It was almost evening and the sky was on the verge of turning dark and gloomy. Outside, I heard sound like engine purring and white smoke started to seep in from below the door in the living room. I looked out the window and a thick white fog seemed to have engulfed the entire road outside. This was neither a scene from John Carpenter's 1980 horror classic thriller The Fog starring Jamie Lee Curtis and Adrienne Barbeau, my dear, the idiotic movie about a killer fog containing zombie-like ghosts seeking revenge for their death, nor its 2005 remake, starring Smallville's Tom Welling aka teenaged Superman. This was a real killer fog right outside our doorsteps. Perhaps, it must be due to the raining season and the Aedes mosquitoes were reigning supreme in Pokok Assam. Many residents were down with dengue fever and there were at least two victims in our house alone! The local authorities had been sending out their workers to fog out the killer insects in the neighbourhood and in foggy issues like this, I wonder if one should kill the mosquitoes or leave them alone to take away human lives instead? Yes, I am talking about the Five Percepts now; the first one particularly, the one that a person undertakes to abstain from taking life - Pāṇātipātā veramaṇī sikkhāpadaṃ samādiyāmi.What about us, humans doing the killing and letting the mosquitoes practise the five percepts for a change? I wonder if a little karmic dirt on our hands matters if there is a bigger and nobler cause of saving human lives...
The fog...
The fog...
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