We, the 21st century hardly know what monotony is! Not that our lives are rosy but that every day we open our eyes to a new, exciting, sometimes hilarious, many a times shocking, but all the time engrossing world. The world, like an assiduous joker never refrains from entertaining us – it makes us smile, it even makes us cry, but nevertheless, it enlivens us.
PM Modi’s Achche Din (good days) made us all witness so many Achchi Cheezein (good things). It also brought to the forefront a peculiar kind of Role Reversal. One might think what is so peculiar about role reversal? We all know what role reversal stands for through the literatures of Greeks, Shakespeare and not to forget Charles Dickens. To simplify it for a section of my readers who might not be so much into literatures, I would rather reduce the complexity of this concept to the Bollywood Classics like Ram aur Sham and Sita aur Gita. It’s quite simple : Ram impersonates as Shyam and Sita impersonates as Gita and vice versa for the betterment of their lives and to vanquish the villain. Lady luck is on their side and hence they are triumphant in their venture. This is role reversal from the vantage point of the past and fairly acceptable too as the switching occurs between two human beings fighting for a good cause. What makes the role reversal peculiar and more or less a helluva thing is when it takes place between a human and an animal!
Have you lost senses? Are you out of your mind? Did you just hit your head? – all lost significance when lately a stupefying incident came to the forefront. Not long ago in Chhattisgarh’s Korea district, when all were busy in the Valentine’s Day celebration, a goat attempted to enjoy itself in its own way. Lured by the thought of fresh plants, flowers and vegetables to eat, the goat entered a bureaucrat’s garden. Unfortunately, there the poor creature was caught ‘red-handed’ and arrested in the crime of ‘raiding’ a senior bureaucrat’s garden. Not only this, the hapless goat was also booked under charges that carry a two-to-seven year prison term and a penalty too. It was later revealed that the criminal goat used to jump over the bureaucrat’s bungalow gate now and then to graze there and was hence declared a ‘repeat offender’! However, the animal was later granted bail. Equally astounding was another incident that happened a few days later. As an act of revenge for a snake-bite, a man namely Sonelal in Uttar Pradesh’s Hardoi bit off alive snake’s head and chewed it before spitting it out. Creepy! Surprisingly, only a couple of days or so later, a replica of this bizarre snake-biting incident was reported from Pacher village of Morena, Madhya Pradesh where a heavily inebriated man bit a venomous snake to death without getting harmed by the snake in return!
This 21st century, where Being Human is the trend, humans are playing animals and animals are being forced to play humans. I don’t intend to shock my readers by penning down what I did. The deeper point that remains amidst these jaw-dropping events is that whether this technological world has become so insensitive to animals that it is denying them their basic animal instincts and punishing them just the way humans are punished? The world seems to be trying to put humans and animals on an equal pedestal where humans are gradually developing animality and animals are expected to behave, where humans are taking revenge on animals and animals are charged with penalties and produced in courts! Let us stop this bizarre role reversal. Let animals retain their animality and let we humans behave. Let us not wrong ourselves and descend in an attempt to ascend the Chain of Being.
(Asma Majid is Masters in English from Department of English, University of Kashmir)