Anthem for the Culled

Chickens can't fly. They might easily have been wiped out by now; or some mutant, beak-wielding stinger version might have prevailed after generations of natural selection. But humans, being lipsmack fond of the bird, have cultivated it, and chickens have survived. The species will do fine as long as humans need kababs for their beer-talk. Governed by some collective mathematical cunning, they hang around us even as we chomp, from Ooty to Ottawa, making their careers in curries, burgers and drums of heaven.

And now that they're falling sick (down with flu, miss), and can't be eaten, they shall be 'culled'. Apparently, though, the safest kind is the chicken in the kitchen, cooked completely, flu and all.

'Culled' is all over the Mumbai newspapers. Students writing the GRE or CAT shouldn't have a problem with the word now: it evokes rows of poultry cages, bold letters and blue-gowned blue-masked men, and one suspects that being culled is not all that pleasant. Culled is a good word for assonance in verse: cold, culled, killed. If you're a mallu you can include gold and gilled, but remember that they are spelled differently.

This is not a good time to be a chicken. I normally urge things trapped in sweaty poultry farms to somehow escape by willpower, hypnotism, bribery or whatever it takes; but now I see no hope. A liberated chicken crossing the road might have got away with it earlier, given that Mumbai's public minds its own business. "There's a man being robbed. There's a chicken crossing the road. Arre, local aa gaya." But now, my little pok-puk-pok, you shall either be cooked or clinically culled.

Just a flu, dammit. Can't be all that bad. I had a flu once; it got better. Look at them: puk-pok-POK-puk-puk.

This photograph was taken at dawn under a cart in Kashid, Raigad district, Maharashtra. It is dedicated to the half-a million (and counting) culled chickens of Mumbai. Their pitrubhumi and punyabhumi are unknown but they all died as Mumbaikars. (I hope at least one among those in this snap died of old age. My money's on the hen in the centre. "My sight is not what it used to be...I want to go to Kashi...".) I should have waited longer for the light to sweep across the soil, for contrast with the dark chick-backs. But we had to leave...