A Thirsty Crow

Once upon a time in school, I read a story called A Thirsty Crow where once upon a time there was a crow that was thirsty. It tried to drink water from a glass or a pitcher, depending on which textbook you read it in, but its beak couldn’t reach because the water level was very low.

Then the crow thought of finding a solution in order to quench its thirst. It saw some pebbles. Despite being a bird unsuited for understanding the science of water volume in a container, the crow picked up pebbles in its mouth and dropped them one by one in the glass to raise the water level to where its beak could reach it. Finally, the crow quenches its thirst.

The moral of the story for the kids was that with hard work and dedication, every problem was solvable. One can find creative and bizarre ways to achieve one’s goals. When I was a kid in school reading this story, around that time I was also very fond of watching Star Trek. I don’t fully recall if it was in Star Trek or in some cartoon that I watched but there is a story where humans set foot on another planet where life is different than the one we have. In one scene, the human stumbles over a stone, which makes a sound expressing anger and pain. And then comes the realisation that life evolved differently on that planet. We can also look at it this way; everything in the universe speaks a language and has feelings. They just feel differently and speak a different language.

As they say, one nation’s freedom fighter is another’s terrorist, one person’s optimism is another’s tragedy. A thirsty crow might be a smart entrepreneur but it may also be a disaster to the stones that may feel and breathe differently and may serve a different purpose with its existence than the crow. And perhaps the stone might serve a bigger cause than the crow. Why should the crow drowning the stones be seen as a trait of courage and intelligence?

Actually, we are witnessing it in Pakistan right now. In order to quench the thirst of anger and ego of just a few powerful individuals, the strong foundations (stones) of Pakistan are being drowned. Democracy, justice, legislature, law enforcement, journalism, civil liberties and so forth are being drowned just so that the crow can drink some. From where I stand, this is not the story of perseverance and intelligence, but rather a story of madness and devastation. The stones serve and represent a much bigger cause and have a longer lifetime than the crow here. Perhaps we should retell the story of the thirsty crow by taking into account other life forms.

Because in that story from childhood, the crow flies away after drinking the water, leaving the stones drowned. We cannot afford a behaviour like that, can we? But then we in Pakistan have lived much of our lives living exactly under those conditions where the constitution, the judiciary, the parliament, and the press and broadcast are left drowning in the bottle. And the crow always flies away to a foreign land after doing plenty of drinking in Pakistan. Enter a weird creature, which speaks truth to the crow and reminds it about its unfair treatment of the stones. The crow is not going to not drink water because that would be unbecoming of the crow. It is rather going to attack the weird creature and make enormous noise about the weird creature, telling fellow animals that the weird creature violated countless laws of the jungle just by being weird. The fellow animals though have become bored with the crow’s selfish noise and are now turning toward the new weird creature in a combined quest to prevent the drowning of the stones. Let’s see where this story ends.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 11^th, 2023.

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