kmguru
Staff member
Just got in the email:
New Delhi, August 19: Even as officials float fanciful, even bizarre,
theories on the mysterious flying mauler terrorising eastern UP, here's the official word: ball lightning. It's a rare, mobile form of lightning that has frequently been mistaken for unidentified flying objects (UFO) in the past. When the rains pass, so should the hysteria, a UP government source privy to the report told
The Indian Express. The report, authored by the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur, was submitted to the UP Home Department today. But the reign of the muhnochwa (face-scratcher) continues. Last night, a man accidentally killed his mother while shooting at a light he believed was the creature plaguing one of India's most backward-and rumour-prone-regions.
The ball lightning presumption will clearly take some selling. UP's own officials are lining up the theories. Genetically engineered insects from Pakistan is one. Laser-equipped terrorists is theory. After all, victims report seeing a flashing red light, then suffer facial injuries.
Saner explanations: Disoriented migratory birds, bats or locust swarms. Such hysteria isn't new to eastern UP. Only six years ago this region, with human development indicies that rival sub-Saharan Africa, was in the thrall of the manai (the man creature). After more than 20 babies were killed, the panic enabled all manner of scores to be settled; 40 people were lynched in various incidents then. The baby-lifters turned out to be a pack of wolves that had lost their habitat and natural prey in a region plagued by deforestation.
''People now see satellites moving across the night sky and say it's the muhnochwa,'' says Ashok Singh, former UP chief wildlife warden who hunted down the wolves in 1996.
''If you develop a rumour, it spreads like wildfire in these areas,''
says Singh. Yet it was just yesterday, after one person was killed in police firing on a hysterical mob, that DIG Faizabad K N D Dwivedi said the muhnochwa was a three to six-inch-long insect ''brought from outside India,'' developed with ''special technology by anti-national elements.''
Today, after being upbraided by Lucknow, Dwivedi isn't forthcoming about his theory. ''Even if I have said it, I have not said it,'' he says and laughs. So what is the muhnochwa anyway? ''It could be animals, insects, anything.''
''No one talks of a living being though,'' says Arvind Kumar, district
magistrate of Kanpur in central UP, new muhnochwa territory. ''They all talk of a mechanical thing with flashing lights.''
One of India's leading ecologists suggests that the administration would do well to call in an entomologist. ''All they really need to do is to contact the nearest office of the Zoological Survey of India or even one from the Agriculture department,'' says Raghavendra Gadagkar, chairman of the Centre For Ecological Sciences at Bangalore's Indian Institute of Science.
Bats, he explains, are known to bite people.
New Delhi, August 19: Even as officials float fanciful, even bizarre,
theories on the mysterious flying mauler terrorising eastern UP, here's the official word: ball lightning. It's a rare, mobile form of lightning that has frequently been mistaken for unidentified flying objects (UFO) in the past. When the rains pass, so should the hysteria, a UP government source privy to the report told
The Indian Express. The report, authored by the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur, was submitted to the UP Home Department today. But the reign of the muhnochwa (face-scratcher) continues. Last night, a man accidentally killed his mother while shooting at a light he believed was the creature plaguing one of India's most backward-and rumour-prone-regions.
The ball lightning presumption will clearly take some selling. UP's own officials are lining up the theories. Genetically engineered insects from Pakistan is one. Laser-equipped terrorists is theory. After all, victims report seeing a flashing red light, then suffer facial injuries.
Saner explanations: Disoriented migratory birds, bats or locust swarms. Such hysteria isn't new to eastern UP. Only six years ago this region, with human development indicies that rival sub-Saharan Africa, was in the thrall of the manai (the man creature). After more than 20 babies were killed, the panic enabled all manner of scores to be settled; 40 people were lynched in various incidents then. The baby-lifters turned out to be a pack of wolves that had lost their habitat and natural prey in a region plagued by deforestation.
''People now see satellites moving across the night sky and say it's the muhnochwa,'' says Ashok Singh, former UP chief wildlife warden who hunted down the wolves in 1996.
''If you develop a rumour, it spreads like wildfire in these areas,''
says Singh. Yet it was just yesterday, after one person was killed in police firing on a hysterical mob, that DIG Faizabad K N D Dwivedi said the muhnochwa was a three to six-inch-long insect ''brought from outside India,'' developed with ''special technology by anti-national elements.''
Today, after being upbraided by Lucknow, Dwivedi isn't forthcoming about his theory. ''Even if I have said it, I have not said it,'' he says and laughs. So what is the muhnochwa anyway? ''It could be animals, insects, anything.''
''No one talks of a living being though,'' says Arvind Kumar, district
magistrate of Kanpur in central UP, new muhnochwa territory. ''They all talk of a mechanical thing with flashing lights.''
One of India's leading ecologists suggests that the administration would do well to call in an entomologist. ''All they really need to do is to contact the nearest office of the Zoological Survey of India or even one from the Agriculture department,'' says Raghavendra Gadagkar, chairman of the Centre For Ecological Sciences at Bangalore's Indian Institute of Science.
Bats, he explains, are known to bite people.
