The Search For Utopia

"They're so huge! When they walk, all earth shakes. They can flatten mountains like they're a lump of clay!" I dared not say this aloud, father would start off with one of his many lectures that I had memorized by experience.

"Daddy, can I meet the wise sage on our way to Sugarland?" Sugarland was our proud home. All was peace and happy there, we were all just a huge family. "Sure son, but is there a reason to it?” he gave me a puzzled look that I was well accustomed to.
"Um.. I wanna know why the stars twinkle". I am a very good liar. I have to lie about my age all the time, I am too tall.
He chuckled, "Son, we're hunters. If you wanna ask him something, ask him to teach you how to track food 'cause you suck at it."
Hunting never attracted me. Though my folks come from a family of highly esteemed hunters, I always had other ambitions. I am the tallest from our village and all the girls back home like me. Bleh, girls are boring. Their only skills are gossiping and cooking. I am famous for my haul and that's why the girls like me, I think. Who wouldn't want a husband who returns home with nice heavy meals? But I knew better. This food hunting and hideout searching was boring, I wanted to do something big. I wanted to break mountains too.

"Jack, they're different. They can quash mountains, you can't. In fact, even they can’t break mountains", the wise sage had already started off.
"Yes, they can. I see them do it every day!" I protested.
"What you see is actually an aggravation perceived by your mind. The mountains you see, they call them stones. The stones you quash are grains to them. The bread pieces you bring home are merely crumbs to them."
"I don't know, I want to become a human too. Being an ant is just so lousy. All we do is hunt and keep an eye for humans near our hideouts. There must be something else to life."
"Let's go for a little walk", the sage said ushering me out.

We walked until I saw a commotion of some kind. "Here, this will give us a better view", the sage climbed a tree and I obediently followed. He pointed towards a crowd of some sort and said "Look, these are the humans you adore so much. They can't even form a queue. We ants are a lot better" and he was right. It took a while for me to realize that these weren’t dunes of some kind. They were just pushing and shouting and yanking at each other. "Never break a queue, watch each others' backs", that was his father's first lesson to him. We always formed a queue when hunting. A spotter would find the food and signal for his comrades to follow. No one rushed in, we quickly climbed and left in a queue. "This is why we are faster and can move about quickly. This chaotic movement of the humans can get them nowhere", remarked the wise sage.

We climbed down and began retracing our steps. Suddenly there were loud shouts and screams, I turned around and saw two humans trading punches. “That is another reason we are better than them”, he sighed. I hate to admit it, but he was right. We never fought. “We are small and have to compensate for our smallness in size by our unity” was another of my dad’s lessons. There was a law in Sugarland, if any citizen was found scuffling he’d be barred from the land and no one had been barred yet, such was our unity. How can humans fight their own brethren? This was no brotherhood.

Does this seem perfect?
Gittin Utopia

This time I led the way back home, I had seen enough. My head was bent low, I had been a fool till now. The ground started shaking and I could no longer walk, I just stood there maintaining my balance. An elephant was running rampant. God, it was furious! Trampling everything in its way, it squashed a human like a bug or an ant. “There’s always someone bigger and superior over you, son. We are afraid of the humans and they’re afraid of all the beasts that rule the savannahs. Life isn’t easy for anyone, they just have different challenges.”

He had learnt his lesson. There was no perfect life, no perfect world, even the word “perfect” was vague. We all are assigned different roles, superiority is determined by how we perform them. Utopia exists, but it is not gifted to anyone, it must be created. Sugarland was his own little perfect world, he had realized.

Utopia means elsewhere. - John Malkovich

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