It's a learning curve

I visited Indore Zoo last weekend with my 16 month old daughter after a huge gap of almost a decade. As we reached near the main gate of the zoo, we saw a huge crowd. Some were buying entrance tickets, while others were gossiping and chatting.

We entered the zoo after paying a meager entrance fee of Rs. 5/- and initiated a leisurely stroll following hoards of people. At the outset, we came across cages of birds like emu, peacock and then came the relatively bigger species like blackbuck, deer. Suddenly you feel that you have entered a different world or colony altogether but when you see human species around, the illusion breaks then and there.

We stopped walking and looked at the cage that was roughly 20 meters away from us and saw a leopard pacing to and fro in the cage almost alone in his own world. My daughter got excited after seeing a scale-up version of what she is accustomed to see in our home (our pet dog). She waved her hand in excitement and signaled the big cat to come nearby, a visible friendship invitation.

On the contrary, there were people busy in making their presence felt by pelting small stones and twigs

at the leopard cage. Perhaps, the explicit expression of human nature that we are superior or may be the "Return on Investment" factor .Each and every person utilized their own means to distract the leopard and forced him to come out of his own world. This continued till the time when a person from zoo authority opposed the act and threatened to employ a coercive action.

We continued our stroll to have a glimpse of other wild species like elephants, alligators, crocodiles. Finally, we had a glimpse of tigers and were bit unfortunate like some others as they opted to take rest in a covered area at same point of time. Some people left the place in disappointment while some others; firm believers of human centrism tried every possible means to break the sound sleep of tigers until they saw the zoo authority guy around.

We retraced back to the entrance after the wonderful experience. Even more, it was quite an adventure for my daughter as she made some new non-human friends over there and had an awesome time.

On the way back, time and again I was thinking of the incidents mentioned in the aforesaid lines.

Perhaps it is the reflection of the thought process of human species and reason why humanity dominates and sees the need to continuously "develop" most of the Earth. It is a well-known fact that we are responsible for the ecological crisis and the extinctions of many non-human species .If this goes on, we may be responsible for more such extinction events.

It's a learning curve and hope we learn from our past sins.