Winters changing to summers

 

It’s February 21 and the maximum temperature already 31 degrees. In a decade or so the winters will turn spring and a few more decades down the line it will be an all summer affair. Well that’s change. And it lies there in the future. As of now there are still wild flowers along the little solitary path. This is more important than what is not available or what we will be missing in the future.

The spring is stalled and there is a beacon of summer or rather beacons of summer—numbering three. Three black stray dogs are coming at a trot and their red flashy tongues are hanging out, saliva shakings to the tunes of rapidly approaching summer. I have taught one of them a nice lesson. As I stroll around the countryside, dozens of stray dogs would bark at my intrusion. Then due to many reasons, such as getting used to my presence, amply aided by my soft cuddling words, they learnt to ignore me. All of them except one. This guy kept hollering at me daily without any provocation, despite the softest of my words. It made me feel like a thief in the broad daylight. It would be particularly aggressive, almost on the verge of biting me, whenever the farm owner, around whose fields it had marked its territory, would be present. It wanted to show its loyalty. Having exhausted all the means of bringing peace between us, I resorted to the last avenue. It required only this much. I had to change my lazy stroll to a blizzard of dash like an Olympics sprinter. This I did to good effect with a stick in my hand, raising a big hullaballoo along the way. Out of wits, the dog went rocketing over the planted wheat. I gave the chase to the capacity of my legs and lungs. I collapsed on the ground to recover my breath but luckily the animosity in the dog had also collapsed. After that it started respecting me. It would give me way and moved to the side as I approached. I think in handling incorrigible chaps a reasonable use of force is needed. Too much of generosity and elegance in behavior is taken for granted, is interpreted as weakness, and then even stray dogs won’t take you seriously.

There was this little piece of land covered with eucalypts trees, the ground covered with shrubbery and bushes giving a dense second canopy. It looked a little dot of refuge for wilderness among the well-manicured, tamed farm lands around. A little wild hovel for cats, rats, jackals, reptiles and birds. The farmer has sold it. It’s a clear skyline now. There is sadness in the air. But we cannot blame the farmer. He must have had his own reasons to cut it. But at least for a decade and half his trees gave oxygen to us and some wild space for the species that are losing their rights on mother earth.

I palpably miss the presence of those threes in the countryside. It feels like one more step towards swathes and swathes of treeless avenues where mechanized human systems would forge a new civilization completely unrelated to the raw forces of nature. A new species altogether. But isn’t that change? Didn’t dinosaurs become extinct? So, does it matter too much if we also become extinct some day and are replaced by a half-mechanized, artificially nurtured new super-species that will have the poor few—who will remain the same old homo sapiens due to their poverty and limited circumstances—homo sapiens of old blood, bones and capacities, either as zoo specimen or at the most as poor household servants. Change is the ultimate master.

A day in the life of a butterfly

 The lightness of being a Blue Tiger Butterfly...

Eco-heroes

 

A virginal forest is cut on a pristine island in the Andaman. I’m glad that at least we are paying a lip-service to the cause of environment. The government plans to compensate for this loss by planting trees in the Aravalis near Delhi NCR. Well, the world seems to have taken the cause of environment very casually. The expression of loss falls well short of awakening people to the fact of irreversible damage.

It’s befitting the fabric of a humane self to grieve over the ecological loss. As a beacon of hope, there are eco-heroes who are holding processions, dinners, benefit concerts, readings and memorial rituals to mark the dents and bruises suffered by mother nature. They have put red gauze flags signposting dead mangroves in Goa. Artists and environmentalists are setting up monuments to pay homage to the lost species. As mega-floods, super-droughts and super-storms come out shrieking, voicing mother earth’s agony, soft and sensitive souls get under a pal of despair, depression and anxiety. They hold gatherings to commemorate the extinct species. There is a memorial dinner for Dodo in London; there is a candle march and handwritten posts for extinct and imperiled pollinators. Musicians, scientists, filmmakers and academicians express their sense of loss at the death of a glacier. A memorial plaque stands for a huge majestic tree gone extinct. An Australian artist composes songs for dying reefs. In December 2018, Olafur Eliasson fetched thirty blocks of ice from Greenland and put them at public squares in London to melt away, hoping it would melt the ice clods in our hearts also. In Canada the creaking sounds of a dying glacier are broadcast live through speakers so that the office goers know what they are walking upon; so that they realize that a part of earth is groaning with pain and agony. Somewhere a glacier stops moving, groans, cracks, melts and dies. At least some people hold a memorial ceremony to commemorate the dying ice. In Oregon a funeral for Clark glacier is held. A coffin full of meltwater from Clark glacier is ferried to the steps of State Capitol building. And somewhere far away a lone tree holds the last baton for its species. It’s Wood’s Cycad, a native of South Africa, the only tree of the species left in the world.

Belated greetings on the World Environment Day

 Wish you all a happy world environment day! Save trees, save mother Earth!

Let's celebrate the Environment Day! Mother earth is the root cause of all our joys. Go close to nature. She needs your healing touch. As Bond Sahab says:

"The more intimate you are with the natural world -- the world that exists without actually having to worry about how to exist -- the more we will come to terms with our own natures."

If Mother Earth stands any chance at all, it lies there if we treat each day of the year as the Environment Day. Everything less than it falls well short the least redemption.

Sow a seed of love. A seed that will one day sprout, spread, bloom, sway to the breeze. It will remain as your best footprint on the planet once you move ahead on your journey in a different dimension. Be a plant parent! Happy environment day to all!

Happy Environment Day

 Wish you all a happy world environment day! Save trees, save mother Earth!

Let's celebrate the Environment Day! Mother earth is the root cause of all our joys. Go close to nature. She needs your healing touch. As Bond Sahab says:

"The more intimate you are with the natural world -- the world that exists without actually having to worry about how to exist -- the more we will come to terms with our own natures."

If Mother Earth stands any chance at all, it lies there if we treat each day of the year as the Environment Day. Everything less than it falls well short the least redemption.

Sow a seed of love. A seed that will one day sprout, spread, bloom, sway to the breeze. It will remain as your best footprint on the planet once you move ahead on your journey in a different dimension. Be a plant parent! Happy environment day to all!

Climate Change

 

Time sweeps the slate clean and draws a new picture, only to do it again. Climate change has seen unprecedented droughts world over—and flooding—especially Europe and America. As rivers and reservoirs dry, there emerge telltale footprints of the largest animals earth has seen, dinosaurs. Weighing dozens of tons and standing taller than even our buildings who would have imagined they would be wiped out one day. A comet or meteorite strike off the coast of Mexico—leaving an almost 100 mile wide and 12 mile deep crater—unleashed  tidal waves and global winter. The dinosaurs vanished from earth.

Presently, as rivers in France and Germany dry up, we see hunger stones exposed—a kind of famine memorial engravings—telling the tales of human sufferings. The engravers left them as a mark of severe drought and famine that struck the region. When the rivers dried up and the humanity hit the rock bottom of miseries, someone engraved this message on an exposed stone in the river: ‘When you see me, weep.’ Another famine stone has the message: ‘When this stone goes under, life will become more colorful again.’

The Earth Overshoot Day

 

The Earth Overshoot Day is the day when we have used all that the ecosystem can replenish and regenerate in one year. On July 28, we have already consumed all that mother earth will be able to renew in a year. It means what mother earth generates in one year we eat it up in almost half of the time. So for the rest of the year we are borrowing from the natural coffers at the cost of future generations.

Mother earth’s bio-capacity is severely overstretched. As per the current consumption levels, it would take almost two earths to sustain us. There are countries that chuck out an entire year’s sustainable resources within just two-three months at the beginning of the year. For the rest of the year, they would be drawing from the deposited pool of resources, the pool that is diminishing rapidly and will surely go empty one day.

Well, I should abandon all gloomy thoughts born of these stats for the time being. An earthworm is not bothered either. After a spell of monsoon rain the earthworm seems all joyful.

The earth is all wet

and the earthworm is all set

to crawl to a new home.

