Of late i've been spending a lot of time analyzing ants. Yes, Ants. They have inundated my home and i've been trying to figure them
out as i look for ways to get rid of them.
Have you ever wondered how these tiny ants communicate with
each other so efficiently without even making a sound that we could hear? How
they come out of nowhere and the next thing you know is that there’s a whole
army? A single ant may hardly be able to do anything but when they get together
they can literally create a mountain. If you observe them enough, you will
notice that they are quite disciplined in their own way and extremely
hardworking. Well, as many of you might know, ants are known to emit a chemical
trail known as pheromones through which they communicate with each other. They
leave a scent (pheromones) in patterns and the proportion of the scent
determines whether or not the ant scouts were successful in finding food and
the rest of the ants simply follow the path with the strongest scent.
Another group that has caught my curiosity off late is ISIS.
Before i begin to talk about them let me clearly state that ISIS and the
Al-Qaeda are a problem that must be dealt with, and i condemn their actions in
totality. But what i am really concerned about is how did ISIS manage to grow
as big as it has without having been noticed by any intelligence groups or
their spies all over the world? Or was it noticed and allowed to grow this big?
Or do they possess some pheromone-esque compounds that enable them to grow
undetected? And from where do they get their funding and weapons? Yes, they may
be a fragmented element of the Al-Qaeda, but it is difficult to understand how
did they manage to get the resources as they have with such apparent ease? Are
they effectively serving a larger purpose that we may not be aware of? Or are their followers simply being blinded by the so called dollar scholars who mislead
everyone and make money for themselves in the process?
Groups like ISIS and Al- Qaeda do not exist in a vacuum and
neither is their reaction as a resistance effort to what they regard as an
unjust occupation justified. And if they do have some form of human pheromones
or have been able to navigate their means successfully then we must find out
how they do so and perhaps use the same technique against them to stop them.
But do we use violence against them in the same way as they have been doing? Do
we effectively become them by doing so? As big a fan i am of Pope Francis, i was appalled by his endorsement of the war against ISIS. Not that i have
anything good to say about groups like ISIS which are apparently trying to
revive a failed system of the caliphate by all the wrong means (cannot tolerate
such ideologies myself), i would have expected a better solution from the Pope.
But then again, we all seem to want our priests and leaders to be the kind of
people we do not ourselves have the discipline to be. And so the question, how
else do we stop hard-line groups like these?
Ants are known to have a conspicuously large head and a butt
just as large. Groups like ISIS similarly have ‘heads’ while there is no
question of ‘if’s-and-butts’ among the other members of the group. They simply
follow orders without any questions. And if you ever try and flick an ant away
it will always try and come back to the same spot again. It just does not give
up. They always remind me of this Paul Newman film, called Cool Hand Luke,
which is amongst my all time favorites. It is about the indomitability of the
human spirit in the face of oppression, something that ISIS might seem to
project as well. And as it did with Paul Newman in the film, this spirit and
determination might help mislead people towards them and in support of them.
The anti-hero often gets celebrated while all his flaws are ignored.
When you kill certain ants and insects, they emit strong
scents, which attract even more of their species towards them. Killing members
of the ISIS similarly may not be a solution as you can kill a person but not an
ideology. Or perhaps, as a wise man once said, only when you have a couple of
ants in your pants, crawling around your testicles, will you realize that
violence is not an option.
I have been watching a lot of debates and a lot of people
identify ISIS as a Muslim problem. It is unjust to paint the entire Muslim
community with the same brush and label them as a part of ISIS or similar
groups. As Obama had rightly said, ISIS does not belong to any religion and
what they do is not what any religion preaches. I hope you are able to see
through the rhetoric that we are fed, and not mistake my thoughts to be facile
generalizations or surrogate advertising or propaganda in favor of any group.
If one has to get rid of ants, then perhaps the best way is
to understand pheromones, and manipulate their path by using scents similar to
pheromones against them. If you succeed, you will never have an issue with them
and you won't have to go to the extent of killing them either. Planting mint in
your house can destroy their sense of smell as well and that would make it less
likely that the ants would enter your house. And similarly, if we need to solve
the problems created by ISIS we must understand them correctly and the right
form of knowledge and education might help to defeat their purpose. They may
seem to be complicated or difficult solutions to the problems but do let me
know if you have better ones. But when we can understand something as complicated as Pheromones and make it work the way we'd like to then i'm sure we can do better with our own species.
