HEAVEN IN A RAGE

When we cannot step back and observe, it is time to tell a

story. And what is a story if not a reflection of ourselves, seen
comfortably in alien skin? Disguised but guiltlessly recognized?
When mass angst seems normal and collective panic justified,
when all of humanity is hailing the other for unity and solidarity as it
assiduously chases down a virus, when each one of us is overwhelmed
by our own resilience and collective nobility, when humanity is thrown
off balance by this ‘sudden’ calamity, it is definitely time to tell a story –
And sometimes a simple school yard tale will suffice.
In a certain public school, mingled boys: both dull and quick, lanky
and roundish, meek and daring, the bully and the bookworm, rich and
poor: as they always do. A certain incorrigible boy, bloated with pride
and fat, bursting with self-importance and shielded by the clout of his
powerful, indulgent father, took it upon himself to rule the playground.
His parents had brought him up to demand, until it became a veritable
virtue in his restless brain. Havoc and menace were his greed for
perverse adventure and domination, just as much as stolen lunches
were his unchecked gluttony. With impunity tiffins were stolen, books
torn, boys thrashed, bones broken, equipment trashed, windows
smashed, games disrupted, and all such mayhem as sprouted in that
unrestrained, twisted juvenile mind. His parents viewed his antics with
fond indulgence and even promise of his prominent future; lone voices
of protest were shocking acts of apostasy. Thus gradually the
playground emptied; the frolicking of games and laughter ended.
One day after having swallowed one too many sweets from his
pile of snatched lunch boxes the boy fell sick. He was taken to the best
sick-bed from where he demanded for his father to fix the problem.
But the entire club of the influential wrung their hands in helplessness.
Meanwhile the stomach ache grew worse. The groaning boy alternated
between bouts of abuse and bouts of fear. The nurse, his father, his
gang, his fate, all were heartless, useless fools to be blamed. When he
gave off demanding other’s lunches, when he simplified his own meal
to a soup, when he endured all kinds of medical treatments whilst
confined to his downy bed, no one applauded, and this truly
bewildered the martyr. He lay ill for many a month, poisoned by the
lethal red worm baked deep into his pilfered red cake.
His father heaped penalty on penalty upon the school for its
negligence, withdrew his son and his enormous donations with which
act he was certain the institution would crumble.
Instead little by little the playground filled. Somehow the school
found its feet without its largest donor, and merriment sounded from
within the walls again. Perhaps the rich delinquent learnt a lesson,
perhaps he carried on… as spoilt brats unable to change their ways will
do… till his wealth ran out? It is not a matter of great concern, for the
boy brought the well-deserved calamity on his own head one would
say? He needed a lesson, a halt, from somewhere, is your conclusion?
And you are not wrong.
An open-eyed, relentless, complicit, gorging of the planet has
been going on, shamelessly, without remorse or restraint on the
playgrounds of this earth. So if the human race has now fallen prey to a
microscopic virus, that leapt to life in a dirty, dingy stall, where animals
are stuffed into stacked cages, which serve as seats for card players,
almost suffocating, disoriented and under tremendous stress by the
joining of predator and prey, one wonders if sympathy is the instinctive,
sane, response? The live animal market at Wuhan which sells
everything from donkeys and camels to snakes, foxes and pangolins all
crowded together, alive and dead, for exotic meat consumption, gave
the ingenious virus the chance of an unlikely jump from the unnatural
proximity of bat to pangolin, and from there to human, as studies are
finding. Over a decade back in another thriving Chinese exotic animal
market, catering to bizarre and perverse appetites, between headless
snakes and still writhing beheaded birds a similarly improbable
mutation took place, giving incontinent, abnormal birth to the Saars
virus, when it jumped from bat to civet to man.
Although global rage is being directed to China, it is not just about
live boiling bats, and civet soup delicacies cherished here that is the
problem. In the USA, where in cruel irony, thanksgiving turkeys are
bred on factory lines, with oversized breasts, so that the poor animal
cannot take a step in its entire wasted existence; when world-over milk
giving cows are injected with painful labour inducing steroids to
increase production, when beating live animals to death for softer
tanning leather is the norm – then clearly laying all culpability on China,
for taking things just a bit further perhaps, is inane.
