Three hundred million years of survival, adaptation and sheer political staying power have taught the cockroach something humans are yet to learn: never give up, never resign and never switch off the kitchen light
Let us begin with facts, since the rest of this piece will contain very few of them. The cockroach has been in continuous operation on this planet for something over 300 million years. This makes it older than the Mahabharata and older than the Odyssey. It is older than democracy, older than nationalism and, another detail I would ask the reader to contemplate, considerably older than the televised panel discussion.
Of the roughly 4,600 known species, fewer than 30 have the slightest interest in your kitchen. These 30 are simply the ones that moved to the cities, as the ambitious always do. Three hundred million years have taught the cockroach something Homo sapiens are forever relearning: survival has remarkably little to do with being loved.
What has it done with all that time? Nothing spectacular. Just patience and resilience bordering on temerity. Consider what it has survived. Every generation is convinced that its own Kurukshetra is the decisive one. The cockroach has sat out several thousand such epic battles.
Empires rose. Civilisations collapsed, usually with a good deal of noise. Ideologies were fought and continue to fight one another to the point of exhaustion, only to be succeeded by newer ideologies with better orators. Through all of it, the cockroach does precisely one thing: it changes address.
Cave to hut. Hut to palace. DDA flat to smart home in a Gurgaon condo with voice-activated lighting. Progress, viewed from beneath the refrigerator, is simply a steady increase in the quality of available plumbing.
Is the cockroach purely a political operator? It has never lost an argument, having never entered one. It has never lost an election, having never contested one. It is simply present in every ward, every constituency, every hour of the night, asking nothing but the occasional crumb of Marie biscuit.
It has never given an interview and never been photographed beside anybody it later had to disown. It is the most accommodating coalition partner in recorded history. Which brings us to the sudden ascent of the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP).
It contests nothing and has never fielded a candidate who could be persuaded to stand still for a photograph. Its posters carry slogans of such devastating economy and wit that one suspects several word ninjas are involved.
The CJP was not founded. It was noticed. “We’ve always been here. You just switched on the kitchen light.” That is the story.
FLASH: Senior leaders of the CJP have dismissed allegations of inhabiting unhygienic spaces as “anti-insect propaganda”.
Here I must clarify that the CJP is not a stand-in for anybody. It is what every political formation becomes if you leave it alone in a warm place with a food source: endlessly adaptable, magnificently resilient and able to announce a historic and unprecedented victory in one breath while describing itself in the next as beset by hostile forces and a partisan press.
And then, as these things go, came the students. They joined in enormous numbers, as the young rightly do, having correctly identified the CJP as the only movement that had never disappointed them, chiefly by never having promised them anything. They came with placards, energy, good playlists and that particular brand of sincerity that makes millennials and boomers uncomfortable at close range. There was a march, and by every account it was magnificent, a sentence I write without a shred of irony. Guns and the odd Roses are the easy part of an uprising. But when the force is spent, what next? The cockroaches are standing by, trying not to smirk.
UPDATE: Several dissident cockroaches formed the National Cockroach Party, then merged back after discovering they shared the same drainpipe.
Which brings us to defection season. A cockroach moults six or seven times in a lifetime. So does the defector: 48 hours of blinking uncertainty and a great deal of hand-wringing about a journey of introspection, finally emerging in an identical shell with a better portfolio attached.
Six or seven is the insect’s lifetime limit. Some of our people have managed more, in fewer terms. Scandal obeys the same law as pesticide. A spray, or the first expose, finishes 99 careers. The survivor, having voluntarily surrendered his ability to metabolise embarrassment, flaunts his ability to slip and slide until an expose is no longer a crisis but just another day.
Your front-page Brahmastra strikes Karna’s kavacha and bounces off, the armour here being not gold but a litigious lawyer and an impressive “M’Lord”.
EXIT POLL: Humans predicted a complete rout for the CJP. Results will be declared shortly after the home lights are switched off. Psephologists have blamed the sample. The sample was under the sink and declined to comment.
In the Mahabharata, at least the war ends and there is a victor. The war of the kitchen is an endless power struggle. Armed with broom and brush and boric acid, you are deluded into thinking you have won. Eleven days later, an emissary appears on the counter, with the sly grin of an old hand who has seen several governments go out and is smugly sure about bidding goodbye to yours too.
And to think you were so certain that this was the decisive Kurukshetra. But no, you just got played. Outwitted and outmanoeuvred. And here I need to come clean about what this piece has been crawling towards. We do not lose to the cockroach because it is stronger. We lose because, in some grey corner of our hearts, we admire the thing.
Look at its power-packed resume: it survives attacks, adapts quickly, appears precisely where least expected and never, in any circumstance, retreats or resigns voluntarily. Show me the politician who would not like such invincibility.
We humans, have inherited the Earth as its keepers. If history has taught us anything, it is that the creature we love to hate will outlive all our rebellions and revolutions. The fellow is quietly waiting behind the kitchen dustbin, already drafting the manifesto for the next election.
