This is a short story of my friend Ajay Bhasy. A story which says about humanity which we can see rarely. Am I right? I strongly recommend you to read this story, because it worth. I found this as a nice read. Share it if you can.
Humanity
I see humans. But no humanity
I still remember the look in my mother’s eyes, her fear, when they took me. Every night I think of her and what she might be doing. I look at the starry sky and wonder whether my mother would be looking at the same and thinking about me.
The day when I was brought to this human world, I felt my eyes weren’t enough and wished I had more. All I saw was entirely different from what I had seen in my earlier years. My initial fear was replaced by sheer amazement. It was nothing like my jungle. Everything seemed so busy and noisy.
I was brought to a place where I could see many others like me. Here we had many things that was needed to keep us alive, but we lacked the most important thing needed to feel alive “Freedom”. The rest of our lives were confined to this concrete jungle, a poor imitation of our habitat. My life here taught me one thing, we hunt to live, for our existence and when it is inevitable, past that stage, we animals do not hunt. But for man, hunting is just another game, a game that he plays when he gets bored, sometimes for wealth, pride or fun. By bringing us here he claims to conserve us, protect us, but what he does not understand is that, once he takes the wildness of jungle form us then only a shadow is left in us, a shadow of our past. We are no longer animals, we are just imitations of what we were once. We are obliged to live in this shadow till our lives end behind these bars.
When the initial excitement died, my life in zoo became a routine. Same food, same place and same activities. I missed my jungle. I wanted to feel the air and sun. To rest in the shade of a tree. I wanted to run, leap and feel exhausted. I wondered how humans would feel when they were taken away from their home. I wanted to show them, I wanted them to know my pain. I wanted revenge. I used to show my anger with loud roars when people come to watch me, but I stopped it as soon as I understood that it excited them more, than frightening them. My anger was their entertainment. The crowd always loved an angry tiger than a silent one.
There are many things that humans should learn from us. Sometimes people are referred to as animals when they conduct a bad deed, they call it ‘The animal behavior’ or a ‘ Man’s animal Instincts ‘. But what they forget is we do follow some laws and ethics that we do not cross even in desperate times. But humans do what it takes to survive. They exploit our mother, ‘The Nature’. They abuse their fellow beings, they kill, loot, rape and do whatever it takes to satisfy them. For us killing is something that has to be done only when it is required, we live in sync with the harmony of nature. If it is their superior brain that helps them to do all these, then I am happy that we don’t have those.
Humanity
Image Courtesy: kavehadel
It was a normal day. It was one of the days when the crowd thickened. A lot of people stopped by to see me. They got excited by the slightest of my reactions. I never noticed this boy until he fell into my cage. My first intuition was to pounce at him, make him pay for my pain, the pain of all animals, the brutalities his kind has been doing to the jungle and my family. I ran to him. I was ready to pounce. But as I got near him, I saw fear in his eyes, the same fear that I saw in my mother’s eyes, years back. I was startled. Something inside me was stopping me from having the payback, the revenge which I had been waiting from the day I was brought to this zoo. He was trying to say something to me. Though I didn’t understand human language I could see his eyes pleading for his life. The people around had started to make sounds as if they would frighten me. I roared at them, this time I didn’t entertain them, instead I frightened them. I looked at the boy in front of me. He was looking at me and was still as a grave. That was when the stone hit him. He winced his eyes in pain. Then more stones started flying in. Many hit me. I roared back at them in pain and anger. How could they hurt their own fellow being? How could they hurt him when even an animal like me could see the fear in his eyes? May be they didn’t have any regard for this poor boy’s life. May be one of them had thrown him to me hoping that I would do his deed in my anger. But I am going to prove them wrong. I will show them that we animals are different. Many stones were being thrown, most of them hitting the boy. Tears rolled down his cheeks. I could no longer stand this. I grabbed him by neck like my mother and ran back to my shelter. I remembered my mother protecting me from the predators when I was young. I hadn’t run like this for long. I went to a safe place away from these humans. I laid him down.
But something had gone wrong. Blood was oozing down from his neck where I had held him. His body let out a small shiver and he laid there motionless and still, but his eyes were at peace. I had saved him from this cruel world where he was judged in everything he did, where he was stamped upon by his own brothers so that they could rise high, where he was exploited by the provided so that the high ones could keep their granaries full, where he was sometimes deprived of even the basic necessities. I looked back at the humans, they were still shouting and throwing stones. Is this what they wanted? I roared back at them.
Wildness of jungle can be better than the justice of this world. I am happy that we lacked the cruelty called humanity.
Mahtma Gandhi once said: “You must not lose faith in Humanity!. Humanity is an ocean. If a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the entire ocean doesn’t become dirty.”
Kindest Regards
Sibeesh Venu