Now after decades of defiance, the Chinese authorities have
finally seen fit to ban all trade and consumption of wildlife for food.
That is our learning curve.
Standing at these empty crossroads, with almost no choices left,
those fiery words of Blake: ‘A Robin redbreast in a cage, puts all Heaven
in a rage’ fall as hammer blows of prophecy upon our iron skulls.
A bird in a cage is one thing. But, meanwhile, we have crossed
another line, taken another step further away from our humanity. In
an act of unspeakable meanness, with his junk and trinket filled world,
littered with objects of amusement, human lust has not spared even
the hapless, chittering cricket. In Chinese animal markets, they are
sold as pets, in palm sized bamboo cage. By such depravity we draw
the wrath of the very King of Heaven, upon ourselves.

Scientists have declared on public platforms that they are

reconsidering the classification of our planet, which they believe has
moved from the Holocene into a new epoch called the Anthropocene –
the age of the humans, based on the most dominant impact of humans
on the environment and climate. They further detail this age as one
distinguished by ‘the greatest mass extinction in the history of our living
planet’. It has been called the sixth mass extinction, the last one being
when dinosaurs were wiped out. One million species face extinction in
the near future. With equal matter-of- factness, it is also stated that
without human influence this extinction of species would not take
place, and hence the politely concerned advice to change our ways.
When specie after specie was being eliminated, wiped off the face
of their planet, many much older than the human species, no one cried
hoarse, there was no panic on the streets, there was no universal alarm
or global shutdown – so now if someone wants to especially discuss the
corona virus and its momentous implications – the instinctive response
is, “Stand in line. There is an entire queue awaiting its due.”
The heresy of such a preposterous thought is of course the
momentous, underlying belief that one has challenged. The belief, the
self-delusion, that the human race is far more important, of greater
value than any other. Did not then the Divine put other creatures on
this planet just as he did us? Is this any less their home than ours?
Does one mean that the Divine has more regard for you than that lone
brown sparrow on the tree-top? That this planet is more rightfully
yours than of that single bird? If you do you are terribly mistaken.
 Ten thousands of years ago when humans had just started out, we
weighed 1% of the planet load, whilst wild vertebrates weighed 99%.
Today scientists tell us it is exactly the opposite and once again wryly
advice to reverse this trend for the well-being of the planet. Surely
there must be some embarrassment in all of this! Some sense of
culpability? Some traces of shame? Perhaps our conscience was ruffled
over our morning tea but no collective outcry rose over the din of our
daily traffic.
So if the world is going into a frenzy because it has to stay indoors
for a while – forgive the ridicule that rises. When one pauses to think
of that powerful, solitary forest beast who walks the entire night, the
tiger, condemned to pass an entire life pacing a boxed cage, or a thirty
thousand mile swimming, intensely social, whale circling an aquarium –
what rises is disgust.
Then again perhaps we have missed another cue. Is this
rampantly spreading virus entirely a catastrophe? Are there not critical
lessons to be learnt, - even now? Does it take a global pandemic to
bring a global change? Is this the only way we have left ourselves to
learn by? Isn’t this the natural brink to which our steps have been
leading us all this while? Isn’t this in fact the path we have chosen?
Now that we reach our inevitable destination it is immature to cry foul.
Behind the abruptness of the four month old covid19, there always
loomed another problem, immeasurably vaster and graver: the
destruction of the entire planet through climate change. This global
pandemic is merely a tiny pus boil that has finally surfaced. The wound
has been festering for a long time now. The actual illness is yet to
surface. We would not only destroy ourselves, but an entire creation.
And yet the pettiness is such, that an event must directly impact our
morsel of food, our daily tea-time gossip, before we take cognizance.
The milk must fall of our kitchen shelves before we can shake off the
torpor. But once that happens humanity jumps and grows hysterical,
all at once. Perhaps in the greater economy of things one needle pin
prick can save from a lethal thorn. Perhaps the unprecedented, difficult
and choiceless, shutdown will teach us yet that the world never
stopped turning on its axis because we halted our scurrying. That the
economic treadmill that the human rat race keeps spinning can come to
a halt without catastrophe. That the wealthy getting poorer is not an
existential calamity; and that clean air, pure water, pleasant weather
and chirping birds are riches beyond price? Perhaps we will yet learn
that life can be lived at a slower pace without collapsing; that quiet is
fuller than noise; that days without cars are the best after all – and a
cheerful heart under a glowing sky is worth the global economy ten
times over. What money cannot buy is in fact free for us to have. This
saving Truth mankind has long forgotten.
If it takes a corona virus to bring collective wisdom, to bring smog
covered mountains into view, to give the planet some respite, a deep
breath, another chance at life, then so be it. These are the lessons we
have brought on ourselves, for inconveniently human avarice does not
come with a free pass. It is ultimately self-devouring too: virulent
diseases, poisoned food, polluted water, unbreathable air, unlivable
cities to cite an obvious few. But its deceitful lure has also made us
playthings of technology, a slave to the shopping mall and misers of
misappropriated wealth.
Undoubtedly these facts are hard for the human ego to ingest.
But if you have ever recoiled whenever an American President
pronounces, ‘God Bless America,’ with the righteous, inspired air of a
missionary pulpit, then you know what is being spoken of. As if the
annihilated Native American and chained Negro slave were less beloved
of Him! Less Blessed! And yet through all that bloodshed and violence
it is America that God must bless – whilst the devil take the rest and
their right to justice!!
What of the mythological creature like the sperm whale, all of 23
million years, one of the oldest, gentlest creature that wanders the
oceans? When whalers hunted and harpooned them to near extinction,
when calf was sundered from mother, when ‘anything alive became by
virtue of the fact automatic targets’, as one seafarer wrote in guilt, did
not their cry reach heaven? Is a silent cry any less of a cry because it is
mute? Does justice not apply in this case? Is justice the sole possession
of the man-animal?
There are laws other than the ones science computes. Laws as
untouchable, as beyond man, as God Himself is. The law of karma is
one such inexorable machination beyond the manipulation of human
devices. In the words of Vivekananda it is simply the cause reappearing
as the effect. So if even one-thousandth of the suffering inflicted by
man on other innocent species were to land at his doorstep it would
mean immeasurable pain.
Thus when a united human race assumes the noble task of saving
itself and begins a round of self- congratulatory back slapping, when
the collective machismo is focused on the heroic sacrifices of staying
indoors, eating with less variety, living without malls, being deprived of
parties, changing ones way of life.etc. it is time to open a story book
and reflect.
In India the beginning of our lockdown began with the news
channels broadcasting that the ‘commander of our ship’, our Prime
Minister had asked people to stay home on a bright Sunday. The
appeal was reported as a humble one, a gracious one. Automatically
anyone disobeying was a traitor, a miscreant. Police roamed the
streets ready to arrest and redirect those who had not volunteered. At
five p.m., an old lady inquired if she should clap from her balcony, as
suggested, for the medical, police, cleaning staff, and other social
fraternities.
And although we are in the middle of a crisis, and although
perhaps the instinctive, natural and even efficient response is uniting
and hardening up with a battle cry, all guns trained at a catapulting
virus; when did my nation learn to sit out that greater battle: self-
introspection, uncompromising self-criticism, unsparing inquiry into the
truth, however bitter? When did my democracy acquire a commander?
And even if we did blow covid19 into the night, and light up the
firmament with Chinese crackers, we do so from the deck of a sinking
ship. From the shore it looks absurd.
Mother India has always been the Goddess, the Divine Shakti, the
single greatest civilizing force humankind has known. In ages dim, deep
from her womb, emerged the Seer-Poets, the Rishis, the leaders of
men, the singers of the Eternal Truths realized by them. In some
isolated thicket, they uttered their words of embodied revelation, and
brought to Earth, Divine law. It was and is left to the tide of
generations to drink at that fount, to live by that radiant sunburst of
light.
