Battling crisis with comedy

A beautiful book; illustrated in detail with meticulously made drawings to keep the eye engaged.
Sea Ice? Now You Don’t 
By: Rohan Chakravarty 
Publisher: Penguin
Price: Rs 799
Pages: 191
Sea Ice? Now You Don’t By: Rohan Chakravarty Publisher: Penguin Price: Rs 799 Pages: 191
Published on

A funny book. Birds, animals in funny situations, cracking puns. Did you know there were beetles, sharks, shrimps, seahorses, moths, toads, butterflies and a centipede named after the tiger? Even the tiger on the page featuring them, didn’t.

A beautiful book; illustrated in detail with meticulously made drawings to keep the eye engaged. Much attention has been paid to ensuring the subjects look as close to real as possible, with a comic edge.

An informative book. Along with ducks and penguins and deer and the big cats, you meet animals, birds, and insects too; and learn things about them that you never knew before.

But above all, it is a serious book; celebrating Nature’s wonderous creatures who live their secret, colourful, eventful lives, and fulfil the functions they were created for before vanishing into the great nothingness. It is also a disturbing book, for in the pages you will see laid bare the greed and foolishness of man who hunts tigers for claws and skin, elephants for ivory and sharks for soup.

Listen then to the song of the Giant Guitarfish: ‘I might end up as bycatch before you count ten/Which is why I am critically endangered on I C U N/ You do nothing about overfishing despite so much being said/Oh how I’d like to break this guitar over your head!’ And, here’s one more that points to the many climate disasters bugging the planet.

The Earth says: ‘Groundwater extraction has caused a tilt in the Earth’s axis!/This polar drift is expected to cause climate imbalances worldwide/Yeah, you’ve been making my head spin lately/AND NOW I AM GOING TO SPIN YOURS!’

Humour comes with Instagram posts by the weaver bird, showing off its nest, says, ‘I took five years to master this intricate nest, but finally, here it is!’ 30 birds post back saying they like it. And 3,30,303 likes accompany a post by the feral pigeon who is, ‘Dropping a reel on how to build the most DOPE nest ever,’ as it sits over eggs at the edge of a high-rise beam.

An elephant bemoans the fact that the 150,000 muscles in its all-purpose trunk contributes in no way to adding political muscle to secure its habitats and corridors from man’s invasive ways. We learn of the importance of mangroves; the variety of flora and fauna and their role in keeping the planet alive and healthy. Fun and frolic and deep tragedy walk along through the pages, and the one obvious villian is the human, who can never ever have enough, and mines all parts of the globe for benefits that will mean nothing when the world collapses.

Read this book. Read it to your children. Talk about it to policy makers who align destruction with development. It may just end up saving humankind.

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