Why are we scared of animals?

This rat snake scaled the neighbor’s wall and lay there long enough for me to do its photoshoot.

When I sent these photos to my contacts on Whatsapp, majority of them sent me gawking emojis in fear. So why do we fear snakes?

Animals attack other animals primarily for food, protecting their offspring, self protection and in rare cases rescuing a fellow animal from its attacker(s). Snakes do not prey on humans so they will never attack us unless for self protection and protecting their eggs. Snakes live in human settlements for two reasons – to prey on mice and for dark and cold areas inside and around our houses to lower their body heat and digest their food. We should be more wary of urban cats and dogs than snakes because they can chase and bite us. Wild cats like tigers and leopards prey on us but attack us only if they are able to drag our body away from the spot because the smell of fresh blood and meat attract other carnivores. Lions hunt as pride which is why they do not show this behavior.

But there is an oddity in us that is not in animals – fear. In nature there is no emotion called fear. Animals running away from their predators is not in fear as we commonly believe. They run to save themselves and their only purpose is reproduction. Nature imposes population control so to stay as dominant species animals need to reproduce as many as they can. We are the only beings on the planet that live in fear of its own kind. We have created the emotion of fear in animals by encroaching and destroying their habitat and hunting them for the purpose of hurting them. Cows graze on wetlands which are snake infested but snakes rarely bite them and move away from them. Snakes bite us in self protection because we tend to kill them at every possible opportunity. Snakes have poor eyesight so they rely on smell and instincts to determine what is prey and what is a threat. Similar is the case with urban street dogs. Through smell and instincts they understand the ones among us who are hurtful to animals.

I was afraid of snakes for a long time because I was taught to be scared of them. Many snakes simply crawl away or warn us in different ways when we get close to them. Some don’t but they stay far away from human areas. We get into conflict with animals when we think we are entitled to walk anywhere and do anything we want. The planet belongs to all living beings and are entitled to live out their lifetimes if they survive in nature.

The dilemma of feeding wild animals when we shouldn’t

So often, we come across messages explaining why we should not feed wild animals. I am not talking about animals in forests. All animals that live in nature are wild. We are even told not to feed animals in zoos. The primary culprits among animals who have the propensity to look for food from us are monkeys. Here are a few illustrations. The problem with these pictures is, they are used to generalize and create opinion against feeding all wild animals. In the case of monkeys, they are primates like us and we still have similarities with them in the food we eat. They have adapted to our food habits quickly. But why are House Crows, Red Whiskered Bulbuls, Red Vented Bulbuls, Greater Coucals, Asian Koels, Common Mynas, Rufous Treepies and Yellow-billed Babblers coming to my home to eat rice and chapathi (Indian bread) every day? They started coming looking for scraps and that’s how we started feeding them. Everybody who is interested in understanding life and its evolution should watch the English movie Lucy. Though it is a fantasy sci-fi movie, how single celled organisms became multicellular ones and went on to become complex beings has been wonderfully explained. When habitats are available and food is in abundance, animals procreate and try to increase their population. When habitats decrease and food becomes scarce, animals choose self preservation over procreation. This is how crocodiles and turtles seem to have survived when almost all other animals got wiped out after the asteroid strike 66 million years back. There are plenty of trees in the area where I stay which provides the birds with enough habitat to nest and reproduce. But animals don’t go away from their habitat area in search of food which is why they have evolved into eating different types of food within their habitat area. Now what if we do not feed animals in the wild? Our encroachment into nature continues unabated as our population keeps swelling. Earth comprises of 30% land mass and 70% water so we and all other land animals are jostling for space in the 30% area. Cutting down trees and destroying forests have two effects on animals. 1) Their habitat areas and food sources dwindle and consequently 2) competition for both increases, not just between animals of the same species but between different species. If this destruction is allowed to continue, most of the animals will be forced to go into self preservation mode. When we decide not to feed them, this can lead to their starvation and death. Extinction of animals do not have to happen by a cataclysmic event alone. Steady loss of habitat and food sources can create the same result over a period of time. Man-eating tigers do not walk for hundreds of kilometers from forests into villages and cities to feed on us. Tigers usually prefer to stay away from humans. We have encroached so much into forest land that our living area has overlapped with their habitat and older tigers are finding us easy kills. The consequences of our actions do not end here. Before religions took shape, we used to follow pagan culture and fundamental to it is nature worship. Hinduism is a pagan culture and not a religion which is why it has animal Gods and animals depicted as vehicles of Gods. Monkeys have adapted to living with us and can be seen in large numbers across cities in India. Because Hindus worship monkey God Hanuman, monkeys have no threat from people which has allowed them to procreate in large numbers. Similar is the case with the Karni Mata temple, also known as the Temple of Rats in Rajasthan where rats are revered and fed daily and thousands of rats live. Nature is a system that keeps the population of every being within it under control through food chain and diseases. With the knowledge of agriculture, rearing livestock and treatment of diseases, we exited from nature’s food chain a long time back. This is why our population has exploded. The population of monkeys in Indian cities and rats in the temple has similarly increased because their population is no longer controlled by nature’s food chain. But diseases still control population to a certain extent which is why in spite of all medical breakthroughs thousands of humans die every year. Same is the case with monkeys and rats. By adapting to our society and lifestyle, monkeys have also become vulnerable to dying in traffic accidents, just like stray cats and dogs. When animals have enough food in nature, they will have no interest in the food we eat. The only way to make this possible is by giving them back the land we have taken from them and let nature restore their habitats and food supply. Pictures and illustrations like the ones above are being wrongly used to demonstrate why we should not feed animals. They should be used to educate people on why nature is important, how badly we have destroyed nature and its ecosystem and highlight the need to control our population.