 

It seems a huge effort by the earthworm to move. It has to stretch its length repeatedly and make a humpbacked U in the middle to stretch and bring forth the tail part by a few millimeters with each heave. An ant-swarm crawls out. The breakfast is almost steady, a slightly shifting breakfast it is to them. They would love to eat it alive. They have the numbers with them. Like the politicians have the numbers to eat our public money in one way or the other. There are hundreds of tiny bites. It wriggles with pain. I think we are like the ant-swarm and poor earth is like the earthworm. It’s wriggling with pain as we the human-swarm continue biting it non-stop, twenty-four hours a day and 365 days of the year.

Uncaring children

 

Cultural anthropologists say that the human society functions on the principles of ‘reciprocity’ and ‘obligations’, both at the individual and collective levels. All our relationships work on the principle of ‘reciprocity’. You feel obliged, even indebted, if someone has done you a favor. If someone has given you something, helped you in some way, or even simply smiled at you, the inherent sense of obligation will firmly ask you to return the favor whenever possible in whatever form. Most of our likes and dislikes are based on what people have given us. If they have given us joy, we like them, love them, feel indebted, and return the favor. If they have given us pain, we return the same. But we hardly do the same in case of mother earth. We forget the principle of reciprocity and indebtedness. We just keep on taking and mother earth keeps giving. That is entirely slyly slanted, one-way process. What we give her back is extraordinarily miniscule (in terms of her health) in comparison to what we extract from her.

Just to show our fellow human beings low, we are drawing longer lines of achievement by their side. The fire of competition persistently burning. The planet crashing like a fiery meteorite. We have already chucked out most of the attractive, holistic heritage that fell into our entitlement. We have taken mother nature for granted and the consequences are plainly scattered around for us to see. Her grievous moanings are no faint ripples anymore. These are piercing cries. Hear them!

Climate Change & a Monkey's Personal Pool

 

Monsoon is a crazy, proud lover. It knows 1.3 billion people are seeking its date. It teases sometimes and gets late. This time she sanctioned June 30 as the appointment date with the Delhi NCR. It showered its pining thirsty lovers with soul-pacifying kisses through drops. When the monsoon hits the sandy burning lips, a mystical fragrance of the soil surrendering to water pervades around. Sadly, I missed the smell. A neighbor had lit up his heap of single-use plastic and the toxic fumes rode the backs of the low clouds and killed the trademark smell of the first summer rain. It was nice to see the first monsoon showers but sad to have missed the famous fragrance of the first monsoon rain. In any case, we will have to bear up with hugely curtailed joy in future.

Western Europe is burning in July. For the first time in its documented history, the UK records forty degree plus temperature. France burns at 46°C. Forest fires. Burning grasslands. Denmark also records its maximum temperature in history. The house is on fire. Do we still need more proofs of global warming? Spain, Portugal, Germany all are in the grip of heat that is typical of northern Indian summers. Now is the time to think of global warming. Hypersonic missiles, wars, superpower status won’t have any meaning if all of us get roasted alive.

Half of the world is caught in forest fires. The other half is flooded. The planetary system seems to be crumbling down while we are using time, energy and resources in developing still deadlier weapons. It seems as if the catastrophes born of climate change are not issues at all. It’s like bubbles fighting among themselves in a boiling cauldron.

The glaciers are melting at an unprecedented rate. The Italian-Swiss border in the Alps is denoted along glaciers. Now the glaciers are melting and the borders are thawing and shifting. An Italian mountain ridge is now being pulled into different directions by the opposing nationalities. The melting snows and the shifting drainage patterns have shifted the Italian ridge into the neighboring country. Now, around two-third of the ridge is technically within the Swiss territory. So the man-made boundaries are melting. Mother nature is giving a message that our cartographic lines don’t matter much to her. High time that we all think now in terms of the planet as one entity and consider ourselves as citizens of mother earth first. The rest are all secondary denominations.

