Early morning . . . Nine o’clock. I boarded the local train for DumDum to meet my friends. We had decided to watch a film, perhaps Jab We Met. College was shut down to mourn a student who had died while being operated for cist. As I stood on the platform for the train to arrive I watched the black smoke let from one of the poor huts by the side of the station, a striking contrast to the fresh air. However, after a while it faded slowly away and mixed easily with the atmosphere.
As I boarded the packed train, I noticed people shouting, quarreling, pushing and singing. All the passengers were huddled into one lump. I strained my head up gasping for breath. To my surprise, I saw a duck looking at us in utter dismay. It was held up high above in a bag. I smiled at myself; little did it know it was being taken for slaughter. Then again, I remember the look on his eyes- a very surprised look-a virgin look of something very similar to him.
It was an epiphany. I gradually realized the look to be of the man animal in today’s world. He is the duck. The duck that is bought by the buthchers (corporates) and put on the high board, stuck by board pins. And as he stands wriggling on the wall, others decide his fate- which part of his body is profitable or rather bankable.
They are those ducks crowded up together in the corporate baskets covered by the nets of advertising that makes the suffering look alluring. They wait in those baskets for ‘clients’ who come and examine and take them to be slaughtered. Our self is butchered to find which the most tasty one is and it is given to the main client while all others wait for the minor parts. The irony is while the birds are caught for the slaughter, the man animal prepares himself all life for this professional slaughter while birds are caught for mans need, man slaughters himself for his own desire, aim, need etc.
I wonder what would happen if one day an epidemic called the man flu breaks out. Governments would grow conscious and ask for the mass slaughter of the man animal. An amount would be sanctioned, in its place, and it would be called ‘security’. Corporate companies would soon be selling their lots to be butchered. If the man animal is killed he would be saved from the routined butchery of the self. However, if the price offered is less, companies would hold them back to save losses. Initially the man animal would think they are preserved but it would actually be a prolongation of their suffering.
There is however no escape for unlike the birds whose butchery of the self results in death, in case of humans, it results in the slow killing of the soul. And so, he is trapped in the suffering that life is. The realization only results in death. Soon the meadows of the little lamb change into Dante’s inferno- where life ends but death does not come. . .