Animal migration is not just a journey in search of food

 

Every year at the fag end of the extended monsoon season, birds start migrating to the wetland areas in my hometown. They come from far and near and more species of birds have been coming with each passing year, especially after protection of migrating birds has been strictly imposed.

Why do birds migrate?

The common answer is for food. Seasonal changes in the areas they are endemic to forces them to leave their homes in search of food. This is true but not entirely. There are more troubling questions here. Why do they travel so far? But what is more incomprehensible is their mortality rates. As they cross oceans and continents, many die due to predators, diseases, injuries and many other reasons. Why travel so far which exposes them to higher mortality rates? Why no self preservation?

All the above questions have changed my understanding of animal migration in general. To understand the mortality rates during migration, we need to look what happens after migration. Migrating animals return to their home regions and what they do next is reproduce. Procreation is the reason why migration is so important. The weaker ones in the herds and flocks have to die. Some will die due to predation, some by diseases, some due to injuries and eventually the ones that return will be the strongest ones, physically and genetically. Migration is a natural population filter. The farther they travel the better the filter works. I came across a research on Arctic Terns flying all the way to Antarctica and back during their migrating season. The fascinating part was, they travel a longer distance during their onward journey but return by a faster route with less stopovers. Then it all became clear to me. The return journey is all about preserving themselves – feeding for enough fuel to burn to reach home so that the stored fat in the body is not depleted and reaching home quickly with less mortality to begin reproduction.

It’s the same with the now renowned yearly migration of Wildebeest across the Masai Mara plains and river, known as the Masai Mara migration. Of the 1 million odd that migrate, just 1-2% die. Even if consider the worst case scenario and take the total mortality rate to be 5%, that’s just 50,000 deaths.

So why such a population filter?

Because of Nature’s rule of Survival of the Fittest. Every living being within nature’s ecosystem is being continuously tested. Only the ones that survive predation, diseases, injuries and natural disasters need to survive. Nature retains only the best. From eating their own infants to starving them to death to pushing the chicks outside the nest so that only the ones that fly survive, nature’s filters are cruel but keeps it’s ecosystem free of genetic diseases. This is why there is only nurturing and no love in nature. This is one critical difference between us and them. We suffer from so many genetic diseases because of the complex emotions we have for our children.

But there is a filter inside our mother’s womb which gets activated as soon as we are conceived. A series of tests are run inside the womb to determine if the zygote can be harmful to the mother or to any zygotes conceived in future by the mother. This is critical since the umbilical cord connects to the blood stream of the mother through which DNA of the child is passed on to the mother which can cause health issues to the mother or to future children. This is why the first 3 months are critical for the mother as well as the baby, why the mother’s health weakens and why chances of abortion are highest in this time frame.

Nature seems to work in mysterious and incomprehensible ways but it appears so because of it’s order and discipline. Specific mating & migrating seasons are why we get to photograph them in different times in different colors, plumage and behavior. If animals were to photograph us based on mating and migrating seasons they would get thoroughly confused because we don’t have any of both. We can have children any time and we travel wherever we want when we feel like. There is no order and discipline in our lives. The fact that we do not adhere to most of nature’s laws is the reason why we are no longer part of nature’s ecosystem.

If love cannot exist without hate, it’s better to not love at all

 

A social media post about an Impala (deer) sacrificing it’s own life to save the lives of it’s fawns from a cheetah attack had gone viral some time back. The post had gone on to describe how the mother deer was looking at it’s fawns longingly and lovingly and was defiant at the same time as two cheetahs were attacking it simultaneously and that the photographer had become mentally disturbed after taking the award winning photograph. Though the post and it’s contents were debunked and rubbished by the photographer, the post had received millions of likes and shares by then.

Well, love does sell well, isn’t it?

The story did fool me when I saw it but then I saw through the loopholes in the narrative soon enough. Females of any animal species are assertive from the time they are born. In mammals, they consume more of their mother’s milk and in other animals they eat more of the food their parents bring. This is because they are preparing themselves to procreate and need to be healthy to have healthy offspring. In the picture the mother Impala seems to be standing without trying to escape at all. Animals protect their offspring by goading the attackers away from them. This would also give them to chance to save themselves and females would try to save themselves as much as they can so that they can have more offspring. Most probably this was a male Impala from the way it was refusing to back down. So the photograph and the story in the post are as different as chalk and cheese.

But there’s more. Animals mate, have offspring, raise them, protect them and teach them survival skills but never love them. Nature’s rule mandates that no unhealthy and injured offspring of any living being is able to survive. Animals have the ability to understand which of their offspring are healthy and which are not. The unhealthy ones should die which is why there are no genetic diseases in nature. Animals are known to abandon, starve to death and even eat such offspring in their infancy. They simply nurture their offspring without any emotions. The offspring have to or are forced to leave their parents once the nurturing period is over.

To put it simply, there is nothing called love in nature.

So where does it come from? Apparently Lucifer was demonized and banished from the House of Gods for disobeying them and giving intelligence and imparting knowledge to us. Could be true or a fantasy story but if it ever happened, it wouldn’t be because Lucifer made us wiser. Must be because we were taught to love. A right eye has a left eye, a right hand has a left hand, a day has a night and love has hate. Can’t say if we learnt to love or hate first. What we have managed to do is to reduce all our higher intelligence and knowledge into hatred for our own kind. More than every other reason, hatred must be reason why the Gods unleashed the cataclysmic floods to destroy us (story of Noah’s Ark) and didn’t want any humans to survive.

