Beauty and Beast

Today the Indian subcontinent witnessed one of the most spectacular diamond rings in the sky, when the annular solar eclipse was sighted from the Southern most tip of the country, and there were a lot of people flocking to Dhanushkodi and to Kanyakumari! One may still remember that these are the very places which had witnessed some years ago one of the worst onslaughts of tsunami! The spectacular show has come as a consoling factor to the tsunami ravaged coastal region of Tamil Nadu, which is still to rise from the harvest festival Pongal slumber. So the wonderful celestial sight was a feast to the star-gazers, if not the coastal fisherfolks, for whom the eclipse was nothing more than a sophistication of a natural event.

But day before yesterday nature showed its ferocious face in Haiti, when an earthquake devoured over 50,000 men and women. Seven richter scale is nothing so low to bring down buildings, and there were people who were buried under the debris, and never to see the light of day. There are more and more natural calamities over which the human beings have too little control. Nature however had its own mechanism to avert major calamities which would cost the earth dearly; but the human intervention has undone these mechanism, to such an extent that it is hard for nature not to be stern. And when nature is hard, the first casualty is the human persons en masse!

If the earthquake has shaken Haiti day before yesterday, our turn may come any time; we are called to be prepared to face the tune of the angry earth. The human race which had mercilessly killed nature’s sap, are to replace them with their own blood, and yet it is doubtful if the earth would tally the accounts and start life anew! But one of the most nagging questions which disturb many of the underdeveloped or developing nations is, why they be held responsible for the destruction of the earth and her resources by the developed nations? Who are the people who have plundered the earth’s resources and filled their pockets? Is it not unfair to make the innocent people held responsible for what they do not know?

The irony of earth’s divine sport is that on the one hand she reveals herself as one of the most charming, beautiful of all created things; and on the other side is her ferocious side! Beauty and beast seem to co-exist, and who else but Lord William Blake can try to reconcile these contradictions. Without contraries is no progression, Blake was to have told, and that is why he brought in Lamb and Tyger (Blake’s spelling), representing innocence and experience. True, the humanity was innocent some centuries ago, and today the experienced men and women would only find ways of exterminating any beauty still left on earth, and it is proper that we see the beastly face of earth!

Humanity is all in praise for the wonders of the earth, and they will make melodies to sing her praises, so long the charm is still there, and she shows her beautiful face, spilling innocence. Humanity is frightened of the other side of the earth, the angry planet, ready to teach humanity a fitting lesson, so that they do not play with fire, which can devour all that is, and is yet to be! As we admire the most spectacular diamond ring of the century, let us not forget the hundreds of thousands of people in Haiti, who are fighting with their lives for no fault of their own, and bring them to our consciousness, so that their cry, pain and anguish may heal our greed and selfishness, so that we may in turn heal the wounds of the earth!