Capiche?
For a creature blessed with only five senses, we’ve indeed come a long way although we don’t seem to be sure where we are going. Left in the wild with our bare elements, we may not witness a lot of dawns. Yet, we’ve done fabulously well for our species. (Damn other species! Who cares about them, right?) If there ever was an animal kingdom, it would be no match to the human empire that we’ve built over the course of a few millennia. Humans have effectively and insidiously ruined the natural order for personal benefits. Survival of the profittest indeed. To put it bluntly, it’s a tragic story of a species outsmarting others — as well as itself — to get higher and higher and higher and higher. Although we are in 2017, we’ve got no clue how much more we’ve got to go to prove our calibre.
What’s more dismal is our pettiness in assuming that we somehow always deserve better. If one of ours dies, we casually throw words such as ‘innocent’ around while other beings exist merely for our amusement—either eyes’ or stomach’s or both. In an ideal scenario, there would be no cages and there certainly won’t be any zoo and those hideous places called animal labs. Sadly, we live in an imperfect world. A world driven by what the economists call growth and what the monks call delusion. The only sigh of relief can be obtained from realizing the trap we’ve caught ourselves in. Nobody goaded us towards it; no, not the mammoths, nor the lions or the cattle. We walked in to this web of no return. A web weaved by unreasonable ambitions and double-coated by a vile hubris. And none of our five senses seem to be very helpful.
A dog may not be able to speak with us but it can sense our joy and apathy and despondency. It doesn’t need a garland of words to neck around what’s up. Despite its monochromatic vision, it can see what we’re going through. We, despite our panchendriya, are blank unless we get a thorough explanation. We can’t touch others and feel their pain. They’ll have to say that they need a crocin. We can’t look in to a stranger’s eyes and conclude whether he’s lying or not. We can see so much and yet we are so blind. The less we talk about sense of smell, the better. Similarly, we can’t filter the truth in what we hear or choose to ignore.
Now that the scientists have established that hearing is the last sense to fade out during our death, it’s worth digging deeper in to our ears. Metaphorically speaking, of course. Let’s say, you’re concentrating on your work at your table and 4 tables ahead of you, you can see — from a peripheral angle, the one that tells you how the woman standing next to you in the elevator looks like even though you haven’t even seen her face — there are some people chitter-chattering. You can’t hear them distinctly though. Your mind knows what to pick and what to drop. But as soon as you shift your attention from your work and focus on them, you begin to hear them loud and clear. That’s what senses are all about; to use only one word, direction. Still, in spite of all these powers bestowed on us by Mother Nature, we can be profoundly dumbstruck at times.
