THE DEER, THE LIONS AND THE FOREST FIRE





Pic.: Mehul  K. Bhuva

In my last Post, I had touched upon the wired behavior of the human species… to come together forgetting our differences and enmities… act in the spirit of brotherhood, help each other… be exceptionally generous, forgiving and even repenting… but only in great crisis… when our very existence is in threat… when a power beyond us uses his whip and melts our egoes…

I had used the Chennai deluge only as a reference point. For, man has demonstrated this kind of strange behavior in every great crisis… be it in times of devastating earthquakes and tsunamis, or deadly wars and terrorist strikes… Man, by nature, forgets God’s mercy and plays God himself… with his arrogance and ego!

Yes, as I wrote in my Post, it takes a nasty whip from God to tame our egos… We need crisis and danger to remind us that we would all perish if we do not live in harmony…


Yesterday was a Sunday. In our Tai Chi class, we had one more story from Kannan, the story-teller…

When there is a forest fire, the deer are the quickest to sense the danger… from miles and miles afar. They know in which direction they should run in order to save themselves from the inferno… And, when the deer run in this manner, the lions, their traditional hunters, know what not to do this time…  Instead, what to do seeing the deer run!  Yes, this time, the lions know why the deer are running… So, they just follow the deer… For a change, the lions forget their hunger… they forget that they are following the deer, their daily meal… The lions are willing to befriend the deer, do no harm to them… sleep next to them… even caress them, play with them…

It takes a forest fire to bring about this change-of-heart in lions… the carnivorous!

Humans are no different, you see…

In great crisis alone, we understand what true love and brotherhood is!


GERALD D’CUNHA

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