A newly-married youth with literary pretensions took his wife to the sea shore because the bride had never seen the ocean. Keen to impress her, he approached the ocean, waved his hands dramatically and quoted these lines from Lord Byron’s poem ‘Childe Harold IV’, “Roll on thou and dark-blue Ocean, Roll’. As the little woman gazed wondrously she exclaimed, ‘O, Henry, they obey you! They are rolling!”
Call it the power of the ocean or the power of Byron’s verse. You cannot question the awesomeness of the ocean. What do our epics and puranas say? During ‘Samudramanthan’, When the Devas churned the milky ocean, many wonderful things emerged like the divine cow Kamadhenu, goddess of wealth, Lakshmi, and the Akshaya patra, the divine vessel from which food never ran out!
We are tempted to say, “Those were the days!” Today such gifts would be regarded as harmful leading to environmental pollution. The oceans are heavily polluted with all sorts of dangerous waste, chemicals and so on. Even divine action may not be sufficient to clean up the oceans or even the sacred rivers which boasted of the sacred touch of divinity. Even the most rabid Hindutva or BJP bhakht (acolyte) would hesitate to bet on the ability of Union Minister Uma Bharati, who has been given the tough task of cleansing the holy river Ganga. How will she approach the tough task of cleaning the oceans, the smaller seas as well as numerous rivers, lakes and ponds?
Her famous urging of the Hindutva mob “Aur ek dhaka de do” outside the Babri Masjid will not work in ‘Operation Clean Ganga’. The shrewd Uma Bharati may well persuade Prime Minister Narendra Modi to ask Human Resources Development Minister Smriti Irani to switch portfolios with her. Keen to please her Boss, Smiriti will grab the proposal, order the vice chancellors, scientists and academicians to clean up the oceans. She in turn will blame Rajiv Gandhi for neglecting Uttar Pradesh based Ganga which flowed by Amethi and by this time Modi would have gone on yet another foreign tour covering Iceland, Papua New Guinea after cancelling the trip to Luxembourg where recently the male Prime Minister married his male deputy. This would be a strict ‘No No’ for ‘secular’ India, and he could not go against the RSS, the VHP and, the Bajrang Dal. Still, the oceans would remain filthy and polluted.
But the NDA government will not give up. It will set up a special fact-finding committee to probe and find a solution to the issue. It will consist of BJP scientists, ‘new science’ text book writers and Hindu ritual experts who would perform special yagnas which would make the deep oceans give up their lost riches. The team will board a new Science Vessel and roam the oceans to look for buried gold, silver, precious stones, silver and gold ingots underneath. These would be retrieved and given to Irani. The other riches obtained from under the milk ocean would be used judiciously by senior leaders like Arun Jaitley.
There could be miracles as the NDA has completed one year in office. India and Pakistan will resume their cricket series (on shore and off shore) and revenue from oil sales will be shared. Under the guidance of the UAE authorities, India and Pakistan will draw the cricket series to avoid any communal clashes. Popular TV anchors will switch over to cricket commentary creating cricket commentary engineered riots.
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V. Gangadhar
The writer is a well-known satirist.[/column]