The Pious Predator
Lima Sehgal
In this whole exercise of defining who eats who, we tend to
lose our perspective on our positioning.
What matters the most is who is above us in the food chain-
never the one below.
Another problem we humans have is that the persons above and
below us tend to resemble our own species.
Other species don’t have that problem.
The rat has a cat or an eagle to worry about but they do not
resemble distant cousins.For some rats cheese has become suspect because it usually
comes with steel strings attached. All said and done, a rat does not usually need
to worry about another rat.
We have to worry. Since up above and down below the food
chain there is another human, who directly or indirectly holds the
responsibility for our food.
Hungry? Well it is not really about food only- but all roads
do lead to the stomach ultimately.
Life is fairly simple. Eat when you are hungry. But the
exercise of finding food in the refrigerator is a complex exercise in the
technology of putting it there. It requires at least 15 years of education
combined with sucking up in boring jobs, or a series of acrobatics to persuade
someone who loves you, to put it there. Only to discover that there is always a
queue in front of it – that is also called a food chain.
‘Me eat’ has been our prime philosophy since the dawn of
evolution. Me eat ‘you’ has been the definition of all success in the primordial
forests of carbonic ages long past.
So why do we need to be polite?
Why has predation has become a dirty word? Simply because up
and down our food chain is another of our species, another human who wants to bite
into what we have to bite.
Those who are proficient in the art of biting invented a defense against competition. They invented a science called the Tactics of Share.
There are many people who are not so proficient in this science
and are confused about what share is exactly supposed to mean.
The mean get meaner when those who are mathematically
challenged not only flunk at kindergarten but also lose gigantic pieces of
sandwich to those who were superior in long division.
But grownups are not supposed to be mean. Share is fairly
simple in our world -You give and I share. The politician is good at it. So is
my elder sister.
Not like that leechy
salesman selling insurance at my doorstep predating on my money. Time he learns
from that blind guy with a tin cup who takes what ever bucks I can spare everyday.
Yes, I can see you agree. The good guy is the one who takes
the smaller bite.
The baby is a small biter - so he is good. But all 49
year olds who are big biters are not good especially if they have not paid me
for their big bites.
I am only writing all this is because someone told me that
writing articles that no one understands will make me as famous as Vyasa. Look how famous the Gita got to be in every country that was
non Sanskrit speaking.
But my Mother is not impressed. She says that this article
is not authentic.I can never be a good writer on predation because I married
wrong - I do not have a sole bread winning husband with a government pension.
Republication or dissemination of the contents of this article are expressly prohibited without the written consent of the publishers of Jobnet Magazine and the Author
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