Elephant woes


Kerala’s educated and highly-literate people seem to be on a mission to exterminate the elephant population. The pachyderm is in danger. Yesterday a hapless elephant was electrocuted in Kottayam .The elephant was being transported on a truck. The poor animal hit the low hanging electric cables and died immediately. Every week there are so many cases of elephants dying in extremely tragic and painful circumstances. The elephant is a majestic mammal. It is an animal that arouses our awe and respect. Today elephants have been reduced to mere money-making machines by temples and nefarious elephant owners. Elephants mean big money for many.

Providing elephants for temple festivals is a lucrative venture. Elephants are transported from one festival venue to another on top of lorries and trucks. They are tied with ropes and made to stand for hours. The tired elephant is then forced to walk for kilometers and kilometers carrying the deity on its back. Sometimes the journey may last for 12 hours a day. Elephants are made to walk on hot tarred roads. They are not provided food or water for hours together. They are subjected to merciless torture by cruel and loutish mahouts. Most of the mahouts are an underpaid under educated lot. Animal rights are something they are unaware of and they relish torturing the helpless animals. It probably gives them a vicarious sense of power when they torture these gentle animals in front of a devout audience. The devotees are lost in their consumerist prayers. How can they see or understand the pain suffered by the poor animal. We are so lost in our prayers for possessions that we close our eyes to the plight of this beautiful animal

Kerala is a consumer state. We produce rubber and we torture elephants. This is not God’s own country. It is a madhouse where human beings delight in exterminating animals and claiming huge insurance amounts.

missing the gentle giants

Trivandrum is a growing city.Once upon a time it was just a little town sitting pretty on the coastline of the Arabian sea.Tree-lined avenues,majestic red coloured buildings and an earthy old worldly charm rendered this place with a unique flavour of its own.But today my little town is getting to be a little too big for her boots.She is gradually expanding to swallow her quiet suburbs.She is straining to accomodate an ever increasing number of denizens.Her tree-lined avenues are being felled to make way for development.The gentle giants of yester years are being mercilessly chopped down.The destruction is rampant and heartless.It is mindless devastation on a scale i have never witnessed before.Trees on the Palayam,LMS stretch and in the court premises are being felled day after day.All this is being purportedly done for road widening.Well ,broad,wide roads are indeed a blessing for one and all.But why not make an allowance for the gentle giants also.Chennai is a thriving metropolis ,much much larger than Trivandrum,and yet they have managed to retain the huge old trees.How did they do it?They did it because someone with a little bit of foresight and vision decided that they were going build roads without chopping down the trees.They have succeeded to a certain extent in retaining the green canopy.But in Trivandrum there is an evil malaise that is gradually destroying the beauty of this one timegreen town.We the silent,indifferent,scared people of Trivandrum can do nothing but witness this destruction.We are scared to react for we may suffer at the hands of the perpetrators of this massacre of the innocents.