Because there is no love in nature there is no hatred as well. Animals develop survival strategies through constant evolution because of nature’s predator-prey relationship to keep the population of all animals under control. Animals fight over territory domination, mating rights, protecting their offspring, etc but there is no hatred involved. Animals teach their offspring to survive in nature and not to hate a fellow or another being. Even when a male lion kills the cubs of a pride after taking control from another male lion it is only for mating rights which also helps to keep control over lion’s population.

In a movie, the male protagonist who is a police officer investigating a series of murders says there is nothing more extraordinary than a human being killing a fellow human being. This is true because only we can kill a fellow human in the rage of love or hate. When a spurned lover throws acid on the face of the woman he claims to love, does he have love or hate for her? The journey from love->obsession->hatred happens unknowingly. While he will continue living in the thought that he did it out of love, he may never realize that rejection had flipped his love to hate.

It’s a miracle that we have survived for thousands of years in spite of living with so much hate. From hatred within families to hatred for people from different geographies to the Church’s hatred for free thinking women during the Dark Ages to antisemitism to the current Islamophobia, humanity has been immersed in hate for a very long time.

So where’s the love?

Gobbled up by ‘I, me, myself’. Animals think in the same manner but only for their survival so that they can procreate and maintain their dominance in nature. Our population has grown so enormous, there is no need to worry about survival anymore. Love is all for myself now. When some among us spreads hatred, the majority of us sits quietly thinking “I am not doing anything so let me mind my own business”. When hatred comes knocking on our doors some day it will be too late to escape from being drowned by it.

While we lose sleep over a virus, the hatred that we have created has become a black hole that is consuming us. Not a pandemic, not a natural disaster and not a mass extinction event is required to wipe us out. Hatred is enough. While we are all told to love and not to hate, love and hate are two sides of the same coin. If love cannot exist without hate, we will have to relinquish love to get rid of hate. And no, there is no shame in being like animals.

The disastrous impact of meat consumption on human behavior and climate change

The awareness of adverse human impact on nature has only started to grow in earnest in recent times. Many of us were even in denial about human imprints on climate changes till not so long ago. What we are still not completely aware is that our activities are adversely affecting nature in a multitude of ways, each activity is adding to the cumulative effect on nature and the blow back on us will be unimaginable in magnitude.

When we talk about climate changes and how the food we eat is affecting it, most of the general population would still laugh it off. What can cultivation and raising livestock do to climate? We have been doing both for thousands of years. Why has it become a problem now?

This is where our education system is so superficial and our knowledge of this planet and its history is so poor. There is ample proof to show that the Earth has gone through 5 mass extinction events till now. The last one was 65 million years ago when the dinosaurs got wiped out. Wasn’t that caused by a comet or asteroid? Well, yes, but earth’s atmosphere and climate had changed considerably by then. Giant herbivores had devoured tons of vegetation and tore through the forests while letting out huge amounts of methane gas from their bellies causing high levels of green house effects. Because of the huge population of herbivores, carnivore numbers had also exploded. Nature, atmosphere and climatic conditions had deteriorated to the tipping point and the asteroid impact was just the shove that triggered the extinction event.

So what has all of that got to do with us? The extinction event wiped out the most dominant species in nature, the dinosaurs that were the primary culprit for the imbalance. When nature cleanses itself, it wipes out what made it dirty. This time its us who is creating instability in nature. When it comes to our food habits and especially with livestock and their meat, we need to first understand how nature’s food chain works. The animals that reproduce in large numbers have high mortality rates and greater number of predators. The ones that do not have predators, known as apex predators reproduce in comparatively low numbers. Predators prey mostly on the ones that are injured or have diseases which in turn ensures that no genetic diseases exist in nature. This predator-prey relationship ensures that no animal’s population grows beyond control or spreads diseases and creates imbalance in nature. We, supposedly the most intelligent beings started protecting our livestock from wild animals effectively disabling nature from controlling their population. This has reached the tipping point where it is no longer possible to discern whether demand or supply of meat is driving the economics of livestock. Now cattle livestock consumes large amounts of vegetation and release methane gas which has contributed significantly to the green house effects we are experiencing.

I have always looked at our alarming increase in meat consumption with the fear of repercussions from nature. I was always a very reluctant meat eater from childhood and I finally quit 20 years back. Digesting meat was always a problem for my stomach and it was too difficult to accept that I could eat animal meat and still be an animal lover. Friends tried to dissuade me by giving me many reasons such as where else will my body get enough proteins other than from meat? My logic has been simple. If herbivores exist in nature, they are getting all the proteins, vitamins and carbohydrates they need from nature. I do not have to walk the long road of first ingesting their meat and then putting my body through the arduous task of digesting the meat and extracting proteins from it when I can get it directly from vegetables, pulses and grains.

Many years back, when I was staying at my ancestral home, a duck flew out of a nowhere and landed inside my house compound wall. We decided to keep her and find a male duck (drake) for her. My dad and I went to the town slaughter house and saw a group of ducks and drakes in an enclosure. The enclosure was right outside where the ducks were taken to be killed. We pointed to a drake and the people at the slaughter house thought we wanted its meat and took it to the slaughter stone. Before any of us could react the drake put its neck on the stone by itself. I was shell shocked for a split second before I screamed no. It was clearly able to see the fate of other ducks in the enclosure but the fact that it knew what its fate was going to be and was even prepared for it was too much for me handle. And we claim only we have a mind and intelligence.