‘All this is for the dwelling of the Lord’, - ‘Isha vasyam idam
sarvam’ - the very first words of the Ishopanishad assign boldly, at
once, the purpose of all creation, perhaps knowing well the rapacious,
avaricious, accumulating, tendencies that dwell in the animal nature of
man. The numerous, heartfelt prayers of universal sympathy and peace
for all beings: animate, plant and stone, resounded from the caves and
thickets as if a mantle of protection and grace was being shed on all
creation. The all-embracing clarion call of ‘Vasudaiva kutumbakam’,
the world is one family deliberately shunned any littleness, any
narrowness; the call of the Rishi to man to, ‘Arise, Awake and reach to
Divinity’ which is his true vocation, his hidden purpose, streams across
the centuries like a beacon in our confused, frantic, meaningless,
despairing lives. They declared unequivocally that desire was insatiable
and the tenacious root of all sin, therefore teaching the constant
renunciation of the lower bestial nature so that it could be infilled by
the higher qualities of compassion, oneness, forgiveness, non-violence
and contentment. Such were the immortal truths left for us by those
children of Dawn, eternities ago… Indeed eternities hence, the future
will be measured only by a greater and greater unveiling of the past.
Here in Rishikesh as one enters the town after a short interval of
two months, the first assumption is that one has lost his way. There by
the highway where a dense saal and teak forest stood, now a lighted
railway station has sprouted, although the number of tourists arriving
already are beyond the carrying capacity of these narrow Himalayan,
glacial, valleys. There was no time for questions or dissent. In the front,
a statue of Shiva sits, with pink lamps, and overhead a board that reads:
‘Welcome to Yoga Nagri Rishikesh.’ As one drives on, barely a
kilometer ahead, there is a traffic jam. Right on the roadside an alcohol
shop is operating freely, with impunity, thronged by a crowd. A line of
parked trucks, cars and motor cycles, on the highway itself, has blocked
traffic. Everyone is stocking up for the next day’s closure. And although
drunk driving when we last checked was a criminal offence, as is alcohol
consumption in our pilgrimages of the chaardhams, a more brazen
invitation to drink and drive one cannot think of. Despite several
complaints made to senior police officers, these vendors have not been
touched.
One has to drive only another kilometer, when the road starts
climbing the Himalayas. It is not a pine laden forest with crisp fragrant
air, but the devastation of the Chaardham Pariyojna that lies around
this corner. Barren, falling, amputated slopes hang precariously on one
side, whilst on the river side, tons of dumped muck cascade directly
into the slender Ganga winding her way further down. There is dust
everywhere. Lakhs of trees were felled for this ‘pet project’ of the
Prime Minister as it is known in govt. circles and termed in the media.
This flamboyant project of turning the existing highway into a four lane
super highway, amid the steepest, most unstable valleys, was to be
carried out at whatever price, hence trivialities like environmental
impact studies and clearances were dispensed with casually.
Experts who have studied the social impact, report that this
fantastic ‘All-weather road’ as propagated by the govt. in its public
interactions, is assumed to be some magical flying carpet by the locals,
transcending weather, time and space. Hence they patiently endure
the constant landslides, the dust, the buried water sources, the
treacherously balanced muck that will trigger flash floods, the large-
scale destruction of their ecology: all in the expectation of a miracle.
Not one official has thought fit to disabuse them of their illusions and
clarify that as per the definition of the government hill road manual
itself, any tarred road is in fact an all-weather road. And that is all the
term implies. In fact their existing tar-road was already an all-weather
road. If this does not qualify as a hoax, then what does?
This ill-conceived project, through its wider road width, will now
be legally authorized to levy a toll fee from pilgrims and unsuspecting
locals on the otherwise free chardhaam route. And once again no
carrying capacity studies justify these plains-type dimensions. In 2013,
lakhs of pilgrims packed into the narrow Kedarnath valley, lost their
lives in a single short breath of nature’s fury –yet this project to
purportedly increase tourist flow, is supposed to be in national interest;
and the permanent loss of ecological security, habitat and resources is
supposed to mark development for the mountain-villager. Battles in
court have been fought, but the march of human stupidity prevails.
