Talks of cow don't make us surprised any more. In saffronised India, the cow is bound to be the most important living thing on earth. But what did surprise us on Wednesday, May 31, was a remark of a retiring judge of the Rajasthan High Court.
Justice Mahesh Chandra Sharma came up with a bizarre plot to back his argument that the cow should be made the national animal. He said peacocks have been declared the national bird because they have pious characters like cows.
The veteran judge, who is a devotee of Lord Krishna and described the cow as a "surgeon" because of its good qualities, said the peahens do not indulge in sex and get pregnant just by "swallowing the tears of the peacock". He said it is because peacocks remain celibate throughout their lives that Lord Krishna wears a peacock's feather on his head because of this quality.
Satyajit Ray's classic Sonar Kella had featured peacocks
Well, how would have late film maestro Satyajit Ray dealt with the subject? The peacock played an important part in his 1974 classic Sonar Kella (the golden fortress) made in the background of Rajasthan. One of the anti-heroes in the film, Amiyanath Burman, was paranoid about peacocks for it was one among them who had pricked his hand in a zoo. In the climax, it was the villain's firing at a peacock which had exposed him before the six-year-old Mukul, around whose reincarnation the film had revolved, eventually leading to Burman's arrest.
The peacock made an appearance in another part of the film when the popular sleuth – Feluda, his niece Topshe and writer friend Lal Mohan Ganguly aka Jatayu – were accompanying Mukul and the imposter Burman and his accomplice Mandar Bose to a fort in Bikaner. On the way, Mukul sees peacocks and they stop. Lal Mohan Ganguly, a man of humour, expressed his amazement on seeing the bird saying: "Wow! National birds" though Burman did not get down of the car because of reasons stated above.
Ray loved to hit narrow social convictions hard but in a soft way
Had Ray been alive today and heard the judge of the high court of the same state where he had shot Sonar Kella, would he have been added a touch of humour to the twist?
We can speculate nonetheless. There is one shot in a train where Ganguly was speaking with the cousin brothers soon after they came to know each other in Kanpur in UP. Ganguly had penned a wrong information about the camel in one of his books 'Saharay Siharan'. He had written that the camel stores water in its own stomach and cover long distances in the desert.
Hearing this, Feluda intervenes and corrects Ganguly, saying: "The camel's water comes from its hump which is fat and is oxidised to supply the water. There is no connection with the stomach in this." Jatayu was left stunned with this check, much to the amusement of the viewers and Ray's fans.
Justice Sharma's version of peacocks never have sex could also have found a similar reality check had the ace director came to learn about it and incorporate it somehow in his creative work to make an emphatic mockery of our false convictions. For the reel viewers, this would have been a classic comedy scene but for those of us who are forced to hear such incredible tales by people of qualification and repute in today's 'Modified India', it is no less than a tragedy.
We miss satires today.