Animals live in very different ranges of wavelengths and frequencies when it comes to light, sound and electromagnetic waves. Many of them have also adapted to understand the ranges we exist in. Only we haven’t been able to tune in to their ranges. Cats are known to see spirits which is why ancient Egyptians considered them as guardians of the netherworld and Bastet was worshiped as the cat Goddess. So it is no surprise that animals know about death and probably better than us. This is where it gets interesting. Whenever we get into a stressful situation, be it an accident or a fight, energy due to trauma accumulates in the muscles that bears the maximum impact. I have heard about pigs getting bludgeoned to death with hammers in slaughter houses. Even if an animal was butchered in an instant, traumatic energy would still accumulate in its body muscles. When we consume meat from butchered animals, we ingest their trauma as well which in turn does two things. It affects the energy chakras in our body and our genetic structure.

Genes are essentially of two types, the encoded ones we receive from our parents, relatives and ancestors and the ones that get encoded with the information from our own experiences. So how do we know that ingesting meat is affecting us genetically? If we look at human history, our evolution into the societal life has surprisingly made us more aggressive and violent beings, not just towards other beings but to our own kind. All over the world we have been raising more livestock, devouring more of their meat and fighting more with each another. Even after creating the mushroom cloud with the atom bombs during the second World War, we are not done with our squabbling and killing spree. We have aggressively pursued industrialization and building a money based society along with finding innovative ways to weaponize every new technology to harm each other and we have done everything without even having scant respect for nature. We created plastic but never cared to check whether it is degradable in nature before commercializing it.

I am aware that though I may not be able to prove the correlation between meat consumption and human behavior what I do know is about the impact of non-consumption of meat on us. The Brahmin community in India were originally the collectors and recorders of knowledge. Interestingly, they decided to relinquish eating meat some time during their evolution. I am not sure what triggered this change. Maybe at the onset of Kali Yuga, idol worship started, temples started getting built and Brahmins expanded their dominance in society from being advisers to Kings to temple priests by taking ownership of ancient Indian texts. But it still doesn’t explain why relinquishing meat was necessary to imbibe the knowledge of the texts but what we do know is that a vegetarian diet has made them benign humans. The hymns, chants and bells in the temples are all intended to synchronize our souls with the highest cosmic energy and thereby find harmony with nature. Now that Brahmins have also expanded into other professions, I know and have heard of many of them who changed to meat diet and started showing clear signs of aggressive behavior. This could be one important reason why the Brahmin community chose to seek knowledge and serve in temples and not take up other professions. Maybe there are undiscovered secrets that could explain how consumption of meat interferes with the assimilation of knowledge and anatomical explanations for how consumption of meat creates aggressive behavior and has made us destructive towards our own kind and towards nature.

From our cave dwelling times when meat was an essential source of food, even though we learnt to cultivate food, our propensity towards meat consumption has only increased with time. Here is another interesting example. Christianity and Islam were both born in the desert lands of the Middle East where cultivation is impossible and meat is essential for survival. The Christian and Muslim communities in India are not migrants from the Middle East. Christians are descendants of the first Hindu converts and Muslims are both descendants of converts and descendants of Muslims who came from outside and bred with the women in India. There is no dearth of cultivated food in India then why do both communities still follow the food habits of their brethren in the Middle East of consuming large quantities of meat? Meat consumption has become part of the culture of all communities and it is reflecting on how the communities are at loggerheads with one another.

There needs to be more research done and more awareness created about how meat consumption has become one of the many self destruction buttons we have created. I believe aligning ourselves with nature is the only way to save our species from total annihilation. Every single step of ours is creating an adverse impact on nature and climate change is just one of them.

Comprehending human violence – why we are so brutal to our own kind

Haven’t we all wondered at least once in our life why we are such a violent species? What are the origins of humanity’s seven sins? Or have we even pondered over these, ever? Rapes, cold blooded murders, looting, arson, hooliganism, the comprehensive list ends with the use of atomic weapons. Right from bullying and ragging in schools and colleges, we have all accepted violence as part of our societal life to the extent where men who cry and cannot endure physical pain are ridiculed and looked down upon. What is important here is, we have been incomprehensibly brutal to our fellow beings. Why?

Animal world is brutal without doubt. Animals have evolved to survive all conditions on our planet. But animals do not kill their own kind other than for mating rights and on extremely rare occasions. Territorial disputes do occur but that gets over in fights and not deaths. Moreover carnivores exist to control the population of herbivores which in turn prevents wanton destruction of vegetation. The perfection of nature’s design is in the fact that carnivores have taste buds that are evolved only to eat meat and not evolved enough to understand the taste of flesh and blood or rather the lack of it.

Human history is replete with violence against its own kind and if we look at our history closely, our evolution has been more significant for the destruction of fellow beings. From wooden to nuclear weapons, we have spent bewilderingly copious amounts of time, energy and intellect in creating and perfecting weapons to use against ourselves. We glorify ourselves for the manner of our evolution from cave dwellers to the technological advances we have been able to achieve in present times, but we do not talk about what we have done against ourselves in the same breath. From Egyptian civilization where soldiers were killed to supposedly travel with their dead Pharaohs in their afterlives to how the entire group of people and soldiers who dug Genghis Khan’s grave was butchered to keep his grave a secret (for reasons still unknown) to the Crusades to African slavery to all the wars especially World War I and II and the atomic bombs we dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, our brutality against our kind is dumbfounding. What is more mind boggling is, we use our superior intelligence to annihilate ourselves whereas less intelligent animals know how to protect and conserve their species. Have we ever wondered why or what drives us towards this unexplained behavior?

