My college diary
Author :
Nethra
Blog :Otiose Opinions
Date: 9/18/2011 10:24:00 AM
If you are a student too then you definitely know that no matter how hard you try, you just cannot pay attention to few lectures. You either sleep or entertain yourself by doing things that you’re not suppose to be doing sitting inside the class during lectures. Well, it’s perfectly alright to play on your phones or draw caricature of your professors during such lectures. I do it all the time but for a change, I wanted to try something else and ended up chatting with an elephant that was sitting beside me. I must add that it found the lecture equally boring. Anyway, just read our following conversation-
“I would rather hear a frog crook”, it said.
“Pardon me!” I asked.
“Never mind”, it snapped and I wondered why. Then, I guessed that it probably assumed that I was listening to the lecture hence didn’t hear it properly. I wanted to clear the misunderstanding instead another question slipped out of my mouth, quite unintentionally.“How does it feel to be kicked out of your home?”
“Kicked out? Says who?” It asked.
“Come-on, don’t deny it. Everything was on newspaper the other day”, I said.
“I don’t know what you are talking about” it said and I could see that it really meant it so I decided to enlighten it.
I explained how elephants are being captured, trained to work at depots and also entertain at circus. We talked about wild elephants breaking into nearby villages, destroying crops and dying because of electric shocks etc. We discussed about how forest brigands kill elephants for the tooth that’s worth several millions and how the government is doing very little to save such elephants. I saw rage, fear and finally, the defeat on its face as we moved from one topic to another.
“Why?” it asked and I understood that it was asking why we, humans, are so cruel to them. I wish I knew why we never considered animals’ lives as lives. Feeding on animals was one things- quite justifiable too-but torturing them to death was definitely unforgivable. Nobody, not even animals, deserve to be treated the way we treat animals.
Humans fly to space. Technology has developed so much that the meaning of communication, market, business and life itself has changed to adapt to the change that technology has brought with it but we still see a horse carriage, bullock cart, even donkeys carrying the burden of our kinds. Why? I wondered too.
“I do not know”, I replied.
“You should be answerable too” it told me and I again wondered why.
“I have never been cruel to an animal”, I justified myself.
“You don’t understand, do you? I have never hurt a human too but I am being punished. Though I’m so well mannered, I don’t see respect for me in their eyes. If I’m chained for what wild beasts do then shouldn’t you be answerable for what your kinds do? Why do you kill us? Do you like it when sharp weapons pierce our thick skins? Do you like beating us up when we don’t oblige to your desires? Is it fun separating our young ones from their mothers? When you do such things don’t your conscious prick you at all?”I had nothing to say.
I opened my mouth to say something but didn’t know what to tell that would justify those cruel actions so I shut my mouth and started at the lecturer who was delivering the boring lecture. I thought boring lectures were cruel but life wasn’t as simple as I thought it was.