The Way We Are

On a hot March day the grand old building of Park Street, Stephen Court danced to the flames of a freak fire. The Fire Minister of West Bengal (a one and only ministry in the country) did nothing but twiddled his thumbs while the ghastly event unfurled, climaxed, took scores of lives and ebbed away after a day. He did nothing before; and he did nothing after, an otherwise difficult deed to accomplish. But he managed to pull it off quite efficiently. He would have loved to have been left like that, but media did their bit of clamouring religiously in front of his chamber. So he was forced to come out of his reverie and do some how-can-I-be-blamed-I-was-not-there stunt. He did that too.

The result? Life is back to almost normal. People have quite forgotten the charred corpses strewn across the fourth/fifth floor of Stephen Court – human life is in excess nowadays. So what if a few hundred die?

And even if they haven’t forgotten, there is little left to do. We, humans standing here on the 21st century, almighty, all powerful rulers of the planet, the top of food chain, the fiercest, the most vicious, the most aggressive killers of nature are quite impotent when it comes to dealing with our own kind.

We perform some demonstrations. We hold some rallies. We make some noise through the media – holding some debate sessions and all. We ask some questions. No one answers. It doesn’t matter to the dead.

So we curse the governance, go back home and live another day. In between, we eat some more animals, plunder some more of nature’s bounties, destroy some trees and pray to God that we don’t get trapped into unforeseen calamities. After all, we did no wrong.

We are one of a kind aren’t we?