Reported By:
| Edited By: G Sampath |Source: |Updated: Nov 19, 2013, 11:17 PM IST
Take these two common hypotheses: Everything happens for a purpose; and shit happens. If both these statements are true, then it means that shit happens for a purpose. But I am prepared to accept this only insofar as the shit in question is human in origin, not if it is from pigeons. Because I am convinced that pigeon shit, or pigeons themselves, for that matter, have no underlying meaning or purpose for happening.
In fact, all that pigeons ever do in their entire bloody lives is wake up, fly high into the sky, and produce shit. Of course, we humans produce shit, too, and unlike us, who get paid for it, pigeons do it for free. But that still doesn't give them the right to desecrate my car every morning. Look, I am no animal-hater. I don't even eat them or make them search for my socks or lick my stamps. But you got to have some standards, and I draw the line at creatures that disrespect my fundamental, human, inalienable, non-transferable right not to have my bodily person or property shat upon. Pigeons as a community have been violating this right of mine every day for nearly three years now and just because my car doesn't crib about it doesn't mean it isn't tired of it.
There was a time when I used to really respect these grey, unassuming co-habitants of the urban jungle. I even credited them with a subtle subversive zeal for the way they picked out statues of establishment figures to shit upon. I admired their non-violence, for unlike crows, they never attacked you or snatched candy from your baby's fingers. But the species as a whole fell abruptly in my estimation after I moved house to my current neighbourhood, with my car.
It's not an extraordinary car by any means - it's an old Maruti. A 1962 model. Or it would be, had there been Marutis in 1962. I don't know if it is its age, but there's something about my car that triggers the crapping impulse in pigeons. I remember it being spotless white when I bought it. But now, with layer upon layer of purple-white pigeon droppings - on the roof, on the bonnet, on the windows, and even the door handles - it looks a mottled grey, as if suffering from acute leucoderma. And the guy I pay to wash the car every morning seems to have given up altogether, though he claims he scrubs it thoroughly. He apparently does his washing much before the pigeons wake up and embark upon their morning ablutions, so that by the time they are all ready and raring to go to the toilet, my car is all cleaned up and gleaming like the washroom of the Hilton. The moment they see it they can't stop themselves.
I sometimes wonder if they take turns, hovering patiently in a disciplined formation in the sky, before one by one flying directly over my car and dropping their load like miniature bombers. I suspect they must have some system and process in place because the area immediately surrounding my car in the parking area is absolutely free of pigeon shit. Once I hid behind a tree some 20 metres away to watch how they were able to target my car with such accuracy, but none of them crapped in all the time that I was looking. I figured they would have easily spotted me from above, and thus stayed away.
Of course, I perfectly understand the temptation to rain down shit upon the world. I would do the same if I was a pigeon. If you mostly live above ground level, the way we guys are running the planet, which sane animal wouldn't want to do that? But I believe that the pigeons who shit on my car aren't motivated by any particular ideological reason - they are not anti-car or anything. If that was the case, all the cars in my complex would be covered in shit. But they aren't; only mine is. I sometimes even wonder if they might have strong - though mistaken - views about automobiles, for why else would they target only my car from the 50-odd that squat in the same parking lot? Why me? Why my car? It's got to be something personal, but they wouldn't tell me what it is.
Yet they keep unloading their crap on my car relentlessly, day after day. It's like every Baby Pigeon in my area, as soon as it's born and even before it has learnt to make those annoying pigeon noises, receives toilet training from Mama Pigeon, who carries it to my car and rubs the Baby's beak on my Maruti's bonnet, so that for the rest of its life, as soon as it wakes up every morning, it rushes straight to my car to take its crap. And unlike humans, these birds don't change their routine even on Sundays and public holidays. They don't say to themselves, 'Hey, today's a Sunday; I deserve to crap on a Mercedes S Class'. No sir, it's got to be my Maruti. And they don't take a single day off, and they don't fly away for a week to Amsterdam for a World Pigeon Seminar so that your car gets some time off from being a pigeon toilet. So far as I know, pigeons don't have seminars, which is remarkable, considering the amount of shit they produce.
Of course, it's possible that I am wrong. Perhaps the pigeons don't hate my car, they worship it. Perhaps in pigeon religion and culture - about which we humans know nothing - the way you express love for your god is by bathing it in shit. Perhaps shit is the token of their devotion, and my car is their local shrine to which they all go in the morning to make their daily prayers and pay their obeisance before they leave for office or wherever all pigeons go every morning.
If that is indeed the case, then we humans should borrow this practice from them as part of our onward evolutionary march towards progress and perfection. Already I can't even begin to think of all the leaders, gods, experts and celebrated influential thingamajigs to whom I am dying to pay my obeisance - a different one every day for the rest of my life. Perhaps that's the lesson the pigeons are trying to teach me: be humble, say nothing, pay your respects. And of course, never forget - life is waste.
