Bhopal’s busiest road on any given evening is filled with a chaotic rush of commuters in a hurry to return home. But this Friday his normal rhythm broke down to a standstill. The cause was not a construction obstruction or a natural disaster, but an avoidable conflict between humans. A minor accident – which was the result of a driver’s careless driving – quickly turned into a brawl filled with anger and ego. Both the drivers were standing in the middle of the road and were fighting with each other as if they were soldiers in a trench. He was completely obsessed with the desperate desire to win the debate. In his anger he had become completely unaware of the reality around him. What they didn’t even realize was that their personal fight had created a long and spiraling queue of cars, which extended far into the distance. The people sitting inside the cars were actually becoming the real victims of their ignorance. They might have been a hungry child, crying over the delay in dinner, or a terminally ill patient, clutching his chest with each passing minute, trying to reach the doctor. The anger of those drivers had become a wall for him, which prevented him from understanding the world of others. This human tendency of not being able to see the indirect harm caused to others due to our ego reminded me of a heartbreaking story from the other side of the world. That was Sunny’s story, which I read recently. In February, a Russian drone hit the Ukrainian city of Zaporizhia. The media immediately put out sweeping figures: buildings destroyed, damage recorded and human lives tragically lost. But Sunny also lay among the debris – completely ignored in the official statistics of the war. Veronika Konkova, a dedicated biologist and sensitive passerby, found the owl lurking amid the destruction. He had lost the vision in his left eye and one wing was badly broken. He was kept in a cardboard box and taken to the hospital. Sunny’s wing had to be cut. Now he could no longer react to light. Instead of flying through the dense forest, he now spends his days hopping awkwardly around on the ground in his enclosure. He lives with a tragic community of other wounded and mute refugees: rare Imperial Eagles, Black Kites, Peregrine Falcons, Buzzards, Screechs and Tawny Owls. Our wars completely disrupt the natural behavior of wildlife. Migratory birds exhaust themselves trying to find their way around active war zones, large mammals stray towards vulnerable human settlements because of the terrifying roar of the explosions, and marine life is also affected by underwater explosions. The greatest tragedy is that none of the birds in Veronika Konkova’s care can ever return to the wild. Their natural instincts have been taken away from them; They are now permanently dependent on humans to get food twice a day. Even the animals remaining in the forests have started behaving unnaturally. The psychological changes in their behavior have been directly recorded by the soldier-biologists present at the front. The natural world can neither negotiate an armistice nor sign a treaty; It simply silently withers under the heavy footprints of human violence. Be it two angry drivers blocking a vital road in Bhopal, or two nations firing missiles on European soil, or two parents screaming behind closed doors – the structure of conflict remains the same everywhere. The people fighting are completely focused on their opponent, and are completely unaware of the cost to which the innocent people caught in the middle are suffering. And somewhere amidst this whole scene is a trembling child, who locks himself in his room when his parents fight; the driver stuck in a traffic jam who can’t make it to his most important medical appointment; And a winged owl hopping on a plastic floor – these are all people and creatures who are paying the price of someone else’s violence, even though they never asked for it. The bottom line is that in every human violence, a third person is paying the price for it. Can we even think about them before starting a fight?
Source link
N. Raghuraman’s Column: Someone is always paying the price of our violence
