The Indian Army, going beyond the call of duty, claims to have stumbled upon a giant footprint of the mythical beast ‘Yeti’ at the Makalu Base Camp in the Himalayas. For those who never read ‘Tintin in Tibet,’ Yeti is the elusive abominable snowman, believed to be heftier, shaggier and taller than an ape.
It is covered in thick fur – somewhat like an overgrown yak — and the rest is stuff of the legends in Himalayas, Siberia, Central and East Asia. The Army shared on the twitter images of the footprint, measuring 32×15 inches, claiming that the purpose of going public was to excite scientific temper and rekindle interest.
‘Some of us who reject the story, surely shall have a definite answer to the evidences,” the Army statement added. The Army possibly bit more than it can chew. Though the discovery was made by a mountaineering expedition, twitter found it strange that only one footprint had been found.
Sushil Kutty, a contributor to a syndicate service, wrote tongue in cheek that ‘‘Yeti did a recce of an Indian Army mountaineering expedition’s base camp and then without disturbing the sleep of the olive-uniformed climbers went away silent as a snowfall in the dead of night leaving behind as proof of its night-time incursion a lone footprint, size 32×15”.
Coming bang in election time, the ‘discovery of Yeti’ soon acquired political overtones. In words of Kutty, the erstwhile BJP Member of Parliament Tarun Vijay took objection to the word ‘beast’ in the Army tweet. Call ‘him’ the ‘snowman’, Vijay chided.
Twitterati promptly took Tarun to task, quite a few citing his intervention as standard BJP practice that gives myths the credence they shouldn’t get. “The BJP must be working out how to fit this into the rest of the campaign,” tweeted National Conference leader Omar Abdullah. Yeti was soon trending Twitter, which was swamped with reactions.
“All the Yeti talk reminds me of ‘Tintin in Tibet’ and that very hackneyed scene where Captain Haddock is in Delhi,” one user posted. “Hanuman Ji on mountains?? Just a thought,” another tweeted. The Yeti is possibly just a huge bear but one wonders how it survives in the snow and that too on shrubs that survive the freeze.
The Chinese also believe in Yeti and there have been reports of many Yeti-sightings in the forbidden kingdom. A 2017 DNA study of purported Yeti samples from museums and private collections had provided insight into the origins of this Himalayan legend.
Of those, one sample turned out to be from a dog. The other eight were from Asian bears. “Our findings strongly suggest that the biological underpinnings of the Yeti legend can be found in local bears,” said lead scientist of that study. The Army seems to be breaking new ground with its mammoth discovery.
