Skip to main content

Terrible Human Touch


Image Courtesy: theodysseyonline
Human beings make a difference even to the planet.  According to geologists, human beings have altered the fate of the planet.  The earth has now entered a new geological epoch which they call Anthropocene.  The 12000 year-old Holocene has come to an end.

Human activities have altered the very nature of the planet.  It is no more the mountains and their glaciers, or the oceans and the cyclones, that determine the fate of terrestrial life.  Man has reasons to be proud of himself: it is he who shapes the destiny of the earth.

Should he be ashamed of himself, rather?

Human activities have increased the acidity in the oceans which in turn will make the marine creatures to evolve and develop shells to withstand the man-made poison in the saline waters.  Geologists predict that future limestone will come from the shells of these marine creatures.

Nitrogen content in the atmosphere has been affected.  River deltas have shrunk.  The very air is poisoned. Soil is contaminated. There is nothing on the planet or its atmosphere that man has not left unsullied.

Three centuries ago, Jonathan Swift created a character named Gulliver who, after seeing different worlds during his voyages, ended up as a misanthrope.  During his final voyage, the Brobdingnagian king judges Gulliver’s species “to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.”  Our geologists today would agree with that judgment.

With the hubris that only the human beings possess, we may assert that we are the creators of a great civilisation.  But our great creation is turning out to be an elegy for the earth.   


Indian Bloggers

Labels:

Comments

  1. Purba chakrabortySeptember 1, 2016 at 2:01 PM

    So true. The greed of human beings is responsible for this.

    ReplyDelete
  2. sunaina sharmaSeptember 1, 2016 at 6:24 PM

    We are not the creators but destroyers in disguise....

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalSeptember 1, 2016 at 6:29 PM

      So true. 7.5 billion of us are spending 1800 billion us dollars on war machinery! Per year, according to latest reports.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Pranita a perverted genius

Bulldozer begins its work at Sawan Pranita was a perverted genius. She had Machiavelli’s brain, Octavian’s relentlessness, and Levin’s intellectual calibre. She could have worked wonders if she wanted. She could have created a beautiful world around her. She had the potential. Yet she chose to be a ruthless exterminator. She came to Sawan Public School just to kill it. A religious cult called Radha Soami Satsang Beas [RSSB] had taken over the school from its owner who had never visited the school for over 20 years. This owner, a prominent entrepreneur with a gargantuan ego, had come to the conclusion that the morality of the school’s staff was deviating from the wavelengths determined by him. Moreover, his one foot was inching towards the grave. I was also told that there were some domestic noises which were grating against his patriarchal sensibilities. One holy solution for all these was to hand over the school and its enormous campus (nearly 20 acres of land on the outskirts
13 comments
Read more

Randeep the melody

Many people in this pic have made their presence in this A2Z series A phone call came from an unknown number the other day. “Is it okay to talk to you now, Sir?” The caller asked. The typical start of a conversation by an influencer. “What’s it about?” My usual response looking forward to something like: “I am so-and-so from such-and-such business firm…” And I would cut the call. But there was a surprise this time. “I am Randeep…” I recognised him instantly. His voice rang like a gentle music in my heart. Randeep was a student from the last class 12 batch of Sawan. One of my favourites. He is unforgettable. Both Maggie and I taught him at Sawan where he was a student from class 4 to 12. Nine years in a residential school create deep bonds between people, even between staff and students. Randeep was an ideal student. Good at everything yet very humble and spontaneous. He was a top sportsman and a prefect with eminent leadership. He had certain peculiar problems with academics. Ans
25 comments
Read more

Queen of Religion

She looked like Queen Victoria in the latter’s youth but with a snow-white head. She was slim, fair and graceful. She always smiled but the smile had no life. Someone on the campus described it as a “plastic smile.” She was charming by physical appearance. Soon all of us on the Sawan school campus would realise how deceptive appearances were. Queen took over the administration of Sawan school on behalf of her religious cult RSSB [Radha Soami Satsang Beas]. A lot was said about RSSB in the previous post. Its godman Gurinder Singh Dhillon is now 70 years old. I don’t know whether age has mellowed his lust for land and wealth. Even at the age of 64, he was embroiled in a financial scam that led to the fall of two colossal business enterprises, Fortis Healthcare and Religare finance. That was just a couple of years after he had succeeded in making Sawan school vanish without a trace from Delhi which he did for the sake of adding the school’s twenty-odd acres of land to his existing hun
19 comments
Read more

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
37 comments
Read more

Sanjay and other loyalists

AI-generated illustration Some people, especially those in politics, behave as if they are too great to have any contact with the ordinary folk. And they can get on with whoever comes to power on top irrespective of their ideologies and principles. Sanjay was one such person. He occupied some high places in Sawan school [see previous posts, especially P and Q ] merely because he knew how to play his cards more dexterously than ordinary politicians. Whoever came as principal, Sanjay would be there in the elite circle. He seemed to hold most people in contempt. His respect was reserved for the gentry. I belonged to the margins of Sawan society, in Sanjay’s assessment. So we hardly talked to each other. Looking back, I find it quite ludicrous to realise that Sanjay and I lived on the same campus 24x7 for a decade and a half without ever talking to each other except for official purposes.      Towards the end of our coexistence, Sawan had become a veritable hell. Power supply to the
12 comments
Read more