Rise, brothers, rise; the wakening skies pray to the morning light,
The wind lies asleep in the arms of the dawn like a child that has cried all night.
Come, let us gather our nets from the shore and set our catamarans free,
To capture the leaping wealth of the tide, for we are the kings of the sea!
-Sarojini Naidu
There were around twenty to thirty people trying to pull the net from the sea and it took them almost 30 minutes to bring the net out and the catch was next to nothing. When we looked at the efforts involved. The fishermen at the beaches say it is lot of hard work involved and the catch we have is very small.
As the sea is getting violent and polluted, they say there are days we get absolutely nothing. With everything getting expensive they are finding it difficult to earn for basic needs. Next day when we went to that beach we saw what they meant by getting absolutely nothing, there was no catch.
Then we decided to go to the harbor and see. To our surprise, harbor was a complete contrast. There were fishes and all kind of fishes. The variety was so huge and we were surrounded by it. Clearly, business here is enormous. One of the fishermen on one of the yetis shared his experience of being here. He said, “ I used to do fishing at the beach, now I do not do it. I go for fishing in the Yetis. We go for minimum of 3 days in the sea and we catch 100 times more than what we can catch there at the beaches. Sometimes we go into the sea for a month; also if other yeti pays me more I ll go in that Yeti”. The industry here is also different. The catch is mostly Yellow finned Tuna which is exported to Japan and European countries. So money involved here has a huge difference when compared to fishing at the coast line. It feels as if soon the small fishing boats will be taken over by Yetis. There is a clear change in the change of traditions among fishermen. At the end we feel, will these fishermen and the boats we see at the beaches disappear?
Vizag, Journalism, Documentary
