Ant to an
elephant running towards him: what happened?
Elephant: A
hunter is chasing me..
Ant: come
hide behind me !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The ant and the elephant duo – be it in the story or in jokes
like above – never stops fascinating me. The charm lies not only in the fact
that two beings on the extreme ends of size spectrum are brought together but also
in the mind-boggling way in which the ant always punches above its weight. The most underestimated of the two turns out
to be the saviour, the hero, the smart and the courageous one.
The duo challenges our stereotypical way of labelling someone
strong or weak based on irrelevant attributes like appearance, size, voice, participation,
confidence levels, body language etc. I like the fact that this duo is used to
disprove the strong connection we tend to establish between what we see, how we
perceive what we see and what it is. A closer look will tell us that all three
are separate phenomenon.
The elephant in the room needs no introduction. It escapes no
eye. Even its silence is heard loud and clear in our minds. On the other hand, a
pinch of ant’s presence is felt only after it puts its life itself at risk. Yet
we equate ant with slow, weak, tiny and voiceless and nothing compared to an elephant.
We do have among us elephants, ants and those personalities who lie between
these two extremes. Of course, we may also encounter elephants in the garb of
an ant and vice versa.
Children are usually the victims of elephantine elders. They
are highly underestimated when it comes to understanding “certain elderly stuff”.
They are not meant to be part of certain discussions because the elephants in
the room get to decide whether their ant brains are capable enough to grasp or
not. If you had such experiences as a
child, you might have heard these expressions a lot “Go out and play .. this doesn’t
concern you”; “go inside … right now” …. And fortunately or unfortunately if you
happen to have got everything what was happening and opened your mouth, there
comes the ultimate weapon – “you are still young.. you are just a child …. You don’t
understand …. Keep quiet”.
For parents, no matter how much their children grow, they
remain children still. No wonder my mother still says that am too young to
understand certain social pressures. Obviously, the age of parents and the
experience that comes with it is what is making them feel that they are
elephants and ignore the ants in the room. But as the saying goes - what goes around
comes around – in the parents-children duo soon role reversal happens over time.
The changing times, technology, differences in life styles and many other
factors contribute in making the same children elephants and the parents ants.
Children and parents duo is just one example out of thousands
of such scenarios across cultures and geographies, where ants in the room are
not paid heed to. Small states vs big states, developing vs developed, male vs
female, male and female vs lgbtqi, rural vs urban, old vs young, north vs south,
east vs west, white vs black, tribal vs non tribal are a few more instances.
Elephants are made elephants because of the huge baggage they
carry. That could be because of various factors like physical characteristics, age,
experience, knowledge, resources, gender, religion, number, race, caste, colour,
economic status, political clout so on and so forth. If we try and remove each
of these imaginary layers, may be… may be what will remain in the core of an
elephantine personality is no stronger than that of a mere ant. But it is
almost next to impossible to convince our own eyes and trick our minds to
believe that an elephant could also be an ant and vice versa.
Yet it is not impossible. We just have to change the frame of
reference. Why expect an ant to uproot a tree? We have elephants to do that.
Ask an ant how to be resourceful and organised. Ask an ant how to plan for the hard
times. Learn from an ant how to be part of a team. Listen to its stories from
the untraveled lands. Ants are everywhere in large numbers. Find out from them
how they cater to huge populations. Learn from them disaster management
tactics. They bring a lot to the table. All the while they might be having just
the right answers with them. Ensure to
ask the right questions. After all it is equally impossible for an elephant to stoop
too low to get ‘an ant’s view’.
The elephant in the room is what everyone
knows about but not talk about while the ant in the room is what everyone wonders
about, but no one knows about. The ant … the one any eye can easily miss, the
one whose life is like a tightrope walk, the one which hardly a few stoops down
to observe, the one who is usually too engrossed in every day survival
struggles, the one who is too busy walking in long queues to gather food, the
one who struggled to overcome its weaknesses, the one who strived to leave much
bigger a mark behind than its own size … that ant, made it to the room … the
same room as the mighty elephant. THE ANT made it to the room. Period. THE ANT
made it to THE ROOM. Period. The ant is in the room. And the ant in the room
needs to be heard. It has a lot to say….. and we have a lot to learn from the
ant in the room ...
Two ants in
conversation
Ant 1: look
!! elephant is approaching.... lets attack
And 2:
Uffooo ! forget it…. We outnumber him …
