Better development?

Okay for some more serious ramblings ... the readers may switch off when dozed!

I was watching the Discovery channel's wonderful documentary about the lost ancient temples of India and they tried to derive the methods that Raja Raja and his people would have employed to get those huge 40 ton granite blocks to the Thanjavur temple top.

Obviously they employed the elephants they said. And apparently they successfully experimented using the logs of wood and the elephants did indeed push those experimental 25 tons of granite blocks! Also with ease claimed the voice-over.

Now, I must say here, that if there is any one animal on this planet I absolutely love, then it has to be the elephant. Nothing is more intelligent and graceful a creature outside the human race as the elephant. To top its intelligence, the inherent compassion in the animal and its social nature in general endears it to me. When in the company of an elephant, the tamer creatures do not fear for their life as even lions and tigers are supposedly not ready to attack tamer species in the presence of an elephant. Such is the patriarchal nature of this huge body of compassion. In India and in Maharashtra in particular, this particular species is extra adored as the elephant headed God, Lord Ganesh.

So, naturally, it pained me to see those elephants rudely chained across their bodies and made to pull and push those heavy granites using their teeth to pull the heavy ropes tied to the block. It made me sick to the intestines. Try putting a rope in your mouths and pull something, I wanted to blurt out. The pain in using the heads to push that block was visible clearly in the eyes of the elephants. It was cruel to do that to another living being and for what? To re-establish how it was done 10 centuries back!!!! For what?

I am all for the research and unearthing the truth. But, not in this way. The research has to be first done of the scriptures and talking to locals who have preserved all this knowledge in their local folklore. And it's impressively wonderfully preserved in the local Tamil folklore, if only the discerning care to talk to the people who live there!

Come to think of it, we are harming the environment today with our polluted development. Yes, it is bad. But, we are at least directly not harming many species the way we did in the past. Is this not a better development? Probably. But, I am a little sceptical of this statement too. Come to think of it, we have abdicated our responsibility to maintaining the balance of nature to the sheer human greed. Probably we do not have much use for other animals any more and hence, we do not care for their survival.

But, history teaches us again and again - even from the times of Ramayan and Mahabharat - that, the victor has to take upon the burden of the vanquished in a war - look no further than Iraq and Afghanistan! If one doesn't want to do that, he should provide for the protection of those entities which are not as powerful as oneself. Also, a very important factor we forget in not protecting those species and their habitats is that we are endangering our own survival. We are still a part of the food chain after all!! We have a responsibility towards those species which have no control on their destinies thanks to the greed of humans.

So, this is a comparatively (and probably, qualitatively too!) better development today we are having without directly using the species like elephants and horses... But, it is time, we take up the mantle of being protector and stop encroaching wildlife spaces and habitats and disturbing and making a hell out of the wonderfully wild life that these species are having. We should be 'man' enough and say thank you to them and show them gratitude for their help through out those important millennia of discoveries and inventions without which today's world would have been an improbability. Remember that today's horsepower came from the measuring of forces based on horse's abilities!

It is high time that we stop this tinkering with our own survival at once... otherwise, tomorrow may never come ...