Monday, April 20, 2015

National Symbols

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Now that our Gujerat model of Governance has spread to the center somewhat, there was this news item that our fond Royal Bengal Tiger has to surrender its pride of place to the Gir Lion as our National Animal:




As expected there was a furor against this scandolous suggestion which was deemed a poor joke.

I don't know precisely what is so great about the Gir Lion other then that its habitat is Modi's Gujerat. The opposition has pointed out that the lion is nowhere found in our wild except in the Modiland whereas our tiger is spread all over India in a hundred wildlife sanctuaries. And that the tiger is an endangered species since its skin, claws, teeth, and other sensitive body parts fetch a huge black market price in, as you can guess, our voracious northern neighbor. So the tiger is stalked, poached, and sold.

But no one has heard of a lion skin as the hot seat of meditation nor do its body parts have a sex stimulant value.

As far as I am concerned, I have never seen either a tiger or a lion in the wild. But I have read Jim Corbett's delightful books on man-eating tigers, but none on man-eating lions, not even in Gujerat.

Nor do I use tiger skin for my meditations in front of my laptop, and I am too old to have any use for tiger's body parts.

So I am just curious why we are so obsessed with our national symbols and fight about them.

I am told that peacock is our national bird because 

'it is a symbol of grace, joy, beauty and love':






Hmm! 

I never saw a peacock in my village Muthukur on the famed Coromandel Coast, nor in Vizagh, nor for that matter in KGP where I lived for all of 40 years. The first I saw a peacock was in 1965 in the then famous Alipore Zoo of Calcutta. It was monsoon time and a couple of peacocks did preen themselves as in the pic above. But then one of them started howling and I ran away since the love call of that peacock was terrible, but of course it might have sexcited the surrounding peahens for whose ears it was exclusively meant.

But I have seen crows all over India wherever I traveled. And Mark Twain wrote a lovely piece on the Indian Crow: 






So, I guess our national bird ought to be the sublime Indian Crow which is reputed for its cleverness unlike the peacock which is said to be as dumb as I.

I am told that our National Tree is the banyan:





No doubt I have seen banyan trees once in a while wherever I went in India. But it is reputed only for its vast spread and its aerial roots. However, it is as useless as the Gir lion. Its fruit are inedible, its trunk is not known for its wood, and its leaves are neither too big nor too graceful unlike the lovely Aswath leaves of Gita...aka, the bodhi under which Lord Buddha attained his wisdom at Gaya in Lalu's Bihar:





And it is well said about the banyan tree that nothing except its own dynasty grows under it, much like our Nehru-Gandhi thing under threat of extinction now.

So my personal choice for our national tree is the Neem:




It is there all over India. I recall playing under the Neem tree in front of our home in Muthukur and we used to lie down in its cool shade in hot summer. We loved to chew its tiny fruit, we used its leaves as the only remedy for our periodic poxes, we tasted its oil, we gulped balls of its leaf-paste as our digestive, we covered our paddy pits with its branches as a preventive to grubs and pests, and folks cut its dead trunk and used it as furniture wood. And as soon as I settled at KGP I saw a series of a dozen graceful neem trees in front of the casualty ward of the famous Railway Hospital there. 

I don't think we have as yet a national insect. Obviously it is the housefly which competes well with our ubiquitous mosquito:
And I loved to distraction the Ogden Nash's ditty-bitty:

God in his wisdom made the fly
And then forgot to tell us why


And our National Serpent is of course the Cobra in its Basket:
Talking of serpents takes us to our politicians. I have been told that we didn't have much of a sense of nationality for millennia although our country was a closed geographical unit. For many centuries our villages were cocoons and self-contained socially, economically and panchayatically. And it is the British who unwittingly united us politically. And this elite awakening started in Bengal and Maharashtra but it was the Mahatma who took it to our villages. And after the wily Brits were forced to abandon their ruthless empire by our Hitler, we took to democracy as a squirrel takes to its nut; unlike our western neighbor:


 


http://www.wildlife-gallery.com/Resources/MCD18569w_Red_Squirrel.png?653
So I propose that our National Person is our Village Politician: 

And now to our National Scientist. You may think it is our Nobel Winner Sir CV Raman. But I doubt it. No one I ever met in my long life other than my physics mugs cared for Raman and very few even there could explain Raman effect to a layman in the street.

So I propose our National Scientist as the Rocket Scientist. Not only did we have a rocket man as our past President but everyone in our country now has heard of our Mars Mission: 

And our National Obsession is without doubt is our unique Caste System:

And our National Lady is our Air India Air Hostess who has gone red recently:





...Posted by Ishani

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