Give up the negative mindset!

Give up the negative mindset !

The city is full of retired babus and academics who while away their time by playing with their playful grandchildren or indulging in idle gossip. But a few ambitious retirees refuse to be condemned to the four walls of their vacant houses.

The sudden loss of esteem and importance leads to an obsessive urge to be in some post or appointment to compensate their lost identity. They cuddle up to the powers that be for a coveted membership of some inane government committee or board. The lust for such positions ends up in these people becoming lumps of clay ready to be shaped into any shape as the establishment desires!

Welcome to the world of the bootlickers! A tribe whose numbers are rapidly growing in modern day Orissa.

One such prominent person is the “turtle lady” who retired as the Vice Chancellor of the Sambalpur University. This hag who should be actually spending her time at Puri eating “habisha” during the holy month of Kartik and doing puja for at least 12 hours of the day, has turned into the most loyal poodle of the state wildlife department. She has readily jumped into the ring to shield the incompetent wildlife department from the battering they have received during the wildlife week celebrations in the hands of a tenacious media which rightly exposed the complete lack of wildlife protection in Orissa.

This lady claims that Orissa is famous in the world for two things ………… Odissi dance and Olive Ridley turtles. And yes, if you have guessed it rightly, she coincidentally happens to be the undisputed expert in both!

Riding on the lap of the real Kalinga Sandha, she managed a effusive recommendation from the state government which fetched her the Padmashree award for her great contribution to Odissi dance. She managed to get herself nominated to all and sundry committees of the state government including the state wildlife advisory board .

Never mind that she must not have traveled more than half a dozen times to the field during her entire research career.

Senior media friends might recollect how she always used to call a press conference at the drop of a hat at Vani Vihar when she was the professor of zoology to announce her apocryphal research findings. Stealing the research done by her hard working students, she published papers lauding her achievements in growing limbs on frog tadpoles.

She also claimed in 1990s that heat determined the sex of turtle hatchlings. She carefully concealed the fact that many scientists have reported at least three decades before that heat truly determined the sex of any reptile hatchling including that of crocodiles and snakes, apart from turtles.

The 52nd Wildlife Week state level function was presided by a bored Queen with his pompous Forest Secretary in attendance. The Queen who loves corned beef and has stacks of the stuff in his house was invited to water a Tulsi plant on stage. What a major sacrilege! Where is the VHP! I hope some Hindu washes the Tulsi plant with "Ganga jal" to purify it.

In her speech,this faithful official stooge wondered aloud as to why the media focused on only negative things in the state. As if anything positive ever happens in Queensland! She also offered some sage advice. The media and the public should free themselves from the “negative mindset” and look around to appreciate the wonderful things which the Queen is achieving in all fields .

She was particularly irked with the media attention the dying turtles receive every year. The most classic statement was “So what if 10,000 to 15,000 turtles die every year? We should not be worried. We have 7-8 lakhs of them.” Somebody should remind her that the death of a sea turtle is the same as the death of a tiger since both are on the Schedule I to the Wildlife Protection Act. Was her statement a passport to the Rajya Sabha ?

This must have sounded like the mellifluous notes of Vivaldi's Four Seasons to the Queen's ears who has faced media flak for his failure to check turtle deaths on the Orissa coast. A few months ago, the Queen’s posh Aurangzeb Road house in Delhi was besieged by Greenpeace volunteers who dumped rotting turtle carcasses before his house.

A bird told me that she also carried a copy of the “Down To Earth” to show it to the Queen at the function. She had authored an article about the status of the gharial crocodile. Ofcourse , due to her utter ignorance, she had wrongly mentioned that the zoological name for gharial as “gharial gangeticus” . Anyway, the major faux pas could hardly be noticed by the semi literate Queen who politely nodded his head in appreciation as Madam went on expounding!

This hag has truly proved to be the biggest enemy of the turtles of Orissa. She was flown by the Indian government to depose before the WTO appeal tribunal at Zurich when the US imposed a ban on import of Indian shrimps due to non-use of the Turtle Excluder Device (TED) in fishing trawlers .She gleefully testified as a turtle expert that there were no turtle deaths in India caused by fishing trawlers.

Whenever, I see the lifeless putrefying carcasses of sea turtles on Puri beach, I remember this traitor!

May her soul rot in hell!