Counting of Ants

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The Man with the Cigarette

Bopa Rai was a well-built man. He was an SPM specialist to the boot. He always had a cigarette dangling from the left corner of his mouth. He squinted his left eye against the smoke. He rolled the burning stick deftly from side to side. His lips and tongue choreographed a rhythm of dancing embers. He was not only a master in medicine, but also in shooting his own smoke signals. Smoke was useful to make ants loose their way

Those were Maruti days, but Bopa was too big for small cars. Helmetless, he rode his trusty Vespa, demanding space as if the road were his living room.

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Scholar and Rockstar

Renowned as a PSM teacher, his eye for detail was legendary, his energy inexhaustible. Half a rockstar, half a scholar, wholly Bindass. His rasgulla cheeks framed a moustache as carefully trimmed as his lecture notes.

At 58, he retired along with his equally cuddly wife, Bopi. They returned to their ancestral home. Village Bopa Rai, where everyone longed to be called “Bopa.” However, the Panchayat gave that name only with great ceremony.

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The Ginger–Cannabis Theory

A year later, lethargy turned into curiosity. Bopa theorised: underground ginger + overground cannabis = a mulch enriched by ants. Ants would donate not only their bodies but their industry, importing valuable debris into the soil.
For this, the population burden of ants had to be optimised.

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The Great Census

The sun baked Nakodar into a crust, but Bopa persisted. Notebook in one hand, magnifying glass borrowed from a child in the other, he squatted at the edge of his fields. Neighbours mocked: “Pagal hai — counting cheenti while cousins count Ferraris!”

But his pencil scratched away like a monk’s stylus:

• 12 ants per square inch,
• 19 ants under a pebble,
• 23 ants marching in double file on a slope.

Year after year, the ledger filled.

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The Nobel in Stockholm

Rumours spread: “There is a man in Punjab who has the only full census of ants in soil.”
Scientists from Delhi, then Oxford, arrived, eyes wide. They flew him — paunch, Vespa memory, cigarette — to Stockholm.

The Nobel citation read:
“For revealing the multitudes beneath our feet, for proving abundance in the smallest creatures, and for teaching humanity that to count ants is to count itself.”

Flashbulbs popped. Bopa chewed his cigarette and said only:
“Ferrari, my foot.”

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The World Responds

The Tribunà

In ex n zza 2 rte:
“Bopa counted ants, not acres — and the world gave him gold.”

The Villagers:

• Cheenti ginni, duniya jeeti. Ferrari wale reh gaye peeti.
  (He counted ants, won the world. Ferrari men were left beaten.)
• Bopa di Lambretta, Nobel da patta.
  (Bopa’s Lambretta carried the Nobel leaf.)
• Paunch vadda, dimag hor vadda — cheentiyaan de raaz likh gya Bopa.
  (His belly was big, but his mind bigger — he wrote the secrets of ants.)

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Opinion: The Ant as Mirror

In a land obsessed with status and surname, Bopa Rai chose to count ants. That is why his Nobel matters. He showed that abundance lies not in Ferraris, nor in family feuds, but in overlooked multitudes that quietly sustain life.

Perhaps every village has its Bopa — mocked, dismissed, persistent. The Nobel is just a medal; the true reward is the ditty sung at tea stalls:
“Cheenti ginni, duniya jeeti.”