The primary issue is in the understanding about the origins of humanity. The conflicting theories of human creation and evolution makes it all the more confusing. If we believe in the theory of evolution, there is a massive gap in our evolution that science has not been able to explain. Our intelligence has literally exploded in our evolutionary timeline in a very short period of time and more bewildering is the development of our communication skills especially our speaking ability. There is also the question of how apes evolved into humans all over the world at the same time. There are no more evolved and less evolved humans among us. If we believe in the creation theory, the story begins from Adam and Eve and they supposedly had 3 male children. Now hold on to this thought and then look at the whites, blacks, orientals and all the numerous types of human beings. What is the probability of such humongous human evolution from 3 siblings and that too without any women to procreate with?

Ancient Sumerian texts explain in detail how the less evolved versions such as neanderthals were genetically manipulated by aliens to create us in our present form. That can explain our evolution in intelligence and communication. But how did we start looking so different, developed different societal ways of life and most importantly, where does this violent streak towards our own kind come from?

Looks like the secret lies in the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel. There were just humans at the time and not different types of humans. The story goes that the humans decided to build a tower that would rise so high that it would touch the sky and be the bridge between earth and heaven. What does this story indicate? It could be a metaphor for the fact that human development had reached a point where it was at the threshold of becoming equal to that of the creator Gods. So the Gods decided to punish the humans by corrupting their minds and destroying their unity. This video explains it all (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_mTsX6jovc). Now this could also explain why we ended being whites, blacks, orientals etc because the same Gods must have manipulated us genetically, created different versions of humans and scattered us all over the world. To add to this, corrupting our minds against one another is where the origins of our violent streak could lie. The premise must have been that the Gods did not want humans to become their equal or it could be that they believed humans were not ready for what they were aspiring for at that time.

Question is, do we need to believe in yet another fable? We do not need to, but the results are before us in our history. Have we ever wondered why we have so many religions? We could say that newer religions such as Buddhism, Christianity and Islam have more and improved rules for human existence in society but what have they ultimately done? Fragmented humans even more. Now what we have is situations like white Christians fighting white Muslims. Lower caste Hindus cannot drink water from wells “owned” by upper caste Hindus even in the 21st century. Same skin color so caste became the divisor. Psychological assessments of hardcore criminals have revealed that they are themselves not able to explain how they committed the gruesome acts of violence and have no comprehension of their state of mind at those moments. We are all supposedly having genetic information from 7 previous generations. What if the violence was coming from an ancestral gene acting up? Money and wealth tops all other divides now and two new groups of humans are getting created, the haves and the have-nots.

So what can we do about it? Understand ourselves first. We are endowed with unlimited intelligence and resilience. We have always been able to absorb all the after shocks of violence and move on which is why we are where we are now. Every problem has at least one solution but to find the solution the first step is to accept that the problem exists. We have to accept that though we are segregated by many factors, we belong to one species called Homo Sapiens. We have to consciously start look beyond monetary, political, religious and all other differences that separate us.

It could also be that the creator Gods have put us to our ultimate test. Overcoming all our differences and uniting as one species could take us to our next stage of evolution. Maybe that is when we will be able to successfully build the tower of Babel or whatever it represented. Advanced civilizations like Atlantis supposedly failed because even though it achieved technological heights it may not have had a united population of people. All ancient texts talk about the return of someone, Kalki in Hinduism, Jesus in Christianity and so on who would return to unite all humans. If we use our intelligence and commonsense we do not need to wait for anyone to come and remind us that we are humans above everything else. The choice is and has always been ours.

Our star shines in the nether world now

We lost this girl 4 days back.

 

 

 

Exactly 11 years back, we brought Judy home along with Tommy.

 

 

 

 

 

Prostrate cancer took Tommy away from us 5 years back. Both were apples of my mom’s eyes and they were vying for her attention all the time. Mom was devastated after Tommy left but Judy’s presence kept her afloat. It’s kind of weird, but everyone in my family has a mind of his/her own and we never agree on most of the things. My granny was like a radio, there was no point trying to tell or convince her about anything. What is astonishing is, every pet we have had, be it dogs, cats and even a cuckoo bird, all of them imbibed this personality automatically.

Tommy and Judy used to know each and every activity inside the house, especially what mom does. They used to disappear the moment they understood that mom was getting medicines ready for them. They would try to keep their heads away from her sight as much as they can. If they had a chance to bury their heads in the ground they would have. Both of them used to sleep as close to mom as they could at night and Judy used to do periodic patrolling inside the house and around mom to make sure nothing were there to disturb her sleep. There is a reason why dogs get attached to us so much. Tommy and Judy were taken away from their mothers when their mothers were still nursing them. They came home and mom started feeding them so mom became mother to them. There is no love bigger and more envious than the love between a mother and her child. Even in his death bed and in his last moments, he was constantly looking at mom. Ditto with Judy as well. We made sure we were around her all the time so that she wouldn’t miss her family in her last hours.

Love in the animal world is straight and simple. Feed them and take care of them and they will give their complete loyalty in return. Their love is unconditional unlike in the human world. What pets do in our lives is something unique and special. They fill up spaces in our lives left behind by other human beings. Parents, siblings, family members, friends; pets make sure that we do not miss them. How do they do this? By constantly seeking our attention. They know when we are sad and need to be left alone and when we should not be alone. We believe animals are less intelligent than us. Most of our knowledge is built from our education system and what we experience in our society which has been created on the concept of wealth. The knowledge that animals possess is rooted in nature which is why they understand love, empathy and compassion much more than us.

