When does a story become
a legend?
When time has tainted
its message with lies
When does a fantasy pass
as a fact?
Every dawn when the
cockerel cries!”
From Chaloo Cheese
by Bachchoo
The cynics and sceptics may not always be wrong, but they certainly spoil the joie de vivre of the planet. I have with some dismay noted their absurd doubts about the pioneering decision of Surendra Singh Negi, minister for ayurveda, yoga and naturopathy, unani, siddha and homeopathy in Uttarakhand, to set aside Rs 25 crores to look for the life-restoring herb, sanjeevani booti which Hanuman fetched from the mountains and revived Lakshman and thousands of others who had fallen in battle. Mr Negi has assured the world that the money will be well spent in the quest and who can doubt — if the miracle herb is found and it can indeed revive the dead — that the patent won’t be worth a zillion zillion or a google of rupees, no! Call that pound sterling.
These sceptics have, I have no doubt, never heard of the great triumph of the Royal Alchemical Advancement Society’s College of Lateral Anti Accepted Thinking (RAAS CLAAT) in discovering the gold-manufacturing hen. For centuries, alchemists all over the world had been looking for a way to convert lead into gold. Now parallel to this quest there was the popular account passed down from mothers and fathers to children and in print in a thousand books of Jack and the Beanstalk. In this undoubtedly historical account, Jack exchanges his family cow for a handful of magic beans which his mother, disgusted and sceptical, throws out of the window of their kitchen. This cynic of a mother is obviously wrong and is proved to be so when the next morning a huge beanstalk penetrating the clouds and scraping the bottom of the heavens grows from the magic seeds.
As everyone knows, Jack climbs the beanstalk and finds a castle with a wicked giant in it from which he steals at first a bag of gold and, on his second foray to the beanstalk castle, a hen which lays a golden egg every time she is commanded to “lay”! Jack steals the hen and brings it down to earth. Some cynics characterise this dynamic historical account as a “fairy story” implying, of course, that it is mythological and a product of the human need for imaginative leaps of possibility. However, the realists of RAAS CLAAT, supported by a grant of six million euros from the Duke of Blodypur, set out to find this miracle hen. Their first clue was that the hen was owned by a person called Jack with the trunk of a truncated beanstalk in his kitchen garden. The 27 scientists and statisticians deployed for the task took three years to locate the original Jack who confessed that he had sold the hen to a sheikh from the Middle East.
RAAS CLAAT finally located Sheikh Doodh and on an order from Her Majesty the Queen, supported by the British foreign secretary, applied for the extraordinary rendition of the Hen of British Origin (HOBO) to the UK. The alchemists are consequently in possession of a creature who, through organic processes, without polluting the environment with chemicals and acid, can convert chicken-feed into gold. Of course, the UK government moved swiftly in to control the hen’s output as the treasury warned them of the danger of inflation if an infinite number of golden eggs hit the economy. Their caution and regulatory moves should undoubtedly act as a guide for Minister-saheb Negi as the dangers of the indiscreet use of the sanjeevani booti, when it is discovered, could have disastrous effects. If its healing powers were used for everyone who died, not only in Uttarakhand but everywhere in India, there would be a tsunami of a population explosion and a shortage of food, clothes and shelter, and finally even air to breathe or space to lie down in.
There would be lesser immediate consequences. The trans-national chemical companies manufacturing curative drugs such as antibiotics would go out of business or would have to resort to making soap and cosmetic products. The priests who conduct funerals would have to seek another honest living. Very soon horror movies would become historical documents. Video games would incorporate the life-restoring properties of the booti. There are of course questions that remain. Can the booti’s magic work successively twice or for ever on the same person? What about people who commit suicide? At what age do the beneficiaries who are revived come alive? And then do they grow old and dwindle as is the human condition? And further, there is the serious question full of dread. Will the gods treat Mr Negi as a saviour of humankind, a bringer of eternal life, or as someone who has stolen from them, through the mechanism of a discovered drug, the power of life and death? I am sure Mr Negi has consulted theologians on this question and we can only hope that they have given him the right and reassuring answer. And so, from the theological to the practical issues.
Mr Negi has not yet made public his plans for how he intends to regulate the powers of the sanjeevani booti when, as he is confident, it is located and ready to use. Some of the qualities and applications of the drug are yet to be researched. Can the sanjeevani booti bring back to life and wholeness only those bodies that lie wounded on battlefields, or can it revive people who have been cremated, eaten by vultures or have disintegrated into a heap of bones inside a tomb? The possibilities seem endless and we must await the results of Mr Negi’s venture. Meanwhile, we can be sure that the Uttarakhand government has enough money to deploy on schools, hospitals, welfare schemes, etc., and would really have no use for the Rs 25 crores it has deployed on this priceless quest. “Sceptics hatao!”
