This last weekend I took a break from my Hensel's lemma and statistical
physics of molecular dissociation and cobordism of framed manifolds to
travel to some of the far flung places of West Bengal. Places which can
be as distant from my familiar world as anything can be. For one thing
these are places in unthinkable poverty. One is going to be horrified
looking at the life-styles of the localities there. Its way deep into
the perforated lower edge of Bengal. The travel to these places is
pretty primitive in its ways - travel in a local train, then a boat,
then a motorized "bullock" cart and then luckily a car. None of the
steps are as comfortable as one would want it to be. While at that place
I tried traveling to another nearby island but the plan had to be
canceled since the Bay of Bengal turned out to be a bit too rough for
the small boat that I had hired. There was always this constant fear of
the boat capsizing. I guess one wouldn't be so scared if drowning was a
painless death.
Do we fear the fact that we will die or the possibility of the pain during the process of death?
But the first destination where I landed held such a mesmerizing
spectacle before me that, I almost instantaneously forgot the agony of
the journey till there. It is the world's most beautiful sea-beach. I
have been to some of India's major beaches and I know what a mess they
are and have seen photographs of many more beaches on the internet. I
can't see how any beach in this world can be better than this one. Its
just empty! I was the only one on the beach when I reached there. As far
as I could see, I could spot neither any other human being or any other
human creation. It was nature left alone on its own. It was just
beautiful.
Being alone on a vast sea-beach with sand plains all around as far as
one could see, one is tempted to feel like Robinson Crusoe :D
Nature looks most beautiful when left alone with me :)
Far away one could see the edge of the mangrove forest and the erosion
edges of it. At that end at various spots one could see the dying
pneumatophores sticking out through the sand as if gasping for the last
breath. Inspite of a lot of locals warning me against it, I did travel
to these edges. Here one is mostly scared of various wild animals.
Though the only thing I had the fortune of seeing were footprints of
possibly some wild boars.
The water was clean as one can imagine it to be. And it brought along to
the beach various curious organisms which one gets to read of only in
the books. I did see a few starfishes, sea-pens and sea-anemones. It was
just bizarrely wonderful to be gazing at this apparently infinite sea
in front with vast sand plains behind and no other trace of human
civilization anywhere else!
A queer sense of excitement to imagine how the world might have been when humans hadn't yet arrived to destroy it.
I walked and walked along the sea as far as I could go. It was like
almost trying to gulp down this immense beauty. Nature when on its own
without being bifurcated by human's "narrow domestic walls", feels just a
bit too large to take in at once. I sat down to gaze at the serene
barrenness. I screamed with joy and shed all inhibitions knowing that no
other human is ever going to hear this sound.
But this is in sharp contrast to the horrifying images of human poverty
that one has to pass by while in the train. Even the train that one
needs to use to reach this place can be nightmarish to someone not used
to traveling in such muck and filth almost like cattle packed for
slaughter. Its a 3 hour long train journey and what one gets for this
long is barely a 1 feet wide edge of a wooden bench to sit on. And not
alone! While sitting in this precariously uncomfortable situation, one
would be gasping for breath as one gets crushed in by the hordes of
people pressing into the train from all sides. To add to the troubles
there is the regular flow of the vendors carrying huge baskets of
enormous amount of cheap stuff or unhygienic food or even pirated foods.
"Pirated" in the sense that one would be selling locally made drinks in
re-sealed bottles of the standard soft drinks and even standard
biscuits at dirt cheap prices. On asking, these vendors would invariably
remain mum about how they managed to do this. Looking at the packets
one realizes that they do have manufacturing and expiry dates and batch
numbers printed on them. Nothing to rule out that most of these are just
stolen stuff. But the exceptionally poor customers who travel on these
trains in the dark corners of India have little time for legality and
will be content buying just about anything that lets them survive this
horrific train journey. (..even among the uptown urban Indians or its
best of research institutes, legality is anyway not a familiar
concept!..) Given my sophisticated urbanized instincts, I was at my wits
end at such nightmarish traveling conditions. I can only wonder how
they do it those who do this regularly. At some point of her life, my
mother, a doctor, used to do similar travels regularly, albeit a little
shorter. There more than the need to hold on to her job to raise her
children, I guess she was more motivated by the fact that the village
where she was posted was so far away from the mainstream that her one
day's absence might mean death for someone.
But at the end of this terrifying train journey, lay the most beautiful
sea-beach in the world. A seemingly endless and totally empty and
completely clean sea-beach. Conflict couldn't have been stronger!
One couldn't be sitting blind to the images that pass by as the train
passes through the outskirts of these abjectly poor regions of Bengal.
What unfolds outside the window is a chilling story of systematic
government failure and of people leaving in subhuman conditions. The
houses one passes by are pretty typical. Its basically a cubicle of
dimensions 4ft x 6ft x 6ft and this too will have two floors and will be
accommodating anywhere between 5 to 10 people. These cubicles are made
mostly of bamboo pasted together with mud and the roof is basically a
thatched roof overlaid with a sheet of plastic on which is put up a
matrix of old rubber tyres. The living conditions inside these houses is
abysmal. The stench is unbearable. No lights. Nothing is clean. There
is so little space to breathe that there is surely no space to think.