Through an asana of wondrous agility the mission of ‘Namami
Gange’ (Bowing to Ganga) made a 360 degree turn and became ‘Arth
Ganga’ (Extracting from Ganga). The many lives lost in fasts to save
this river are a matter of indifference, as is national sentiment. Hence
bear with those who balk at the enthusiasms of ‘commanders’ and
‘ships’ and ‘personal appeals’.
When we stay at home during a virus contagion it is because it is
scientific and makes social sense – not out of fidelity to our
‘commanders’ call. Collective chauvinism, an inflated sense of human
significance on this planet, an ego deranged and monstrous enough to
construe its self-preservation instincts into a virtuous act of morality,
especially given our abject and deplorable failure towards preservation
of the entire gamut of other living species and this planet, is the
arrogance of the asura; of a Hiranyakashipu and Hiranyaksha who
dragged the earth into the nether worlds, as the story goes.
There are truths that need urgent telling; stinking corpses that
must be called dead even under the layers of paint and roses.
Collective human avarice can no longer gallop with a shining armour,
flying the flag of Progress. Its sword is one of loot and plunder and not
of succor.
The endless infrastructure for which we are willing to destroy
uninhibitedly, are only pathways of an insatiable desire. For those who
can see, the planet already has a truer, a mightier, a stupendous life
giving infrastructure. Her mountains and seas, lakes and swamps,
grassland and woodland, cliff and desert; river and ravine; her wetland
and grove, glacier and aquifer – these are the infrastructure through
which have thrived and flourished millions of species, for over 3 billion
years.
To give us a relatable perspective, astrophysicist Nigel Calder
reducing one hundred million years to a year, calculated that Earth was
a woman 46 years of age. He goes on to point out the humbling fact
that man’s existence in the life of this lady is just four hours old, and
the industrial age a minute long event. This was the time it took us to
bring an entire planetary system crashing upon our heads, and yet we
stand on our balconies and clap.
It is time to look beyond the powerful and the wealthy for the
answers to our stomach ache. This time around Science does not have
the answers. This time around we have to look within. From within us
came material Science, from within us will come the wiser Science too.
When man can empty streets as readily for a species of insect as
for the human race, then it is time to applaud. When mankind refuses
to take another step until every cage is unlocked only then can we
complain of shut-ins without preposterous hypocrisy. When the sperm
whale that saves other species- including human - from predatory
sharks, brings us to our balconies, then it is time to cheer. When plastic
found in the endangered monk seal, an animal that once showed great
friendliness to humans until we hunted it to extinction, becomes a
cause of worldwide rebellion; when extinct cheetahs, and endangered
tigers becomes more of a regret than closed malls; when we feel the
shame of the devastation around us then and only then does our turn
come, then and only then are we fit to discuss the future of humanity.
Till then the human-animal must wait his turn. Like Thoreau, who
unblushingly wrote, that if he were to draw the tracks of various
animals, he would end with the prints of man.
 This is not criticism in a spirit of misanthropic zeal, or ‘animal
activism’ – whatever that means. The suffering of the homeless migrant
roaming our streets, hungry and abused while the rich hoard; the
compassionless suspicion with which neighbor views neighbor while
others risk their life daily; the attempt to bear this massive calamity
cheerfully; all this and more is true, but it shrivels into insignificance in
the face of the volatile truths that lie at the root of our present crisis
and from which we can bury our head in the sand no longer.
For if not now, then when? If not mankind then whom? If not
introspection and course correction, then what? Another precipice –
steeper and darker? Another opportunistic pathogen, deadlier, of an
even freakier origin? With the infinite goodness that dwells in the soul
of man, will selfishness be his final word? The Divine that lives in man,
lives in the worm and the eagle. The life that longs to flourish and
expand in us, longs to expand and grow in all creation. We are a part of
a very vast whole. Our freedoms end where the next species’ begins.
Our pleasures end where another’s pain begins – not just man to man,
but specie to specie. The wrath of Heaven is not a figment of a poet’s
imagination; the joy and content of a conscience at peace cannot even
begin to compare with a desire satiated; and Nature the Creatrix of a
billion universes is in fact the greatest Science that we will ever know.

Priya Patel
April 2020