Most of my readers will be familiar with Aesop’s fables. The Indians have their Panchatantra and Hitopdexa, which Dubois and La Fontaine propagated in the West, as traced by Guy Deleury, a renowned French writer, who worked during many years in India as Jesuit missionary and obtained a Ph.D degree from the Pune University for his commentary and translation of Tukaram’s Abhangas in French verse, which he dedicated to his guru Sonopant Dandekar.
Fables are a simple, enjoyable and effective mode of transmitting moral lessons, when plain talking and academic discourses run the risk of provoking negative reactions. The Buddhist Zen stories work like fables, and Jesus taught his listeners through Parables. Most adults want to hear what pleases them. Any overt or even a subtle criticism of their thinking or behavior is commonly resented. The same is true of nations, which need diplomatic services for face-saving operations and to avoid quick reactions that can lead to costly wars and painful consequences.
Despite technological and other forms of progress, the humanity has not gone much beyond its natural instincts. More power and more wealth has generated more ambition and more pride among the privileged sections of the humankind. The pre-historic forms of exploiting, looting and eliminating the less privileged individuals and societies have attained new modes of functioning, probably more sophisticated, but aimed at satisfying basic instincts. Only when the conflicts overflow the expected limits, humans resort to ceasefires and treaties to gain time before returning to the age-old nasty and criminal routine.
Impressed and overwhelmed by the self-glorifying evolution of the humans, some far-sighted rodents among rats and bandicoot rats (to be distinguished from bandicoot marsupials) met to reflect upon the criminal behavior and the legal system (including international law and ICJ) of the humans of different ethnicities and levels of development. These rodents like others which the humans bunch together as “irrational” creatures have the advantage of being domestic, but not domesticated.
The rodents have to contend with snare-traps and poisons, but not subjected to democratic referendums, censorship, and drones. Consequently, the procedures for their decisions are likely to be simple and quick, even though the bandicoots are aware of their bigger size and apparent force to demand more rights than their smaller micy partners in the new joint project of a world order that could ensure their safety better than all the human inventions, driving nations into mutual destruction. Some of their leaders recalled a story that they had heard from the elders about the Lion and the Rat.
Unlike the English racist discrimination between the bandicoots and rats, the rodents remembered fondly of the more sensible and sensitive Portuguese, and also their former Goan subjects who preferred to keep the muridae gender-linked as rato and ratazana, undir and kollindur. The idea to forge a closer identity within a new world order may have been inspired by the election of the new general secretary of the UN, a Portuguese with a Goa-born wife.
The bandicota indica hope that this connection may open to them a door to UNSC after decades of efforts in vain.
Among the many questions that worried the rodents were the same that have led the humans into a quandary and mutual recriminations in the context of the ongoing crisis in the Middle East: (1) demonstrations can be repressed by force when foreign interference is noticed? (2) Is there any limit of time beyond which demonstrators can resort to violence? (3) Can the foreign powers distinguish the violent jihadists from their allies, the “good rebels”? (4) How does one distinguish civilians from violent rebels supported by them, in the midst of blurring of lines between civilians and combatants? (5) Why women and children should get a differentiated treatment if they live and sleep with their violent rebel relatives and elders? (6) How come the civilians supporting their elected governments in war decisions and their troops in production of war-material can claim to be non-combatants? (7) The nations selling weapons to rebels in other countries should not share responsibility in the war crimes? Many such and other issues baffled the rodents. What they found more baffling was the irrationality of the humans claiming rationality. Under cover of international law, and a façade of world order which brings together masters and victims to share a common UN platform, a make-believe cooperation, always under a watchful and mighty fist of UNSC, the logic of “might is right” seems to be the order of the day.
The United Rodents have reached the conclusion that time had come for them to rush to the rescue of human race, which has been cruel to them with their systematic campaign to hunt them down since the 14th century when the Black Death killed nearly a third of the European population. The humans traced the plague to the rats, but as usual they were unaware of the small Ice age, and of the consequences of their own ambitious project to replace feudal order with their capitalist dreams.
The humans, especially in the West, are slow learners. Before they learn they leave a trail of destruction. The bandicota indica recalled with gratitude the Hindu god Ganesha, the Vighneshwar, who chose rat as his mount. This gave them hope that not all humans are beyond redemption, despite the foolhardiness of some of their leaders.
