On the lonely island of Rathlin, off the Irish coast, Robert Bruce the Earl of Carrick took inspiration from a spider and fought King Edward - I of England with persistent effort till he drove out the English from Scotland and then reigned over Scotland. I have a different story – as I lay on my bed and saw a tiny spider I got this brain wave to write this essay. The spider spins a web around itself and then sits in the centre, in wait for a passing prey to be caught. There’s more than the simple disgust to see a nasty cobweb in a corner of your house roof. The process of spinning a web is an engineering marvel as well as an energy consuming process far too complex modern science has yet to decipher! It’s said that the tensile strength of a spider silk of the same thickness is more than steel - something mankind has been breaking its head for centuries now since the renaissance. It’s all not that an unceremonious affair, rather the witty spider has so many tricks up its sleeves, much for than we could digest.
Metaphorically, this means a lot to the human commune. We are also akin to that spider and we spin web around ourselves albeit the difference that it’s not just the prey but we also get wedged into the web. Consider this – for over 200 years, Europe waged several wars with the Ottomans and other Caliphates. Thousands perished on both sides. For what? The French and English were in loggerheads for several centuries, Kings and Queens came and went but thousands of foot soldiers swearing loyalty to the respective royalties lost their lives. Why? During the Georgian-Abkhaz conflict of 1993, more than 250,000 ethnic Georgians were forced to flee, and approximately 30,000 people were killed during separate incidents involving massacres and expulsions. I am going bonkers! In India, the caste factor is something unavoidable in marriage solicitations and many regional politics. Somebody please help me understand this. World war – II claimed millions of lives all over the world ending with the catastrophic nuclear explosion over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where no plants grew for years to come and handicapped generations. Wonder why it happened at all?
We are also akin to that tiny spider and we spin the web of family, friends, enemies, religion, caste, clan, community, political groups, states, nations and what not. First we create the web and then we unnecessarily bicker and bitch, shedding teeth, hair, blood and what not? This life is already burdened with so many headaches, then why do we add more headaches? We have wake up early morning and rush to office. There are so many staffs to be managed. A hundred bunch of reports to be prepared and sent to a fire breathing boss. Sometimes the call of duty demands that you forgo a much needed snap or meal. The poor lunatic walking the streets of your locality naked needs some help to be rehabilitated not because of sympathy but because he lost his mind because of some cruel soul. Some unscrupulous person has cheated a helpless man of his cash and property, who would help him? A man lies on his hospital bed knocking the door to heaven because the blood bank doesn’t have the blood type he needs. The terminal patient is fighting a legal battle for his right to die in peace. The climate is behaving in ways that living memories world over remember it to be a ‘first time’ because we are burning the fossil fuels over time. Somewhere the weevils have eaten into the crops and famine is looming large over a helpless population. Somewhere, an infant rhinoceros has been orphaned because a greedy man has poached its mother for a few thousand dollars from some Chinese who believes the rhino horn is a remedy for his unresponsive nine. The atom is still some maverick scientist’s figment of imagination and still needs more probing. We are breaking our heads over why the spider’s silk has more tensile strength than that of steel. Oh God, there’s so much to worry about in this world. I have neither brain nor brawn to indulge in any more web-spinning. I guess, I am already a burdened man and I’ll be careful to not bite off more than I can chew.
As for the web all of you have spun, I beg to differ in a thousand ways not to have a web. I would choose not to be a party to any of it. So while, I am not an atheist but my concept of God is far too big to be accommodated in your concept of religion. While I see your concept of religion fairly agreeable, I would never own it because I agree it from your perspective which is not mine. My relationship with god is personal and I need no middlemen, idols or ideologies. You may segregate amongst your self on the lines of your skin colour, I see a spectrum of colours with no beginning and end. You may segregate amongst yourself the way you look but I will always ignore the way I look (a mongoloid in your lingo) because I see a unity of anthropology (Homo sapiens sapiens) between me and everybody around. You may divide amongst yourself on the lines of football teams but I have never been a great sports fan any way. The Uighurs and Han Chinese populace were recently fighting pitched battles in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang province (China) over ethnic and religious lines while I believed that they are the same lot. So when humanity itself is a concept hard to maintain, I am least bothered to maintain a concept called ethnicity. My neural networks are already firing like mad to understand the secrets of atom while nations are blasting away nuclear bombs to intimidate each other for a permanent seat in United Nations Security Council. It’s said that between 50 and 70 billion cells die each day due to apoptosis in the average human adult, then if I am reborn everyday who am I am born to? Is family an important thing to worry about and other people around secondly dear to your family members? Who do I belong when I am just not bothered about reciprocation? Am I branded molecularly by any caste or community as I exist? Is it not the same oxygen we breathe and the same oxide of Hydrogen we drink? Is the deoxyribonucleic acid down every cell of our body made up of elements that are unique to any individual?
The nuances of life are too many and I am least bothered to have any more headaches. I have often felt like Neo in the movie matrix when he revives from gun shot in the final fight scene. He doesn’t see any agent anymore; instead he sees several green lights of bytes moving around to form what is called as Matrix. In this life we too live in a similar matrix but the only difference is that the matrix in our case is not created by the machines rather our own handiwork. The Spider will spin webs in the same way for a thousand more years to come and it would be the same one certainly but in our case God knows how many more strings we are going to add in the years to come. If I had my way, I would just interest myself in the beauty of a blossoming flower, enjoy the flutter of a butterfly’s colourful wings, savour the fun in building a bridge for the tiny ant army with a twig across a small gully, run till I tire on the sands of a beach and chase the crabs to their hideouts, assure a hungry stray dog with some bread or watch the monsoon clouds pass by the green mountains in a place on earth called Arunachal Pradesh…….but you would never let me because I am also part of someone’s web and I am stuck too. Just don’t prey upon this poor soul!