A few days back,a college-mate of mine,Dr.Ashis Baran Saha had sent an email to natmedicos_87,the web forum for the interaction of the college-batch of medicos to which I belong.The mail revealed a series of photographs of a day in Feroe Island,a Danish coastal town where the locals hunt down Calderon dolphins as an annual event of celebration. The graphic photos were nauseating to say the least,showing the sea-waves stained red with the innocent blood of the hunted which lay sprawled along the sea-shore and offering a unique exhibition - trophies,bringing about the joy of victory to the hunters,as revealed by the facial expressions of those who participate in the brutal exercise,reportedly celebrating the "manliness" the local teens achieve.
As one of my batch-mates remarked over the photos that where animals hunt for need,man hunt for greed,I couldn't help but recoil from the sickening sensation that overwhelmed me(and all my batch-mates too)with a thought which continues to disturb my inner peace to the day,that the civilized man is undoubtedly the most cruel,sadistic and pervert animal that ever existed on our planet.
While my wife (and my batch-mates too)continue to whine in a harmlessly light and jocular tone,over the alleged fact that I choose to ponder over issues that are chronically morose shaded in negativity,I cannot help but express my helplessness about committing this aesthetic crime again and again.The very history of civilized man continue to pursue me to the limits of dispair.And the history of needless war,terrorism and genocides,of raping Nature again and again without remorse,wiping her innocent virgin beauty off the face of our planet,seem to continue comfortably into the future.
One of the ugliest crimes man has committed is harnessing the unbound energy of nature to make a radio-active bomb out of it which he unleashed upon his own fraternity in Japan,on 6th.August 1945.And by continuing to develop an arsenal of thermo-nuclear weapon in the decades to follow,man has shown that he has not felt guilty of any crime,and is ready to repeat it without remorse if provocated to sensitive stretches.
There is no such concept called a nuclear war.Today if one nuclear weapon were to be unleashed,it would lead to a nuclear Holocaust.The perceptions of objective consequences of a war and a holocaust are significantly and grossly different,to say the least,and it is important that the men in power,the men rolling desperate dices recognize this.The dichotomy lies in the fact that every thinking person in grips with sanity fears a nuclear showdown,and every technological state plans for it.Everyone knows it is Madness,and every nation has an Excuse.There has developed a dreary chain of causality:The Germans were working on the nuclear bomb at the beginning of World War II;so the Americans had to make one first.If the Americans had one,the Soviets had to have one,and then the British,the French,the Chinese,the Indians,the Pakistanis...By the end of the last century,nuclear weapons had become almost a home handicraft industry.
The conventional bombs of World War II were called Blockbusters - filled with 20 tonnes of TNT,they could destroy a city block.All the bombs dropped on all the cities amounted to some 20 million tonnes,2 megatons,of TNT-Coventry and Rotterdam,Dresden and Tokyo,all the deaths that showered from the grey skies between 1939 and 1945 were 2 megatons.By the end of the 20th.century,2 megatons was the energy released in the explosion of a single,more or less humdrum thermonuclear bomb-one bomb with the destructive force of the Second World War.But there are tens of thousands of nuclear weapons.By the late 1980s,the strategic missile and bomber forces of the USSR and the USA were reportedly aiming at 15000 designated targets.
No place on the planet is actually safe. The energy contained in these weapons,Sinister Genies of Death patiently awaiting the rubbing of the lamps,was far more than 10,000 megatons,but with the apocalyptic power of destruction now concentrated efficiently,not over 6 years that spanned the last World War but over 6 hours,a Blockbuster for every single family on the planet,a World War II re-enacted with every second for the length of a lazy afternoon.
We are inhabitants of Planet Earth.So is a venomous cobra,and so is a blade of grass freshly bathed in the dew of this early morning when I am writing these lines,snugly closetted in my own little den.We have all been so for a million years.But the Universe was discovered only yesterday.These million years were spent in innocent ignorance.In the last 10th.of a percent of the lifetime of our species,in the instant between Aristarchus and ourselves,we reluctantly noticed that we were not the centre and purpose of the Universe,but rather lived in on a tiny and fragile world,lost in immensity and eternity,drifting in a great cosmic ocean dotted here and there with a hundred billion trillion galaxies and stars.Something in us recognizes the Universe as our home.We are made of stellar dust,our origin and evolution tied to distant cosmic events of temporal antiquity.There are worlds out there that have charred to ashes by cosmic catastrophes.We are fortunate,we are alive.The welfare of our civilization,our species,the green forests and the graceful dolphins lie in Our hands.If we do not speak for our planet,who will?Yet our energies find themselves channelised towards destruction.Hypnotized by mutual mistrust that is unique to our species,our nations and ideologies,with our religions and senseless fanatical chauvinism prepare for self-annihilation.And because we are doing is so horrifying,we tend not to think of it much through escapist excuses.But what we do not consider,we are unlikely to put right.
If we are not committed to our own survival and that of our cohabitants,who will be?
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