Srijana Mitra Das analyses a TOI news story and its meaningsabout being humane.
The story, as reported by Pinak Priya Bhattacharya and Roshan Gupta in The Times of India (September 22), won a million hearts — including mine. The BRICS 2026 menu remained cruelty-free These are questions each of us who still has a shred of truth within them — that hasn’t been drowned in the home-delivered sauces of hypocrisy which make us amnesiac about slaughter-houses — should ask. RESPECTING ALL LIFE: Five fisherfolk of Jalpaiguri have garnered international appreciation due to their effort, as reported in the TOI (September 22), to rescue a baby elephant swept away in the flooded Teesta river and reunite it with its mother — the five showed a rare regard for the suffering of another being, breaking the bounds of specieism No, said the heavens, and sent a Samaritan the baby elephant’s way — actually, five Samaritans, Bablu Das, Mithun Das, Kader Das, Biswanath and Gopal.
A herd of wild elephants was trying to cross but the little one couldn’t keep up and amidst the raging tides, it was swept off, lost to its mother, crying out helplessly as an angered nature — were the downpours intensified by climate change? — tore it away. The griping comically went on for days, displaying a somewhat pathological obsession about the opportunity lost by not presenting a dead goat at the BRICS banquet.
As Roshan Gupta told me, ‘They saw the little elephant suffering and they just decided to act. A river in furious spate. A baby elephant that nearly got swept away. A distressed mother — and a few heroic humans. Srijana Mitra Das writes in Times Evoke, analysing a TOI news story and its meanings about being humane, preventing suffering and safeguarding dignity for all — including non-human beings: The story is simple — and profound. A few days ago, an elephant calf, just four days old, all unsteady short legs, baby rump and tiny trunk, was swept away in Gajoldoba’s Teesta Barrage. There had been heavy rain in Sikkim and the Teesta was swollen. Would the little elephant, who had just landed on Earth, perish at the hands of the very powers who had brought him here? Would his mother, who carried him lovingly for two years, helplessly watch him taken — and never, as elephant moms do, be able to name her child and introduce him to a world full of beauty? Local fishermen, they spotted the little elephant some distance away in the river — it was almost drowned, just the tip of its trunk desperately aloft to keep breathing. In a second, the fishermen plunged their row boat into what now resembled a sea, steered towards the struggling baby, aligned their vessel by it and hauled the gasping kid in. Stroking it, the fishermen headed back to shore where Baikunthapur Forest Division staff gave it veterinary care. As it got back some energy, they helped it walk towards its mother — the little one moved movingly, jelly-like legs hesitantly treading as its mother ran to it, crying out, taking it into the sanctuary of her lap, the purest pair in the world reunited, thanks to a few good men. The fisherfolk had redeemed something which has been in short supply for some time now — faith in humanity. We hear, numbed, daily of Presidents bombing schools, pilots stabbing co-pilots, armies killing doctors and citizens making videos as a man drowns in a pit. It seems like most of us have become deaf to the suffering of others. We blank their calls out, wrapping ourselves in non-receptiveness, rejecting guilt, our stonewalling, another layer on a being’s agony. Where did everyone else go? Wildlife vs our life Often, this is also the only option many have, given a society where a lack of sensible infrastructure dovetails with impunity for law. In that situation, Samaritans can suffer for having helped, enmeshed by criminality and officialdom, which, brutalised by corruption, taunts them for coming to someone’s aid. Thus, we inhabit a world where someone’s suffering is, at best, something to avert your eyes from — and, at worst, to make a video out of. Thankfully, the five fisherfolk of Jalpaiguri are not like us. Unlike alienated urban folk, who live clutching at the edge of mall, field and nightclub, not fully at ease in any, their world is rooted, a riverine ecology where sky, earth and water meet, clouds flee across pewter firmament and the fusion of the elements encourages the spawning of fish. Why, some may ask, would fishermen, who catch and sell living beings, be kinder towards species? Here lies a profound truth, at the heart of which is the secret of the Anthropocene — the era of privileged humans destroying this world. People who belong within local ecologies — farmers, foresters, fisherfolk, etc. — usually have an instinctive sense of the patterns, the balances and rhythms of nature which surround their lives. In her marvelous book ‘Floating Coast’, historian Bathsheba Demuth outlines the Bering Strait. Nestled between America and Russia, this icy terrain is home to the Inupiat, Chukchi and Yupik. Its rich ecology — bowhead whales, caribou, walruses, seals and foxes — sustained these indigenous groups over millennia. However, the same ecology also drew Westerners to Beringia. In the 19th century, commercial whalers from New England arrived to hunt whales for their blubber — boiled to oil, used in factories, lighting and explosives. First, they killed the whales practically to extinction. Then, they began hunting down Beringia’s foxes, walruses and caribou. How do you see a whale While both groups hunted, there was a difference. The indigenous communities of Beringia hunted in just the right quantity needed to sustain them and acknowledged the transgression of killing. Every hunt was accompanied by elaborate cosmologies, rituals like whales being fed and prayed to by communities, shamans imploring a whale to perish peaceably, women chanting, so hunters would not cast disturbing shadows on water, whale bounty received with reverential prayers. The hunt recognised a whale’s soul — hunters prayed to it for forgiveness and never committed excess. This was very different from Westerners who saw whales only as objects, functional things which, slaughtered, brought efficiency and wealth. In this worldview, a whale was not a being which, as Demuth writes, ‘…made the darkness of the polar nights visible, the cold bearable, and stomachs satiable. It was a soul in life…’. To a Westerner, a whale was only profit, to unlock which whales had to be killed in vast numbers, treated just as commo-dities with no ceremony, for, Demuth notes, ‘No oil buyer on the New Bedford docks paid for emotion… they sold light to people who could burn it with no knowledge of pain. ’ Hiding animal pain In a sense, Demuth made me understand the recent homemadefuroré over the BRICS event held in Delhi — and specifically, the menu of its official dinner. Why, demanded many of our leading liberals, was this purely vegetarian when India has a grand tradition of non-vegetarian cooking, which could have knocked the jackets off our foreign guests? These meltdowns over the missing chicken makhni made me wonder. The core of being liberal is respect for the rights of all — liberals thus argue for minorities, the vulner-able and less empowered. But why do they recognise only the human? Do rights to life, security and dignity not matter for non-human beings? Is there a hierarchy of life? If so, who decides that? And, if that’s what you believe, how are you different from former colonisers — or the majoritarian types you now claim to oppose? It’s nice to write slogans about equality and justice — but if we follow these up with chicken burgers, what do we prove? And why should our protests then, as gluttonous as righteous, make a mark? Perhaps they could hear that beaut-iful hymn again — ‘Vaishnav jan to tene kahiye, je peerh parayi jaane re’ — and understand ‘peerh’, suffering, is common to all life. A truly liberal human tries to save any being — particularly one headed into a pointless burp in the annals of time — from it. Let’s try to learn a lesson from the five fisherfolk of Jalpaiguri — and still redeem ourselves. Views expressed are personal You use AI every day. Now get your AI Quotient. Take the AIQ test.
That recognition — of someone suffering — is rare today. There is a reason Mahatma Gandhi emphasised vegetarianism against colonial violence — one hopes today’s liberal satyagrahis get it.
