Dheera's Workshop of Whimsy

The earth was silent, calm and still,

The air was frosted over with chill,

No surface feature had yet corrupted,

The pristine topography, no volcanoes erupted.

The continents remained a single land mass,

Before the evolution of pomfret or bass.

Then quite imperceptibly the climate altered,

The shallow seas got deeper, more salt-ered.

A tremour shook the even ground,

The contours moved, there was a sound,

Thus the Meso-zonic era commenced,

The conifers, frogs and starfish tensed.

Meso-zonic, incase you are confused,

Refers to reptiles and is often used,

To describe the clumsy Dinosaur age,

Tracing their history at every stage.

With the oddest names and voices in chorus,

At 24 meters stood the carnivore, Tyra-nno-saurus.

The smallest one, no larger than a chicken,

Was savage enough to make a pulse quicken,

Scaly, fleet footed, with vertebrae bent,

Ten times the weight of an average elephant,

Most subsisted on local vegetation,

Lush and obtained without agitation.

But the meanest, lean necked, small-headed saurus,

Roamed, mouth gaping, in search of tubu-li-florous.

Thus Dinosaurs ruled the sky, land and sea,

Wandering continental land connections, freely.

It has been acknowledged and often said,

That India is backward, its millions underfed.

A third world country, with problems galore,

Was a likely land for the Dinosaur to ignore.

But quite unexpectedly, an Indian excavator,

Out on a picnic, several billion years later,

Suddenly ran into a bone

And flung it away, mistaking it for a stone

The stone turned out to be a fossil,

Its importance in Indian paleontology, colossal.

For it was a precious vertebral piece,

Of an enormous creature, long since deceased.

The paleontologists fell into a scutter

They searched for fossils in distant Calcutta.

They hunted high,

They hunted low,

Up and against the Narmada’s flow,

They found more bones and then some more.

Until they had an even score.

They named it Raja-saurus and they built,

A whole new skeleton, with a jaunty tilt.

They researched and dug, until they found,

That in India the Dinosaur did abound.

They found that he was a carnivore,

He walked on hind legs and had quite a roar.

He was thirty feet long and had many horns,

They couldn’t quite decide if he had had any corns.

The reconstruction done, they had a bash,

Dinner and dancing, with pomp and flash.

The Indians felt happy, they welcomed the fact,

Of an Indian Dinosaur and that it had been tracked

The authorities were unanimous, as they concluded,

In a high level meeting, in chambers secluded,

The Raja-saurus must have an edge over the others,

He was rare, an Indian, quite unlike his brothers.

This Dinosaur was ethnic, special as could be,

So a smart tailor was commissioned for the next jamboree,

Where the reconstructed skeleton wore a GANDHI TOPEE!