What Ivy wants, Ivy gets

Pest Tense – Mite and Main

Today the US boasts of being the only superpower in the world. Though this potent country might have forced its domination at foreign lands like Iraq, Afghanistan etc but it is loosing the battle at home grounds. The enemy which is the humble cockroach, which has infiltrated millions of American homes, causing many householders to be more exercised about the bug under the rug than they were about the red under the bed, in the good old days. The badgering insect, which has been on the earth for over 300 million years, seems to have become immune to pesticides and is proliferating at alarming rate. This makes O Henry’s “Baghdad-on-the-subway” to be rechristened to a plain “Bugsville” as New York has come to be called a “Cockropolis”. These creatures have challenged the sanctity of the corridors of Washington also. It was amazing to come across news article on a website of

‘Tehelka fame’ that a particular resistant stain of the insect was discovered in the House of Representatives, which caused not only indignation but also words of blasphemy to arise with “surround-sound echo-on”. The representatives were found running around in utter confusion to their dismay. The poor biotechnologists and other scientists were forced to test their wits by coming up with a number of ingenious ploys. Now hold your belts tight because what I am going to tell you now will surely give contortions in your belly. The above clique has come up with a chemical aimed at confusing the insect’s sexual identity and thus inhibiting it from breeding. (Isn’t it preposterous?) Anyhow such measures may not make for a gay future, and the New World takes its pest-free pleasures quite seriously.

Just as I was browsing sometime back, tracing the ‘basic instincts’ of humans (now don’t go for that silly film yaar…) towards violence in the older years, I found that there once existed a creative entrepreneur who made killing through the mail order sale of an “infallible” fly destroyer: It was a simple block of wood like an anvil that I used in my fitting workshop and a mallet similar to that with a judge, with instructions to place the offending creature on the former and strike sharply with the latter.

Those whose pastime consists of what closer to home is idiomatically referred to as killing flies might wonder about the fuss being about a perfectly natural activity, or rather, non-activity. But even the most quiescent can finally be stung to the quick, as was shown by an episode in Patna. Fed up by with the municipal apathy about the local mosquito menace, citizens reportedly surrounded a number of officials and demonstrated their grievance in a pointed manner by jabbing them with pins. But how successfully or otherwise they pricked official conscience, noted for being formidably thick-skinned, is not known.