There comes a time in every society’s slow descent into mediocrity when a line must be drawn—not in sand, but in pigeon droppings. It is here, in the dense, choked arteries of our great urban jungles—Mumbai, Delhi, Pune—that the line between faith and folly is smeared into a foul, feathered mess. And nothing embodies this grotesque fusion more pungently than the devout insistence of a few self-anointed saviours of culture to feed pigeons, come plague or pneumonia, come reason or ruling.

Yes, the sacred pigeons. The airborne carriers of piety and pathogens. The fluttering vahanas of virtue and viral load.

They descend in flocks, summoned by handfuls of wheat and misguided compassion, to alight upon every parapet and power line, every balcony and cornice—leaving behind not divine blessings, but acidic excreta potent enough to etch their theology into the very stone of civilization. And still, their feeders—those urban priests of pigeonhood—demand that their right to pour grain upon filth be protected, even as courts of law, public health departments, and lungs of asthma-stricken children cry out in protest.

Superstition: The New Public Policy

Let us be clear: the matter has transcended religion. This is no longer about reverence; it is about recalcitrance. A perverse determination to uphold ritual even when it stinks of decay—literally and figuratively. The High Courts have ruled. Medical science has spoken. Municipalities have scraped, swept, and sprayed. But none of these interventions can outflap the wings of blind belief when it is cloaked in the garb of tradition.

These pigeon feeders, emboldened by centuries of unquestioned ritual, now assert their constitutional right to infect the atmosphere with Histoplasmosis, Psittacosis, and Cryptococcal meningitis—as if the Constitution ever promised the freedom to corrode balconies and bronchi alike. Their offerings, they claim, are acts of charity. Yet in the name of this charity, they convert housing societies into guano graveyards and hospital wards into temples of the breathless.

Balconies of the Damned

One need only gaze upwards in any old quarter of a city to witness the architecture of this lunacy. What were once stately facades now bear the calcified wrath of decades of pigeon dung. The white crusts of sanctimonious indifference cling to ledges, drip from air-conditioners, and fill the corners where once children leaned out to watch the monsoon.

And inside, behind mesh screens and windows sealed tighter than secrets, families suffocate in a haze of fungal spores. The immunocompromised, the elderly, the very children the feeders claim to love—they all breathe in the slow curse of the devout.

Is this charity? Is this dharma? Or is this simply domestic terrorism dressed as devotion?

Of Faith and Faeces

The tragedy is not that people believe pigeons to be auspicious. Superstitions, after all, are as old as humanity. The tragedy is that these beliefs now demand immunity from law, from reason, and from consequences.

When a court rules against pigeon feeding in residential zones, it is not attacking faith. It is defending lungs, defending walls, defending what little sanity remains in a city at the edge of asphyxiation. But those drunk on ritual scoff at the evidence. “Let the birds be fed,” they chant, as if their piety were a pesticide. As if centuries of myth outweigh milligrams of mycotoxins.

And so, armed with a brass pot and half a kilo of bajra, they march towards residential rooftops with all the zeal of medieval flagellants—flagging not their own backs, but the future of their neighbours.

The Cult of the Kabutarkhana

Nowhere is this pathology more pronounced than in the city’s infamous Kabutarkhanas—those self-declared temples of defecation. These are not sanctuaries; they are centres of contagious compassion, where a spoonful of grain buys a pound of pestilence.

Here, amid cooing and coughing, the faithful gather to feed what they will not touch, to glorify what they dare not clean. And woe betide the civic officer who tries to interfere! For he shall be branded anti-tradition, anti-people, even anti-Hindu, by those who cannot distinguish spirituality from spore count.

The Price of Passive Governance

Refusing to regulate pigeon feeding, the State itself becomes an accomplice in this aviary apocalypse. Its silence fertilizes the very superstition it should uproot. It tolerates a culture that measures faith by grain count and holiness by how many pigeons defecate on your rooftop before noon.

A Prayer for Rationality

Let it be known: compassion is not the same as contamination. Feeding birds is not a crime—but doing so at the cost of human health, infrastructure, and sanity certainly is.

Let those who insist on feeding pigeons do so in regulated, open, non-residential spaces. Let municipal bodies establish designated bird feeding zones, supervised and cleaned. Let faith be reclaimed from filth, and charity decoupled from contamination.

And let us, as a society, learn at last to distinguish between worship and waste, between devotion and disease, between ritual and ruin.

A city is not a coop, and its citizens are not sacrificial offerings at the altar of obstinacy. The right to believe cannot be the right to blind others, and the right to feed cannot be the right to foul the very air we share.

To persist in pigeon feeding, in defiance of law and logic, is not religious—it is reckless. It is not sacred—it is selfish. And if this plague of piety is not checked, the cities of tomorrow will be not temples, but tombs—choked with feathers, fables, and the silence of those too breathless to object.

Let us not allow superstition to fly so freely that it snuffs out the very breath of civilization.

-Mahesh Zagade