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The Squirrel ATN Machine

By Yoginder Sikand

15 July, 2012
Countercurrents.org

The squirrels of Bumble Hill were the happiest little creatures you ever saw. All day long they would zip up and down the trees that stood on the hill, squealing with delight as they chased each other’s tails, which was their favourite pastime when they were not nibbling nuts. Their life was not all fun and frolic, though, for much of the year they had to toil hard to garner enough nuts to see them through the long, harsh winter.

Now, among the squirrels of Bumble Hill there was one odd-man-out, and he was Big Biz, or so he liked to call himself. He often hung out near the homes of humans at the foot of Bumble Hill, which is where he got all sorts of bizarre, most un-squirrel-like, ideas from, which the other squirrels found very distressing. You can imagine how hilariously ridiculous they thought he was being when, for instance, he suggested that like humans, squirrels should wear clothes, send their children to school, make others work for them, drive around in cars rather than scamper up trees on their little toes, and live in glass and concrete buildings, rather than in nests made of feathers and twigs!

One day, Big Biz returned from his daily visit to the human settlement very excited. All day he had looked on in wonder as the humans set about installing a new contraption in the centre of the village square: an Any Time Machine, or an ATM for short. The humans, and Big Biz, too, had watched with great excitement as the bank manager demonstrated how by dropping a card into a slot in the machine and at the press of a button, a thick wad of currency notes noiselessly slipped out of a slot! Wasn’t that very clever, thought Big Biz?

As he scampered along home Big Biz’s mind was busy with thoughts of a similar contraption he would install on Bumble Hill for his fellow squirrels. It would be called an ATN or ‘Any Time Nuts’ machine. It would make perfect business sense, he thought excitedly, for each time a squirrel stuck its card in the ATN to withdraw a bag of nuts, Big Biz would earn the equivalent of half a bag. ‘My! My!’ thought Big Biz excitedly, ‘Soon I’ll be the biggest nut-owner in all of Bumble Hill forest, and won’t have to slog to hunt for my nuts anymore!’

That evening the squirrels listened with rapt attention as Big Biz spoke about the ATN he wanted to set up on Bumble Hill. In no time at all he won them over to his plans. After all, he managed to convince them, the machine would save them the bother of scampering up and down trees every day to search for nuts.

In a few days time, Big Biz’s ATN machine was ready and functioning. Throughout the day, a long line of squirrels stood outside, patiently waiting with their ATN cards in their paws for their turn to withdraw as many nuts as they wanted. You should have seen how cheery they all seemed. They literally went nuts, as the saying goes, about it. The poor little things thought that the ATN was supplying them nuts for free! That was not the case, of course. Big Biz hadn’t told them that each time they took nuts from the machine, they were adding to a loan they had one day to repay him, along with a heavy interest. He had kept that a secret—he had learnt that this was what the humans called a ‘smart business strategy’.

Now, not much good can be expected from a sinister scheme, and that’s precisely what happened with Big Biz’s ATN. In just a few months it began falling apart. No longer needing to scamper up trees to find their nuts, for the nuts were now available at the press of a button from the ATN, the squirrels stopped their daily exercise. You won’t believe how fat and lazy they became, so much so that they even stopped playing with each other. As a result, old friendships simply fell apart. All the squirrels could now talk about—that is, if they did bother to speak to each other—was how many bags of nuts they had got from the ATN that day. No longer did they chatter, as they once did, about the birds in the trees, the clouds floating in the clear blue sky, the changing seasons and the fragrance of the flowers.

In a short while, the squirrel family of Bumble Hill was transformed into a replica of the human settlement at the foot of the hill. The once cheery creatures now turned sullen and grumpy, each set against the rest in a mad race to grab as many bags of nuts as they could every day from the ATN. But there was one among them, a young lad called Bonny, who simply refused to let things go on as they were. He was the only one who had resisted the temptation of getting an ATN card for himself.

Bonny was a smart little squirrel. It did not take long for him to figure out how through the ATN Big Biz had led the squirrels of Bumble Hill deep into debt. When he revealed this to the rest, you can imagine how indignant they were! And when he went on about how the ATN had ruined the squirrels, made them lazy and churlish and had caused them to become as quarrelsome, miserable and mean as humans (you should have heard the groans and shrieks that this revelation met with!) they broke into uncontrollable sobs.

And do you know who was crying the loudest? It was Big Biz, who was also present at the meeting. He did honestly feel awful about cheating his fellow squirrels, and frankly confessed that the ATN was a bad idea—as was copying humans in any way. He pleaded to be forgiven. He promised to stick to the age-old ways of the squirrels and never to imitate humans ever again. To prove that he was really sincere he rushed to his ATN machine and, with his little paws, tipped it over into the stream. It went tumbling down the hill till it landed at the human settlement below. And at that you should have heard the squirrels of Bumble Hill, led by Big Biz himself, excitedly cheer!

Yoginder Sikand is bangalore based writer. He can be reached at [email protected]




 


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