The only question for its inmates is that of survival and the only
slogan is to be able to do just about anything to make both ends meet.
They are barely protected from any of the slightest of natural
disturbances. It won't take much of a strong wind or a drizzle to bring
everything tumbling down. The state of the people living in the 2nd
floors of these cubicles gets only worse. They could only be lying on
some old tattered horribly unclean mattresses on broken beds and rain
and wind would be blowing in water and dust into the completely
unprotected rooms. They can hardly do anything to protect themselves
from anyone. But the bizarre miracle of this conniving world is that
when it couldn't provide them with even a sense of respectable life,
this mockery of a civilization does bring to these tattered homes
cell-phones and televisions. It would be a common meal time scene to see
all the inmates sit semi-circularly around a single plate of food and
facing the television. The food would hardly be anything more than may
be a mound of rice and salt and lemon and chillies and may be a cup of
dal (lintels) for everyone.
Looking at these lives, one is soon left searching for even life.
The absolute wonder of seeing the mangrove forests at the edges of
Bengal did help forget the pathos that had inevitably shrouded the mind.
One is only strongly inclined to put into action in one's daily life
the philosophy of the terrific book, "The Life you Can Change" by Peter
Singer. At the mangrove forests, nature is playing its own beautiful
games of survival albeit with a touch of beauty and comforting grandeur
which hasn't ever been the forte of the humankind. One would be
fascinated to see stretches of mangroves lean deep into the water and
the roots to be rising upwards out of the water. At about the age of 14,
I had first read about these pneumatophores and it took so many years
to be actually seeing this fascinating natural phenomenon. They are a
cradle for a very unique mixture of creatures ranging from cranes to
deers to wild cats ("Baghrolls") and various forms of wild boars and
other animals. I was still only at the fringes near the sea-beach and
the deep interiors which I could see far away are known to be the home
to some of the largest tigers.
Since I was putting up in house near to the beach/mangrove itself,
nights were no less exciting with all kinds of odd sounds. Sleep would
be hard to find with the naive mind's untrained imagination adding
connotations to the unfamiliar sounds of the forest!
At a certain erosion edge of the mangrove forest, I did spot the natural
phenomenon of a lagoon formation. It was hard to spot from anywhere
nearby given how beautifully it had curved inside remaining hidden from
the forest cover but I could see it from the top of a tower. These
eroding edges are vivid signals of approaching natural disasters. Its
clearly because of the rising sea-levels in south eastern Asia which is
disturbing the critical salinity levels of the water. One is surely
going to feel a chill run down the spine as one gazes at these fields of
dying mangroves whose only remnant are the breathing roots sticking out
of the mud at various places in clumps of various sizes.
Around these one could keep spotting other small water body formations
and if like me one can go down inside the mud in hope of spotting
something interesting then one would surely not be disappointed.
Initially my efforts were paid back with just a sight of a few snails
lazying around in the shallow muddy waters but soon I could spot, a "Mud
Skipper". Its a very unique animal whose lungs are disproportionately
large compared to its lizard like size and structure. And not just big,
the lungs are pretty transparent and they bulge out clearly evertime it
breathes outside water. It can also live under water. Mud Skipper's are
evolutionarily very important since they are the "missing link" between
the life that evolved first in water and when it started to come on
land.
These still couldn't take away the show from that of a sunrise on this
vast, empty, open and sparkling clean beach. It was a sight to see. Just
at dawn the sea-anemones would be curled up and as the sun rose they
too seemed to pull up their tentacles. I didn't care whether it is
harmful but I did touch the slimy sticky tentacles. Just for the
experience! One couldn't but help feel connected to a pantheistic
emotion as the sun shimmered across the white and golden sand smeared
flat and seemingly endlessly around. I walked towards where the red
crabs lived and most ran inside their holes as soon as they heard human
footsteps albeit from very far away. But still I did manage to get some
photographs of their crowd and some of them individually. When they are
collectively out, they would make stretches of the sand looks red from
away! And pretty much ubiquitously one could see the much smaller and
colorless hermit crabs scurry between the legs. Here there would also be
dogs who seemed to manage to sniff from outside whether a certain hole
in the sand had a crab and could dig it out and maim it. But it didn't
seem to have any intentions of eating them. As the sun kept rolling
higher up behind me, I crossed these regions to walk to the eroding
edges of the mangrove which I described earlier. Here the land would get
tricky and marshy and it turned out to be beneficial to pull down some
of the long branches of these trees and use that to test the land
stability before setting foot any further.
It was too hard to leave this most miraculous sea-beach and return to
the shackles of this unfair world of the only war-mongering form of
life.
Is evolution necessarily eventually suicidal?
