Saturday, April 10, 2010

Menacing with mosquitoes?


This is about a hoard of unwanted intruders who are found everywhere in my household! They are in the bed room, they are in the kitchen, they are in the verandah, they are in the living room and most importantly they are the bathroom too. No amount of baygon, HIT or any other pesticide is of any help. They seem to be increasing in numbers everyday to the extent that a late evening chit chat in the lawn becomes a dancing session trying to avert the irritants. You cannot concentrate on anything but the head of the person you are talking to over which hover hundreds of them. Well someone told me that these dancing mosquitoes in groups don’t cause malaria as they are all males trying to attract the female anopheles. Don’t know about the anopheles but that dance definitely causes the worst form of distraction to me.

They gaze at you while you lie inside your mosquito net reminding you of what could have been your state had this wall of net not been there. One or two of them manage to get in once the lights go off. Suddenly you are awakened by the most annoying song on earth, a humming sound which is enough to drive you crazy when you are in a “half alive state”. This annoyance turns to anger in my case when I realise that the creature has bitten my little son and I turn on the lights and don’t go back to sleep till I “hunt it down”.
Surprisingly every morning all of them are found sitting on the nets, installed on the windows to keep them off, trying to find a way out. Guess they prefer a morning walk and outing in the day only to return back and transform our evenings in to hell. A few days back a brilliant idea struck my brain. The window nets were sprayed with ample amounts of Baygon and wow every morning I found all of them dead on my window. I know this sounds bizarre as marvelling at a mass murder is not acceptable but this is being done for the safety and well being of family and guests. However they still keep coming and coming and coming, hundreds and thousands of them. I get bewildered when I see some people carry on with their work undeterred in a crowd of mosquitoes. They can even sleep in their presence and I cannot even slice a lemon! I don’t know what stuff these people are made of.
There is an urgent need to do something about these unruly creatures as no research has been able to produce a fool proof solution against them. I often get to read sentences like this - Of the 5 million confirmed cases of malaria reported each year from countries outside Africa, nearly 3 million are from India and Pakistan. There are so many huge programmes to combat this disease like the WHO’s Roll Back Malaria programme. I don’t know how successful these are but my life has definitely been made difficult with the mosquito menace

For now, I have already smashed atleast 6 or 7 of these menacing creatures while writing this up! God Help Us!

1 comment:

BK Chowla, said...

Unfortunately, our Govt and the medical fraternity likes to discuss HIV and not Malaria or Malnutrition.
The medical lobby is very strong the world over.It is very difficult to circumvent them as they are busy promoting the medicines.