Invasion

I am a vegetarian by choice - I emphasize the "choice" part all the time as my being raised as a vegetarian or being born into the brahmin community doesn't really play a part in my being a vegetarian. I had umpteen opportunities to bite into pieces of artistically marinated hens and lambs but they never enticed me enough and I wear my semi animal activist, herbivore badge quite pompously. I say "semi" since I am not yet in the league of Maneka Gandhi or Amala Akkineni. That reminds me of the time when I caught Ms. Akkineni being interviewed for her contribution towards blue cross, Hyderabad. I was at a friend's place and her dad immediately opined that organizations like blue cross make no sense in a place like India since we have a lot of people dying of hunger and Amala should focus on people and not low life animals - he didn't say low life but it was so strongly implied in the way he emphasized the word animals. His statement shocked me then, but as I grew older and wiser, I realized that in a place where the life of a person has no value - God save the animals. Anyway, I traveled across the oceans and came to a different world and started looking at animals through a different paradigm. Animals are living beings - not human beings - but they live, they experience pain and are limited by their bodily functions when compared to their human counterparts. Here animal right activists take their passion to a different extreme but hundreds of animals are still abused and left to die, or killed for sport. I condemn all kinds of killings, be it animals or humans or fetuses - but what about the pests? The insects? The ants, mosquitoes and the roaches and rodents?? Can they be killed? Is it not violence to spray insecticide on the robust little wormy things that camouflage so well onto my freshly sprouted rose stalks and distort my flowers? Should "all out" be banned? Okay, may be they cause and spread diseases the mosquitoes, so killing them might not necessarily be covered under animal/insect violence. How about Ants? The tiny black things that epitomize to humans the virtues of team work and hard work? How about hundreds of them in every nook and cranny of your pantry, invading every possible food container, penetrating magically into jars that allegedly keep even the air out?? How about ants on your kitchen towels - parading under the warmth and moisture of a wet kitchen towel? You get the idea - so these hundreds of ants marched into my pantry for the first time in years of living i n this house, and made me a non- animal activist. I still exercised 'options' such as the ones below.

1) Vacuum them and empty them into the trees.

2) Use a broom and a dust pan and sweep them out.

3) Transfer all food items into air tight jars - including the ones that come in storable cartons.

4) Re-caulk all hair line cracks in the shelving where colonies could be established.

I lost my battle with ANTS.

I did not have a choice. I had to empty each and every container in the pantry - that was all the three hundred and thirty three of them and spray some evil thing that claimed to smell like roses and kill ants on contact. I had to rip off my old contact paper on the shelves, re line the shelving, clean and disinfect the whole area and rearrange the groceries, condiments and spices the true legacy of an epicure. It took me 48 hours, two trips to Walmart, a day of allowing triple bonus TV time to my over manipulative toddler and arthritis like pain in my knees, ankles and knuckles to possibly win a battle over a mob of black ants.

I am still an animal activist - "semi" that is - which allows me the right to fight a laborious battle to drive away an invasion.

:-)