5 min readNew DelhiSep 8, 2026 06:22 PM IST
At the outset let me admit that, until recently, I was staunchly anti-roach. Then, not long ago I discovered a huge, polished mahogany roach dawdling in the bathroom, waving its long antennae around, bilkul altu faltu. I whacked it with a newspaper – say the equivalent of smacking a lathi on a kid’s head. It rolled over, and I thought, ‘Hah, done deal.’ No way. Some hours later, I found it was still alive so this time, I took the Hit to it – the equivalent of using teargas right in its face. Still upside down (some mysterious roach asana?), it waved its legs around and lay still. Good riddance. But no, after half an hour, it was still alive.
Respect!
Immediately I switched parties (and set it free in the garden) and became pro-roach. Now, anti-roachers think that roaches are a pest. They live in and eat garbage and their poop smells. Also, they can cause allergies and asthma in children. So does their own poop smell of Chanel #5 while they strongly advocate the consumption of what comes out of the rear end of bovines for good health and well-being (and BO)? As for allergies and asthma, have they ever tried to live in Delhi during and after Diwali, and wondered what that’s doing to the lungs of children?
The leading geriatric anti-roacher has recently, so nobly said that he ‘forgives’ those who insulted him and his mataji during the recent agitation. Has he realized that he has virtually plagiarised lines from what one of the world’s leading religious apostles said while being crucified? Is this prophetic or is he putting his feet in quicksand?
There are over 4,500 species of roaches in the world, of which around 30 associate with us. The big gun roaches are the American roach, a beer guzzling (and presumably hamburger, doughnut scoffing) roach, the social German roach, the Australian roach and the Asian roach, typically considered to be the ‘dirtiest’. Most of the other species, some of which are quite exquisite, live in forests, where they turn up the soil, and via their poop, free up nitrogen trapped in the dead and decaying material they consume, which is vital for the well-being of plant life and without which, everything in the forest would die. And then, so would we.
So why did the roaches swarm Jantar Mantar and other places in India for almost two months, protesting? Like all anti-roachers, all they wanted was a good, fair education with a solid, well-paying livelihood to look forward to after that. Geriatric anti-roachers keep boasting about how their ancestors flew to Mars and beyond and back 50,000 years ago, something even AI savvy roaches today would not be able to do. But let me tell you — roaches are interested in being well educated: Decades ago, while prepping for a school ‘board’ exam, I remember one ginormous one flying through the night outside to settle on my fat, battered Chemistry textbook, which I was struggling through. Perhaps, all it wanted was to glue-sniff the binding, but it was still imbibing knowledge for which it had given up the pleasures of the night.
All geriatric anti-roachers too want their progeny to be well-educated so promptly send them off abroad. Now 99.9 per cent of local roaches can’t afford that, and 99 per cent of these are given a lousy deal at home, slogging 22 hours a day for two years, only to find that all that work does not count and needs to be redone, because someone has leaked the questions and pocketed a fortune — to send baba and baby anti-roach abroad perhaps — but no one knows exactly who.
But really, geriatric anti-roachers better get themselves educated about exactly who they are taking panga with. Roaches can go without food for a month, go headless for a week, and without water for three days. They can have babies — 2-3 million in two years — so we are never going to run out of them, and they can swarm Jantar Mantar in even greater numbers. They can lift up to 900 times their body weight and slim down to 3 mm while scuttling into cracks. And if worse comes to worst, if we blow ourselves up with our nuclear devices, they will probably be the only living creatures (along with fruit flies) to survive the blast and subsequent radiation, taking in up to 15 times what we can tolerate.
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There is, however, one sure-fire way of getting rid of roaches. And like what Gandhiji taught us, it is a completely non-violent method. Also, it inculcates his dharma that every person should clean his own toilet. And that is by keeping your surroundings and toilets — and education system — squeaky clean and above board. As we have seen, the surroundings and toilets of most anti-roaches these days are unspeakable, which is why the roaches have turned up in droves. But if these are deep-cleaned, for now and forever, the roaches will not bother you anymore, let alone pour into the streets and call you and your mataji bad things. Hounding a frightened 14-year old is the equivalent to me smacking a roach with a newspaper and blasting it with Hit. I switched parties pronto. It’s time they did too.
