David and Goliath

The bible glorified how a small, nondescript David killed the giant, Goliath.

Michelangelo gave David a permanent place in the history of mankind.

History and mythology throw up innumerable instances where the underdog triumphed.

David, Robin Hood, Cinderella, Kapil’s Devils of 1983 World Cup, Cameroon for one match in 1990 World Cup, Simon Wiesenthal as a one-man-army chasing Nazi criminals, Leicester 2016... this list can go on and on.

There was something common and united and satisfying in all these stories. The “David” needed to win, we were rooting for them, the fall of the Goliath was justice. If not necessarily evil, the Goliaths were big and powerful and there appeared at least some poetic justice in seeing them fall.

Now, follow the reconstructed event that is given below.

A benign, simple giant, an unnamed elephant, pregnant, grazing the meadow encountered a small human. The elephants have evolved over centuries, came to trust humans, domesticated in most instances, often reduced to a stage where it had to depend on the humans for its survival. It had been lulled into a sense of complacency and trust not to view the humans as uniformly evil. They are used to interacting with them, entertain them at times, and accept their offering on its face value. A prize specimen of this deplorable abominable human race, again unnamed as I write this, as in not yet apprehended or identified, approaches the pregnant elephant and offered it a pineapple, loaded with firecrackers/explosives, rigged to explode when the trusting elephant bit on it.

As inorganic things do not have a conscience or rationality, the said rigged pineapple blew up INSIDE the elephant’s mouth, broke its jaw, and burnt its tongue. The stunned elephant wandered off, unable to comprehend what just happened.

A phase of agony is unrecorded neither in its intensity nor in its duration. We have no idea how much the might pachyderm suffered. The final moments of its life are gut-wrenching.  It stood in the water, probably to cool the burnt mouth and passed away. Two lives were lost, the mighty elephant and the calf it would have delivered.

This Goliath did not need to die.

And certainly, not the way it did.

The period of lockdown due to Covid19 was made beautiful to me as we witnessed, through the webcam, the births of two female elephants in Prague Zoo, in the months of March and May. We, as a family, regularly watch the two baby elephants through the web camera that is publicly available on the Prague Zoo’s website.

https://www.zoopraha.cz/en/animals/live-from-elephant-valley

It is such a delight to see them. The babies as well as their caring gentle mothers.

That one perverted mind could put an end to two mighty lives is difficult to digest.

This diabolical, vile, hideous, mean, ghastly, sadistic, ruthless, remorseless, stone-hearted, cold-blooded, barbarous, callous, brutal, savage of a human being must be identified and dealt with in a telling manner to send a clear message to every single person.

If we, as a society, do not treat this act as a violation of the fundamental decency that is considered a norm for a civilized world, we would fail in a massive way on a gargantuan scale.

In the closing scenes of the film, A Few Good Men, the following, rather bewildered, the exchange happens between Downey and Dawson.

Downey: [anxiously] What did we do wrong? We did nothing wrong!

Dawson: Yeah, we did. We were supposed to fight for people who couldn't fight for themselves. We were supposed to fight for Willy.

Willy here is the unnamed pregnant elephant. We are the Downey’s and Dawson’s. There is not going to be a gallant Tom Cruise to nail Jack Nicholson.

Let us not sleep, at least I will not be able to, till we put the stone-hearted bastard away.

Satish Acharya has rendered in a poignant way, the helplessness of even the mightiest animal in the face of the cruelty that humans are capable of

 

 

He is fatalistic, looking at it from the helpless elephant’s point of view. I am asking for blood. Let this innocent death(s) be avenged.

And, as far as poetic justice goes, I have just the correct sentence for him.