Why does death hurt every living being? It’s just not us; every animal displays remorse at the passing of their loved ones. There are two things that happen when a beloved one passes away. We can no longer communicate with that person and most importantly we can never see each other again. This is what hits us first, especially after the funeral. Before this sinks in, we start missing that person and what hurts the most are the little things. Judy used to constantly move around inside the house and keep shifting her resting places. Her footfalls could be heard most of the time. Now there is a certain deathly silence.

What we need to understand is that our comprehension abilities are limited through our 5 senses. We were created with the knowledge that if we understood the entire process and cycle of life and death, we would become reckless beings and would never respect the rules of the Universe. If I knew when and how I was going to die and what would happen to me after death, I would live my life out without care rather than respect the time I have and everything life has given to me. This is why the entire system of life and death has been restricted to us. But as we approach death, that world opens out to us; especially in cases where people have lived out their lives and are dying of old age. My grandpa had a big wide smile on his face as he took his last breath. Death is release from the agony and miseries of our physical existence. Our souls are chained to our bodies just like we put birds and animals in cages. This is why I despise seeing any animal in chains or inside cages because their sufferings are doubly ignominious.

My dad reminisces about all the pets he has had from his childhood and keeps wondering where they are now. Of all the 7 billion people in the world, why do we know only the people we know? Out of them, very few become our best friends and soul mates. Why did we pick Tommy and Judy out of all the big bunch of babies that were there? It is impossible to believe and accept that all of this is random selection. There has to be some sort of connection that brings two people or a person and an animal together. When I look back at all the friends I have made, none of them seem to be random connections. It just happened with each one of them without any explanations. I thought about one of them yesterday and lo and behold, I see his call on my mobile in the evening. I keep telling dad that his beloved pets are just no longer in the physical form; they are in the form of energy and are everywhere. Our beloved ones become our guardian angels when they go to the spirit world and in the spirit form they will have a lot more influence in protecting us. We will not see them in the same form again. They discarded it when they left. But they will always be with us. I don’t miss any of my beloved ones because I have realized that there is no going away. We are eternally connected through space and time and once we realize and accept this, the boundary between life and death will vanish from our minds. We need to actually look forward to the end of our physical existence so that we could be with our beloved ones again.

Judy, my girl, be at peace wherever you are. We buried your body but your memories will be with us till we go to our own graves. Till we meet again in the spirit world…..

Nature’s insights for the millennium life

There is a very good reason why we are causing mayhem in the world. We no longer feel the need to fit into the realm of nature. Two things are happening as we continue to evolve away from nature. We are no longer understanding and learning from nature and we are losing our survival instincts. The problem with this is, we are still part of nature’s ecosystem and though we have built our own Matrix, our roots are still buried in nature. What we are not realizing is that if interpreted correctly, there are reasons and solutions in nature for everything we experience in our modern urban lives.

Consider this. Traditional martial art forms such as Kung-Fu evolved from the observation of movements of animals such as snakes, monkeys, tigers and cranes. But as our society evolved past the Renaissance we stopped observing and learning from nature. Aren’t we bored and tired of our monotonous 5 day weeks in the corporate world? Then head out to a lake or a water body where there are Cormorants, Darters or Terns and observe them fishing. 50-75% of the times they dive into the water, they come up with nothing. When they do catch a fish, half the time the fish slips out and escapes. How many times do they need to keep repeating the dives to find enough food to satiate their hunger each and every day? There are no weekends in nature. What if they thought this is boring and monotonous? What if they said we had enough and we are not doing this anymore? They would perish in hunger, as simple as that. And people complain about not getting jobs and talk about retirement. There is no complaining and retirement in nature. Just one rule exists out there: Try till you die and die when you quit.

There is something very fascinating in nature we don’t reflect upon. Why is it so difficult to spot animals in the wild? It is because of the prey-predator relationship. A successful catch of a prey depends on who sees or senses who first. What we see as beauty in nature is actually camouflage, to hide or distract, be it from the prey or the predators. Everything in nature is trying to hide itself from one another all the time. Lions are colour blind to the stripes of zebras so when zebras run together, lions do not get any visual sense of what is happening before them. But they still hunt down zebras. How? Because they have heightened levels of their other senses. What does this come down to? Nature always pushes the boundaries of every being in her ecosystem. Nothing comes easy. Every being has to be at the top of it’s game all the time to stay alive and procreate for it’s species to survive. The primordial force of nature keeps pushing the limits of everything within it and this is what propels evolution; every animal tries to evolve continuously to be a dominant species in nature.

How does all of this translate into our lives? For wildlife photographers they have to stay ahead of all these hide and seek games in nature to get great pictures. There are 3 aspects to getting great wildlife photographs: spotting the subject, anticipation and hand-eye coordination. Take this to Agile methodology, the management practice that has taken over almost all industries. Whenever I hear or think about Agile, what comes first to my mind is the image of a tiger. Agile methodology is not just about doing things faster. Why is Agile predominantly a product based methodology? Because it is essentially about spotting those little opportunities in the market, anticipating which way market conditions could swing, what customers might need and getting the products out into the market accordingly. This is exactly how tigers or any predators hunt in the wild. Be it in nature’s jungle or concrete jungle, success has the same underlying roots. The change management principle of focusing on small wins, consolidating them and targeting bigger goals is a lesson that comes right from nature.

