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A Bulbul came to the feeding station in our garden by late afternoon and found no food in the bowl. We normally fill the bowl in the morning and evening, when birds usually come. Although I came back with food, the bird had flown away.
A few minutes later, it came back near to the feeding station with a mulberry fruit between its beaks.
The photographs below are some of them I was able to take, of the sequences in its feeding process. The mulberry was big for its mouth and it struggled for a while. The efforts with which it struggled to swallow made me wonder if it was not used to peck and take portions of fruit to swallow!
Sometime back I noticed a Barbet in our feeding station, struggling to swallow portions of banana which was large for its mouth!
The compulsion for this Barbet to swallow the large portion of the banana might have been because another Barbet came along and perched beside it hoping to receive a portion, as seen in the few photographs. Barbets are known to be gregarious!
A similar instinct is evident in human behaviour. The president of the USA meddling with tariffs to gain more profits; Russia invading Ukraine, Israel forcibly occupying Gaza; Pakistan unsettling India by encouraging terrorists killing civilians; Hamas still holding hostages even after fifteen months; the province of Balochistan wanting to be independent of Pakistan and similar tendencies elsewhere to be authoritarian or violent, show that human behaviour is not fraternal, inclusive or accommodative!
The Christian Medical College is in its 125 th year in 2025. Its founder Dr Ida Scudder discontinued the chartered path she had for her life when she realised that India needed women doctors, as three men who came seeking for a doctor for child birth insisted on a women doctor attending on them. Although, Ida's father was a doctor and was ready to attended to child birth, the men would not welcome that. The CMC came into being in 1900, when Dr Scudder returned after her training in medicine. With the licentiate course started to train women doctors, Dr Scudder responded to a need of that time.
Dr Ida Scudder belonged to the tribe of people who were givers.
The dominant acquisitive culture of today is defined by takers.
With our neighbourhood developing into housing plots, I found out that the real estate deals involve 200 to 300 percent profit for the developers! This is obsession with wealth!
In the seventh decade of life, I live in the social interface between a fraternal view of life in the neighbourhood in the past and a self driven passion for economic success of the recent times!
I sense that the new policy of globalisation of economy with the expected trickle down effect to the people in the bottom of pyramid, where the have-nots congregate, did not happen as those who have, hold on to what they have for themselves!
The latest in this painful drama of success, is the president of America accepting a personal gift of a luxurious air craft from the state of Quatar and claim it for himself with no moral inhibition!
My thoughts got formed in the way stated above, watching both birds struggling to swallow more than what was normally possible. They had an option ! But they were driven by the desire to consume!
When the Pope Leo the 14th, a day after he was elected, quietly went to the street outside Vatican in the evening unnoticed by any one, and found a migrant boy with a fractured hand on the pavement, he revived the calling to be a giver, and to live that way as the vocation!
I stay pondering!
M.C.Mathew(text and photo)
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