Skip to main content

Little Creatures

This little beetle (or whatever creature it is) sitting on a yam (chembu, in Malayalam) leaf looked helpless.  As I closed in on it with my camera, it seemed to want to run away but couldn't.  I couldn't help imagining myself in its place.


Red ants don't like to be disturbed.  They attack you with all their life if you disturb them.  But I didn't disturb them...  I hope you can see them sitting on the coco shell.  They were building a sweet little nest on the seed without realising that the farmer would soon come and pluck away the coco.


Chembu and coco have value in the market.  Beetles and ants are like me and most people: little creatures at the mercy of the big ones. 

Comments

  1. UnknownJanuary 10, 2014 at 6:06 PM

    It's beautiful to see how you draw the comparisons but one thing is not true. You are not an helpless person who is at the mercy of the world. You have an voice and you make sure that it is heard.

    http://www.pagesofflife.blogspot.in

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJanuary 10, 2014 at 6:29 PM

      Thanks, Rupert. But at this phase of my life, I feel a little helpless. As I'm writing these lines, sitting in my room near to the playground of my school, I can hear cries of people measuring out land, at this time when the whole of Delhi is drowned in fog and darkness... measuring, measuring out lives of hapless people...well...

      Delete
  2. magiceyeJanuary 10, 2014 at 8:12 PM

    Loved the 1st pic!

    ReplyDelete
  3. GigaJanuary 10, 2014 at 9:18 PM

    Te stworzenia też chcą żyć. Pozdrawiam.
    These creatures also want to live. Yours.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJanuary 10, 2014 at 9:34 PM

      I wish people on earth died off so that these creatures are safe.

      Delete
  4. ManiparnaJanuary 11, 2014 at 12:10 AM

    Nice comparison and photography too..especially the first one..

    ReplyDelete
  5. UnknownJanuary 11, 2014 at 8:04 AM

    Beautiful photos with nice comparison, especially first photo is very nice ;)

    ReplyDelete
  6. ulti khopdiJanuary 11, 2014 at 10:22 AM

    Sad but true. The survival of the fittest (bullies)... And so defined by the times we live in.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJanuary 11, 2014 at 1:25 PM

      Yes, it is becoming increasingly difficult for goodness to survive.

      Delete
  7. DeepanshiJanuary 15, 2014 at 4:29 PM

    loved the clicks very much.....

    ReplyDelete
  8. UnknownJanuary 16, 2014 at 6:49 PM

    Survival of the fittest :)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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
47 comments
Read more

The Ugly Duckling

Source: Acting Company A. A. Milne’s one-act play, The Ugly Duckling , acquired a classical status because of the hearty humour used to present a profound theme. The King and the Queen are worried because their daughter Camilla is too ugly to get a suitor. In spite of all the devious strategies employed by the King and his Chancellor, the princess remained unmarried. Camilla was blessed with a unique beauty by her two godmothers but no one could see any beauty in her physical appearance. She has an exquisitely beautiful character. What use is character? The King asks. The play is an answer to that question. Character plays the most crucial role in our moral science books and traditional rhetoric, religious scriptures and homilies. When it comes to practical life, we look for other things such as wealth, social rank, physical looks, and so on. As the King says in this play, “If a girl is beautiful, it is easy to assume that she has, tucked away inside her, an equally beauti...
31 comments
Read more

Indian Knowledge Systems

Shashi Tharoor wrote a massive book back in 2018 to explore the paradoxes that constitute the man called Narendra Modi. Paradoxes dominate present Indian politics. One of them is what’s called the Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS). What constitute the paradox here are two parallel realities: one genuinely valuable, and the other deeply regressive. The contributions of Aryabhata and Brahmagupta to mathematics, Panini to linguistics, Vedanta to philosophy, and Ayurveda to medicine are genuine traditions that may deserve due attention. But there’s a hijacked version of IKS which is a hilariously, if not villainously, political project. Much of what is now packaged as IKS in government documents, school curricula, and propaganda includes mythological claims treated as historical facts, pseudoscience (e.g., Ravana’s Pushpaka Vimana as a real aircraft or Ganesha’s trunk as a product of plastic surgery), astrology replacing astronomy, ritualism replacing reasoning, attempts to invent the r...
17 comments
Read more

Rushing for Blessings

Pilgrims at Sabarimala Millions of devotees are praying in India’s temples every day. The rush increases year after year and becomes stampedes occasionally. Something similar is happening in the religious places of other faiths too: Christianity and Islam, particularly. It appears that Indians are becoming more and more religious or spiritual. Are they really? If all this religious faith is genuine, why do crimes keep increasing at an incredible rate? Why do people hate each other more and more? Isn’t something wrong seriously? This is the pilgrimage season in Kerala’s Sabarimala temple. Pilgrims are forced to leave the temple without getting a darshan (spiritual view) of the deity due to the rush. Kerala High Court has capped the permitted number of pilgrims there at 75,000 a day. Looking at the serpentine queues of devotees in scanty clothing under the hot sun of Kerala, one would think that India is becoming a land of ascetics and renouncers. If religion were a vaccine agains...
8 comments
Read more

Waiting for the Mahatma

Book Review I read this book purely by chance. R K Narayan is not a writer whom I would choose for any reason whatever. He is too simple, simplistic. I was at school on Saturday last and I suddenly found myself without anything to do though I was on duty. Some duties are like that: like a traffic policeman’s duty on a road without any traffic! So I went up to the school library and picked up a book which looked clean. It happened to be Waiting for the Mahatma by R K Narayan. A small book of 200 pages which I almost finished reading on the same day. The novel was originally published in 1955, written probably as a tribute to Mahatma Gandhi and India’s struggle for independence. The edition that I read is a later reprint by Penguin Classics. Twenty-year-old Sriram is the protagonist though Gandhi towers above everybody else in the novel just as he did in India of the independence-struggle years. Sriram who lives with his grandmother inherits significant wealth when he turns 20. Hi...
9 comments
Read more