What has changed about us is that we evolved into beings of a complex cooperative society and what has got affected the most because of this transformation is our surviving skills. A support system gets built around every individual from where we get help whenever we are in need. The size of the support system depends on our needs and what we can give to the society. Social media networks are all examples of such systems. This highly interconnected way of living reduces our need for surviving skills and this I believe has been the biggest liability of becoming intelligent beings. Our needs have grown exponentially which in turn has raised the bar of our desires. With our waning surviving skills, when life becomes difficult, we become frustrated and start feeling helpless, turn to Gods and eventually to superstition. No other being in nature believes in getting help from a higher power to succeed. Every animal believes in it’s own skills and abilities to survive. This is why in highly competitive market conditions, mere skills and abilities do not take us far; it is our contacts in the favours based society that help us to get ahead.

But there is an anomaly here. Less surviving skills should ideally make us less competitive but the reverse is happening. Urban life has become a mighty arena for wealth based competition. We are vying to buy bigger and more expensive houses, cars, gadgets and an infinite number of assortments. This is an endless pit and once we fall into it, we spend our entire lives chasing more wealth to keep buying newer and supposedly better things. Think iPhone and all it’s die hard fans who literally live in queues for days outside Apple’s stores to buy new versions. Our status quo in society built around wealth mandates that we keep chasing wealth all the time. Business is thriving with marketing strategies fine tuned to exploit this wealth based competition to the hilt. But wealth is a commodity and acquiring wealth is not a skill; it is all about exploiting the needs of our fellow beings. A great example is the real estate industry. Buy land for lower cost and sell for higher price based on demand. All business models are built around understanding and exploiting people’s needs, going to the extent of creating new needs if they do not exist, something which Apple epitomizes. Is there anything in our society that keeps egging us on to become better human beings? Nothing. This means we are not evolving and we have stagnated. Technology has only made us dependent on it and has not helped us become better beings.

Nature develops 3 critical aspects in every being for survival: Patience, Perseverance and Resilience.  Nature teaches us to keep scouting for every opportunity, keep doing the same things relentlessly till we succeed and to keep moving ahead in the face of every adversity. Nature teaches us to appreciate every moment of our lives. We take time for granted, ours as well as that of everyone else’s. In nature, a lapse in moment is what stands between life and death. Nature sharpens our skills and abilities continuously and keeps us ready to face the next challenges. We need all of these, even to live in the bubble we have created for ourselves. But we have made ourselves lethargic enough to choose the easy way out every time. No schools or universities can teach us nature’s lessons. In the extremely competitive world we live in, we need our fundamentals firmly in place. Only the eternal Mother can make us evolve into better beings.

 

The inverse relationship between intelligence and sex

I came across this thought provoking article today morning.

http://iheartintelligence.com/2016/02/09/intelligence-sex-drive/

The fascinating bit is, higher the IQ, higher the sex drive but lesser sex. This has been explained away by reasoning that people with higher IQ are more focused on gaining knowledge than having sex, but it does not get into the details as to why.

People with all levels of IQ are interested in sex, but higher IQ means more neuron connections inside the brain which translates into deeper connectivity in relationships with other people. This is why these people make lesser friends and prefer to be social outcasts because they simply desist being in superficial relationships. Such people simply cannot be in casual relationships or one night stands because they find no mental connectivity in such short time. They would rather prefer to stay away from sex completely or be monogamous if they come across that person with whom they find the deep connectivity they are looking for. This could explain the higher use of sex toys among people with higher IQ as mentioned in the article. They would rather use the toys rather than being in meaningless relationships.

But there is a deeper reason for giving up on sex for gaining knowledge. People in ancient times used to do penance to reach out to God for superior knowledge and powers. Ancient Indian texts are replete with the tales of such numerous yogis. Why did they leave their lives behind and walk into the deep forests to do the penance? They wanted to be away from all relationships and distractions because they had to channel and focus their entire energy into reaching out to the higher powers. They needed all their energy to interact with the supremely higher energy source that is God. There are two activities in our daily lives that are the most resource intensive, digestion of food and sex. Both require the maximum blood in our body to complete the tasks. The more food and more sex we have, the more exhausted and drowsy we become. That is why yogis used to live on fruits and berries and observe complete abstinence from any sort of contact with women. Some of this is still in vogue. In my native state, Kerala, before we go to a certain temple called Sabarimala, it is required to abstain from meat, alcohol, women and even cutting of hair and nails for 41 days. Our ancestors used to walk to the temple through forests for weeks and months. They used to carry machetes to clear the forest area they were walking through. When they leave, their families used to light oil lamps and used to ensure that the lamps burn till they return. 41 days was probably the average time taken by people to walk forth and back and if they did not return in that time period, they were presumed to be dead.

Animals have been considered at a lower order than humans in ancient Indian texts and there are reasons for that. Animals exist to maintain the equilibrium of the planet’s ecosystem and we do not belong to the food chain because we were given intelligence and knowledge to cultivate our own food, domesticate animals and use fire and metals. Unlike us, animals have no taste buds. They do not need to seek higher knowledge so that’s why they have not been given intelligence. It is said that when the Gods created us, we were not supposed to be made intelligent. But some among the Gods defied the rule and passed on intelligence and knowledge to us. The Forbidden Apple eerily resembles the shape of the vagina which could mean that we were told not to get into the infinite loop of procreation like animals and we were meant to use our intelligence to seek higher knowledge.

I do not believe that anyone is born with higher IQ than others. It is said that we are listening and feeling from the time we are in our mother’s womb. What we experience right from our mother’s womb through our infancy and in our growing up years affects our mental makeup positively or adversely. The well-being of relationships between couples could determine the makeup of children even when they are conceived. Ancient Indian texts describe in detail how to live our lives and all these factors have been taken into consideration when writing them down. We overlook everything because of our ignorance and this is precisely why the apple was forbidden.

