The CUTTING EDGE

Once again, a festival full of bloodshed, killing, pain and suffering. Wait..! Festival of pain..? That’s strange..! Festivals are for fun, joy and happiness. But in almost all of the festivals for human beings today, there is pain and suffering involved. That’s for innocent animals, birds or snakes. Similar is the instance on the Uttarayan festival. 14nth January is celebrated as Uttarayan by flying kites joyfully. But joy for us turns to horror for innocent, fragile, beautiful feathered souls. Yes, I am talking about the killer ‘manja’ and its CUTTING EDGE. Razor sharp threads that cuts the bird wings like a sharp knife that shears apart soft flower stems.

But with PRAYAS: TEAM ENVIRONMENT’s Animal Welfare Initiatives, we the volunteers feel for the birds that are badly injured and are left out to die a cruel death. Sacrificing the fun of flying kites with friends, we run around and toil hard to save the feathered friends.

Radio Partner of Cutting Edge 2010 tune to 91.1 FM a 'tune of awareness'

PRAYAS Bird Rescue help-line phone numbers are declared well in advance to the 14th January through radio channles, in newspapers and TV channels and now also through the mobile SMS. In lightening speed the message of doing good to the birds in needs spreads around in the city and beyond. All volunteers team up to divide the areas to attend to. Though very fond of flying kites with their gang of friends, these school or college going young brigade gives up the enjoyment for the sake of prevention of cruelty. That’s what being humane is all about..!

The calls for birds in distress start coming in from almost a month ago to the kite flying festival and the maximum damage is done during the three days of the Uttarayan. To the utmost horror of the birds that dwell the city terraces and trees peacefully, giving us the joy of seeing them playing and flying, suddenly find all the people take to the terraces and making all sorts of crazy noises that sink in even louder music. Screaming and beating of steel dishes also pours in the decibels.

HOW CAN I HELP? It's not that you always have to spare a lot of time or money to do something good. We have a great system being set up in which you can even be a major brick in the wall or a lead activist or a project leader right from your laptop or PC, or in some case only with cell phones. Do you want to know how you can save birds from your office? Do you want to help hundreds of innocent animals through just the internet? Do you want to be in the middle of all the environment friendly activities happening at PRAYAS? Do you want to lead a campaign that will save hundreds of trees in Surat just from your cell-phone? And you can also join to learn field activities and actually change things for better being right there. Join our rescue team. Send mail to us with your contact details or just SMS "TEAM PRAYAS" to 9825119081. We will contact you and arrange training for the same. Take oath for not flying kites from now and motivate others to do the same. Do not use nilon (chinese) strings. Promote our campaign by intimating every one about it and spread the message. At least!!! And more importantly Clean your terrace and roads for kite threads to prevent birds from getting injured.

In all this frenzy of being safe somewhere, pigeons, that normally fly in groups fall victim to the web of very very sharp threads that are even reputed to cut open human throats. So many human lives are also taken each year throughout the state by this fatal phenomenon called ‘Manja’. Coated with sharp fine glass powder, I think it’s the symbol of the mindless madness of the human race to forget all the logic and reason and give-in to crazy mania of so called ‘masti’ and fun. The real side of this bad way of celebrating may well sink-in deep if all those who think that flying kites is one of there fundamental rights, suffer a loss of any person in family or even read about the human loss reported in news due to this euphoria of putting kites in the sky.

Most of the calls that come to the rescue help-line of PRAYAS are of the birds (mostly pigeons) with open wounds, wings cut in half and bleeding profusely. And another nature of calls has birds hanging with wing or leg, on a tall tree at the topmost branch or on a cable wire between skyscrapers. It is very difficult to help such birds due the sheer height and the lack of approach. But no hurdle can bog down PRAYAS Bird Rescue volunteers. Most of them are trained rock climbers and they rappel down on the tallest of the sides of any sky- scrapers to save a soul. Surat Fire brigade now known as Surat Fire and Emergency Services also lend a helping hand to enable our volunteers to reach the unreachable heights. They come to help with elevated hydraulic platforms and ladders to take our rescue volunteers up to the heights of even 10th floor. This is a big factor in saving the birds that may otherwise die a very cruel slow death by hanging upside down giving away to hunger, thirst, trauma and shock.

Cutting Edge Photo Gallary PRAYAS Rescue Efforts. Injury from killing threads. Treating injured birds. Emergency Control Room.

The cutting edge is not only about saving the injured birds. We do number of campaigns to educate people to take all possible actions to reduce the chances of injury. We do number of campaigns to educate people to save birds rather than keep them hanging waiting for death. This has resulted into around 100 calls in the days of festival and total 700 calls in the whole month. It was a big challenge for us to justify them all. Our years experience and team of professionals had played their role to achieve this. We had established a professional emergency control room with network of 6 computers equipped with customised software called "Call Catcher". This software has allowed us to attend call in average 5-10 minutes of response time. We had 9 rescue centres covering the whole city to make sure those birds gets treatment very quickly. This year we had more than 100 rescue volunteers ready to serve on call. We thank them all for joining us to get the challenge through.

In January 2009 we had 699 total bird rescue calls in a whole month. In which we had 156 calls on the two days of festival (14th and 15th). Following are the analysis chart we did in those two days. It all could be done because of our professionally equipped emergency control room in these days.

Call Status

Hourly Calls

As many as 23 birds all pigeons are still recuperating from their wing-injuries as now they have a permanent damage and cant take to the sky again. They are now guests for lifetime at our shelter.

All the news papers, Gujarati, English, or Hindi, covered the pre and post happenings with kind words and photographs, giving large space on prime pages to this operation and major TV channels of Surat and Gujarat state has appreciated the campaign by covering the action in their prime time news.

PRAYAS Bird RESCUE Volunteers are the people who had great roles to play in this CUTTING EDGE operations. Now with the support of IFAW and WTI we are able to do more than we have been doing.

With the hope that less number of birds will get hurt this time, and with all the enthusiasm that we shall be able to help each and every injured, I appeal to all the people who read this will be inspired by our actions and join in to strengthen our team. Kindness Is Contagious.