Ants in my garden.

 Ants in my garden.

Arshad Azad

Have you ever seen ants build a colony? Or carry food as they go in line? I remember, as a kid, I used to drop some dirt or a little rock on the trails of ants. It used to disturb a handful of ants, maybe kill a few. The line used to get disturbed but only to be brought in order soon. It used to appear as if only a few ants cared for the injured or dead. For a couple of ants around in the neighborhood, it was just a disturbance and for the rest of the trail, nothing used to happen.


I don't suppose there is any ant-accident inquiry committee that sits and enquires about the origin of the extra-terrestrial bowl of dust or that big rock that appeared out of nowhere, that martyred many ants. I don't suppose this committee also talks about what happened near that yellow little rock, around that mango seed, how many ants were killed? How are the injured being taken care of? I don't suppose they are going to submit this report to the ministry of transportation to help create a better offensive and defensive transport network.


I don't suppose some idle ant like me sits and contemplates about the lives and deaths of a fellow ant and how it affects those ants in its neighborhood. I don't suppose some esoteric philosopher, Anto-Sopher if you will think about the metaphysics of the ant world they occupy. This little story about ants, partly an observation, mostly an extrapolation, and totally a figment of my imagination seems a little far-fetched, for it probably wouldn't be the right depiction of the ant world. For the same reason, I don't suppose any human would be willing to accept the replacement of ants by a human in the above story. Because ants don't do such stuff.


We take a lot of pride in declaring that we The Humans are different from these little who for the most part are unaware of others, these non-self reflecting beings. Scientific experiments conclude the presence of certain cognitive abilities in jellyfishes and dolphins. This brings some distinction between those who are alive in the sense that they think and feel from the rocks. I would say this is a sign of humbleness from mostly self-centric humans to even acknowledge that they aren't completely the center of the world. Others too kind of feel and think.


Coming to the ants, we take pride in our ability to reflect upon our acts and create fiction. Modern society, the government, institutions, and yes money too, all are fiction. Good fiction nevertheless. Also, we remember our past too. All these abilities are what differentiates us from the little ants. No one has seen ants sit and listen to the stories about King Entward. No one has seen ants talk about the work and life of Entectus. Okay, I will give you this, ants do have Queen, so they do have order and organization but we don't know what they do in their extended colonies, in dead nights? Possibly they too enjoy occasional late-night parties and gather around to listen to the poetry of Lord Enton. We don't know what they do/ think when they are alone, sitting in their quarters filled with all the food they worked so hard to gather over the summer. Honestly, we would not know much about what goes inside the heads of these ants unless we learn to tune our radios to the frequencies of their antennas. From the ways of ants and their lifestyle we observe, it is tough to ascertain what their institutions, philosophies, and their ethics are. By observing the ways of life of ants and humans one would not be able to differentiate it much.


One thing though one would say is different that,

What humans do when there is a little disturbance in the trails of humans. What the humans in the neighborhood do. What humanity as a whole does.

or is there?