Headline, May18, 2013

'''RODENT: 

COMMAND -CONTROL- CURSE'''

The Mizos have the uncomplicated innocence and beauty of people whose exposure to the West has been limited. Mizoram is very homely. Mizos have a happy outlook on most of what life has to offer. No one is fat, and hardly anyone drinks. The entire state is dry, and the only thing to do in the evening is go to the Church.

But the Mizos are starting to freak out. They have a fear psychosis since the last mautam.

Rokhuma -who is so revered that he is known as to most Mizos as Pu C. Rokhuma, pu meaning ''Sir'' was in change of Rodent control during the last mautam and is one of the local expert on the phenomenon. He is close to 90 and was amongst the founders in 1951, who set up the ''Rodent Control Demonstration Centre.'' He recalls:

''I was a schoolteacher, and in 1951 I started an organization called the Anti-Famine Campaign with the victims of 1911 mautam. We knew that the mautam was coming in 1959,and wanted to take precautionary steps. We taught the women to grow more food, and to cook only sufficient food to eat, and save the rest.

But our main objective was to kill rats. We used traps and poison  -zinc phosphide-  and the government paid a bounty of 20 paisa for each rat's tail the villager brought in.'' 

There were five different kinds of traps that he invented:  One trips a log that crushes a rat as it comes for the bait. Another garrotes the rat. There is a tube blowing tobacco smoke into the rats resting holes, which suffocates them, and a facility for testing deadly ''cyno gas powder.''

The cause of the rats great number is eating the fruits,'' he explains. ''When the bamboo fruits, the males stop eating their young ones. The mother rat can bear 10 to 13 rats in one litter and can become pregnant again in 25 days, and the babies from a new brood can become pregnant in 70 to 80 days. If the babies are safe from male eating, the rats will increase in great number, and Mizoram is the bamboo center, the main growing place of mautak. When it flowers, the rats come from Tripura and Bangladesh and Assam.''

The Secrets of the famines found reads like Daniel Defoe's A Jounal of the Plague Year written in self-taught English. It gives the full, grisly history of what Mizos have suffered at the hands of Mother Nature, not only from the mautam but from two other famines. The worst was known as the thingpui tam. It happened at very long intervals in the past, and there hasn't been one since the British began keeping written  -records.

During one, Rokhuma writes, ''men could barely sustain their lives by consuming anti-hills; and swines, deprived of proper food, could not produce any audible sound but just stood trembling hedge..........just so waiting for their dying date.............Men could hardly muster their strength to catch hold of such half-dead animals.

Then there is a smaller and but locally devastating famine called the ''Thingtam'',  which is precipitated by the flowering of another species of bamboo known as rawthing  -Bambusa tulda. It, too, blooms, every 48 years, but the outbreaks come 18 years after one mautam and 30 years before the next. The last thingtam in 1977, proved to be very disastrous for the people on the western side.

Rokhuma writes, ''while many people and villagers in the eastern part of Mizoram did not feel the effect.'' During the 1881 thingtam, over 15,000 people died. This was one-sixth of the population. Colonel E.B.Lilly, the local Colonial Administrator, wrote that  ''the famine arose from the depredation of rats, who multiplied exceedingly the previous year owing to the ample food they obtained from the seeding of the bamboos.''

The next thingtam is due in 2025!!

So, the question that truly needs Scientific thinking about is, ''WILL WE, LIKE Mizoram's Rats, experience a massive Malthusian Die-Off?

This unique post continues. Don't miss the following one, as I tell you about ''The Laughing Rats!''  and then of course, inevitably about ''The  Ratso Ritzos'' of this world!

With respectful dedication to the Beast of the East!

Good Night & God Bless!

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless