THE RAT MINERS : GREAT MINERS

There is an old fable about a rat and a mountain which many of you may have read as a kid. The mountain boasts to the rat that "you are such a tiny creature and see how majestic and huge I am", in response the rat smiles and says I can bore holes into you but you can't do that." Guess what? It is the rat miners who again came to the rescue of the 41 trapped labourers who were at the receiving end of the wrath of the mountains for boring these gigantic tunnels in them. Since last couple of days, the whole nation was glued to the TV sets for updates on the rescue and evacuation of these unfortunate labourers. Electronic Media as usual goes overboard and covers the details with funny looking animations and if it was not such an emergency, one would probably have enjoyed their rather ludicrous efforts at depicting the happenings. 

Tunnels have acquired a different kind of notoriety, with the labyrinth of Hamas tunnels in Gaza, the paparazzi chasing Lady Diana and Dody Fayed resulting in a fatal car crash in the Pont de l'Alma tunnel in Paris, and now this one in Uttarakhand where it left no stone unturned, pun intended, for another tragedy, which human intervention finally averted. 

The tunnel at Silkyara in Uttarakhand is now well known in the country and has also  as also acquired international fame, as this rescue effort involved not just the best brains and the resources in India but the specialists from world over were lending their hand, with Mr Arnold Dix,  the President of the International Tunnelling and Underground Space Association  himself directing the efforts. There were American augurs in use, the Govt machinery including the Army Sappers, Air Force Helicopter pilots, the Chief Minister of the state, Mr Dhami, Union Ministers Mr Gadkari and Gen VK Singh were themselves present to supervise the rescue effort. In fact Mr Dix was all praise for the cooperation amongst the various agencies and the spirit displayed by all concerned.

Be that as it may, we have our own tunnels to contend with, the techies amongst us will recall the Zener effect, which is a type of electrical breakdown that occurs in a reverse-biased PN junction when the electric field enables “tunnelling” of electrons from the valence to the conduction band of a semiconductor, leading to a large number of free minority carriers which suddenly increase the reverse current.  This technical mumbo jumbo was just to elucidate that tunneling of any kind is a complex task. Computer whiz also exploit the 'tunnelling' for virtual private networks. Most of us in any case suffer from “tunnel” vision, though ophthalmologists would diagnose that as a loss of peripheral vision, a condition which if temporary is curable however if permanent then you may as well kiss your driving licence good bye. 

Getting back to the ‘rat miners’, although rat mining as a practice  has been banned by the National Green Tribunal (NGT) for being  very dangerous, it was these men who finally emerged as the heroes. Rats also known as “Mooshak” in Sanskrit are revered in our country for being Lord Ganesha’s chosen mode of transport. With Ganesha’s blessings, he is after all the “vighnharta”, the one who removes all the hurdles, this landslide at Silkyara had to finally be rid of all the impediments.