Our eternal bonding with the animal world

I have often wondered, what is it that binds us to pets so closely and we feel so hollow when they die and leave us. Sometimes, the pain of separation can be even greater than the departure of fellow human beings who were close to us. Our connection to animals is mystical and goes back to the dawn of humanity. We have coexisted with them for a long time before we moved on to a new distinct society based life. But evidently, the connection was never severed. No human being’s life is complete unless he/she knows the joy of being with an animals and the pain of separation from them. This is exactly why the training program for Hitler’s SS operatives was so cold and cruel. Every new recruit would be given a pup at the beginning of the 2 year training program. The recruits had to raise the pups with proper care. The final test to pass the training program was to cut the dog’s throat. SS was a manufacturing factory of lifeless human monsters who would readily give up even their own parents if they betrayed Hitler.

Well, pets are of three types, ones we buy and bring home, ones who come home on their own and ones we find from out of nowhere. I have experienced all three. Ultimately it doesn’t really matter. We love them all the same nevertheless. But we will never know how and what they feel about coming and being with us. I was in my teens when this cat walked in through the front gate of my house, came in and just sat on a chair.

We were all dumb struck. He just stayed on for the next 10 years till he died. He grew up into a strong and handsome brute that would bully down and beat every male cat in the neighborhood. But he would always keep his distance from the female cats at home and we used to wonder why. Then we found out that outside the walls of our house, every female cat was his consort and he had kids like him with everyone. He actually knew family. He had a regular partner with whom he used to have kids. One day early in the morning, when my mom opened the work area door, she found 3 cute kittens on the mat. He and his partner were sitting a little distance away. He saw my mom and walked off. His partner also left after a moment. Then it dawned on mom. He had brought his kids home. Apparently, only human beings have intelligence to understand family and bonding.

When we buy pets, we have to consider many things. Like when we buy puppies, the standard to follow is to buy a pup that is exactly a month old. Mother dogs feed puppies for about 45 days, so the intent behind separating pups from their mothers in 30 days is to make them bond quickly with the human parents. They bring out the best of our parental instincts because we naturally tend to care for them as our own babies. But it’s with strays and the ones that come to us that becomes random and unpredictable. We find them at different ages, some might bond with us and some may leave, but with the ones that stick with us, their gratitude for us is a thousand times more worth than all the money in the world. A cat with a family in my neighborhood had grown close to me.

When they moved to another city, they took him along. After about 6 months, when I visited them, they told me that he had left home one day and never returned. I knew immediately. He had left home in search of me. I was heartbroken.

How can I forget this scoundrel I came across in Bangalore?

The whole street where I used to stay was his home. Everyone used to feed him and pet him. We hit it off quickly. He would catch me whenever he sees me and won’t let me go unless I feed him a loaf of bread. He was pampered so much by everyone that he used to amble into a ladies’ hostel nearby, get his tummy filled and calmly walk out. He was a stray, was picked up and castrated and left in the neighborhood. He found refuge with a family who took him in and that’s where he spent the night. He grew ill and they admitted to him a vet hospital where he passed away.

A cuckoo bird we had found as a chick passed away a couple of days back after spending nearly 10 years with us.

We tried our best to make her fly but she couldn’t. Cuckoos lay eggs in crow’s nests, so the mother crow must have pushed her out. Birds usually push their chicks out when they reach a certain age. The ones that can fly are the ones to take the lineage of the species forward; ones that don’t must fall and die. Darwin’s theory. The body weight of the chick must also be in perfect proportion so that its heart can support the beating of its wings. We had to keep the cuckoo in a cage to protect her but we were always sad and helpless. We got used to waking up to her squeals every morning as she spoke to cuckoos outside. She knew everything dad and mom did in the house and learnt to ask what exactly she wanted to eat to mom. In her final moments, the last thing she did was to lift her head up and acknowledge mom.

We have similar experiences with our pet dogs. They know exactly everything we do and to react precisely to our feelings and emotions. The other day, I was watching two stray dogs joyfully playing when one of them suddenly overstepped on to the road and under the wheel of a car. The driver of the car braked in time. The dog slammed itself on to the tire and was shaken. When I looked at the other dog it was cowering in a corner. It was mirroring the exact fear the other dog was feeling. Under the assumption that animals are inferior in intelligence to us, we are doing everything possible to hurt them. I just can’t understand how we can treat them as just blood and meat when their emotions are fully alive. It’s all in their eyes. We need to have compassion in our eyes when we look into theirs. Then only we can see their gratitude and acceptance. My dad and I feed so many stray dogs in our neighborhood that when we come across strays in other places, they immediately pick up the scent that we are animal lovers and start following us. Only they know how they figure that out.

I have heard that our soul start off by being inside small animals, progressively grow up into bigger animals and eventually becomes human beings. Animal world is considered to be inferior to ours because they kill each other for food and they are not evolved as a society as we are. Are human beings less violent than any animals? On the contrary we have evolved into the most cruel, mindless and selfish creatures on the planet who would care nothing to hurt a fellow being. When we term a barbaric human act like a murder or a rape as animalistic, let’s remember one thing. Animal world is cruel, no doubt, but they kill only for food, water, procreation and the survival of their species. All of these are necessitated by Mother Nature herself to maintain the balance of life. There are no seven sins in the animal world, animals don’t torture one other physically or emotionally and keep their victims alive so that they can have sadistic pleasure at the expense of seeing their victim’s suffering. We do all of this. We have absolutely no respect either for our own kind or for any living being. If our existence itself is based on hurting all animals and exploiting our fellow beings, it’s high time for introspection. Everything that is being called as inhuman can actually be defined by the word human now.