As I looked at the now lifeless and bloody body, it struck me that what I had just witnessed was not an isolated incident. Thousands of such dogs die under the merciless wheels of this monster. Hundreds of birds die everyday not knowing the difference between a transformer and the branch of a tree. Millions of seagulls die choking on the trash left behind by tourists. We kill these beautiful creatures just for the sake of the luxury that we so desperately require in our life. Milton’s description of Sin in Book II of Paradise Lost would be fitting for the plight of Mother Nature today. We destroy the very thing that conceived us, chopping down trees and killing off animals at our will. An Agent in the film The Matrix says that humans could more aptly be classified as a virus rather than as a mammal. Where a mammal develops an equilibrium with its surrounding environment, humans move to a region and multiple until every natural resource is exhausted. Then we move to a different area and begin all over again.   

How much longer will we continue to eat away at our mother? When will this parasitic relationship transform into a symbiotic one? Someone once told me that if all the cockroaches in the world were to die tomorrow, there would be an ecological disaster, but if the same were to happen with man, the world would only get better. I think it is high time we changed that. Giving something back to nature would be the ideal legacy to leave behind for the future generation.