Login Register
Follow Us

The big ‘P’: Pollution, not progress

As a thick blanket of toxic smog choked large parts of the country, causing widespread panic and severe health problems, Just Jugglery took a trip back down the tunnel of time to see what started it all.

Show comments

Jug Suraiya 

As a thick blanket of toxic smog choked large parts of the country, causing widespread panic and severe health problems, Just Jugglery took a trip back down the tunnel of time to see what started it all.

A caveman returning to his cave after a hard day’s work as a hunter-gatherer, hunting woolly mammoths and mastodons and gathering whatever roots and berries he could find.  

Entering his cave, he sees his cavewoman sitting beside a strange thing, orange-red in colour, which gives off heat and light and makes a crackling sound.

Caveman: Golly!  What on earth is that thing you’ve got there?

Cavewoman: Dunno. I was just sitting here, absent-mindedly rubbing two twigs together, waiting for you to get back home, when suddenly this … this thing, whatever it is, appeared out of nowhere.

Caveman: Well, not that you’ve made it happen, by chance, or accident, or whatever, I suppose we’d better give it a name.  What do you want to call it?

Cavewoman: How about we call it `fire’? 

Caveman: Fire?  That’s a funny word.  I’ve never heard it before.

Cavewoman: Of course you’ve never heard it before.  None of us cave people have heard it, for the simple reason that it didn’t exist before I made it.

Caveman: Hey, that’s true.  It’s very smart of you to have made fire.  But now that you’ve made it, what are we going to do with it?

Cavewoman: Lots of things. To begin with, thanks to fire, and the light it gives, our cave won’t become pitch black the moment the sun sets. And you can sit here and read The Stoneage Times, when they get around inventing newspapers, and also invent reading.

Caveman: Wow!  I can hardly wait to read newspapers, whatever they’ll be.  What else can we do with fire?

Cavewoman: Lots more things.  Fire will keep our cave nice and warm in winter.  But, most important of all, for the first time we’ll be able to eat cooked food, instead of all this raw meat and raw roots and berries that we’ve had to make do with all this while.  

Caveman: That’s wonderful!  But what the heck is cooked food?

Cavewoman: You’ll find out.  But first I’ll have to invent a few recipes for cooked food like biryani, and matter-paneer, and pizza, and things like that.

Caveman: No kidding. Thanks to this fire we can sure invent a whole lot of things, like all that stuff you just named. 

Cavewoman: That’s just the start of it. With fire at our disposal people are going to come up with all sorts of inventions, like factories which make motorised vehicles, which will burn fossil fuels and which will produce emissions from exhaust pipes.  Fire will also be used by farmers who’ll burn the post-harvest stubble on their fields so they can plant seeds for the next crop.

Caveman: You’ve lost me somewhere along the line.  Factories?  Emissions?  Exhaust pipes?  Fossil fuels? Farmers?  Crops?  What do all these funny words mean?

Cavewoman: They all mean one and the same thing, which is Progress, with a capital `P’.  That’s the big P-word which will keep driving people on, and on, and on.  There’s only one problem. There’s another big P-word, which goes with Progress, and it got a `P’. 

Caveman: Yeah?  What’s that? 

Cavewoman: Pollution….

Show comments
Show comments

Top News

Most Read In 24 Hours