We have perilously shrunk within our civilizational interiors leaving the exteriors—everything non-human among flora, fauna and the rest that constitutes earth—as mere utilities. We have gone on the wildest of eternal quests in pursuance of the completely unending path of ambition. We have turned into extravagantly rich-bodied people with shoddily poor souls. And all these natural disasters are merely reflecting the chronic dissonance between what we actually need and what we try to grab out of greed. The seminally formative natural forces lay ravaged. The sprawling canvas of mother earth’s natural painting is replaced by a fractious abstract art drawn with grotesque sense of redrawing anything natural with artificiality—the human-centric abstract art that absolutizes the ultimacy of our madness to keep utilizing natural resources at any cost. The free gifts of mother nature that were once quintessentially common are now swiped away and grafted with our crass mundanities. The virile vibrance of our vigorous negativism eclipses the earth. Where are the starry skies that once crooned moonily? As the centuries old trees fall mother earth sadly applauds the feats of her child, the child who is engaged in a mega-larceny.

Here in our part of the world, the temperature may be around 40°C but it feels like 60°C. You feel being roasted slowly. In the locality there is a vacant plot with plenty of wild growth. The owner thought of putting it in order by cutting the weeds, grass and bushes. As a result, a few snakes, monitor lizards and other reptiles turned homeless. They crept around seeking a new home. It created a big scare among the humans. A big rat snake sneaked into our garden as well. It’s a non-venomous snake. But irrespective of the category of snakes, poisonous or not, our fear is in proportion to their length. The fact is that rat snakes help us by chucking out rats and mice. But their size scares us. We cannot believe that such a big snake can be harmless. Never go by the appearances.

Wherever there is a snake many people gather around because it’s a common enemy. One of my uncles killed it exclaiming, ‘It’s a big one and dangerous!’ All of us felt very bad about the killing. It was the first Monday of shravan. It struck our conscience as a sin but what to do. Our fears turn us helpless and critically limit our choices. But we have a suitable accomplice in all our deeds and misdeeds. We absolved ourselves by quoting certain scriptures that clarify that probably it’s not a sin to kill a snake if it enters your house.

And beyond all these scary climatic issues a monkey has found his personal pool of water to beat the suffocating heat and humidity on this clammy, partially clouded noon. He has expertly disposed off the lid from the rooftop water tank. There he sits on the opening’s rim, his red bum safe on the frame, his tail hanging down, his smart paws holding the edges. He casts the look of owning a rooftop swimming pool. After enjoying a look of supreme solace he goes into the water, wallows for some moments and comes out sleek and shining. I saw him enjoying this for at least half an hour which included about ten dips in the water. The family of course would be using monkey-treated water.  

An ode to a snail

 

Next time you come across a snail give it a bit more respect than you did earlier. They move slowly as if carrying carefully cultivated, standstill reflections but they hold the recipe of beauty as well. Latest skincare products use snail mucin, snail secretion filtrate, which is found to be effective in skin healing, regeneration, works as a nice exfoliant, soothes and hydrates the skin, has anti-aging properties, removes acne scars and much more. Currently the Korean culture is high-riding the fame horse from music to movies. Snails have been a part of Korean beauty concoctions since ancient times. O thou conjuring satraps, whenever you come across a snail next time, slow down your pace to its own, take a pause, move a few centimeters alongside the guy always at ease, salute it. Maybe being balanced, poised and at pause holds the secret secretion of beauty.

The smart beetle

 Anyone who has worked in the corporate must have heard about ‘smart work’ scoring over ‘hard work’. In the competitive corridors of corporate buildings the so-called smart guys rule supreme. The victory of smart work over hard work spawns many an anecdote. Hard work is symbolically very dramatic. But it’s the smart work that pulls the strings of the mules. It carries a progressive veneer; smartness coming handily convenient. Just like this little rove beetle does. The ants are the hardworking laborers of the insect world. So inevitably there are supposed to be smart corporate guys among insects to take advantage of poor hardworking ants.

The rove beetle is very smart. Using its skill of smell and touch it dupes the ants into taking himself as an ant larvae. The befooled ants protect the impostor and nourish him like their own. The poor ant parents believing they are raising a handsome kid. Meanwhile, apart from all the bounties ferried by the tireless workers, the rove beetle feasts upon the ant eggs and their young ones. Isn’t it a real smart work? Now take a close look at the successful corporate guys around you!

Natural tricksteries in nature

 There is a beautiful set of program hatched by two species of fish. This is a mutual agreement among a species of larger fish and a much smaller fish. Normally the bigger fish eat the smaller ones. But here the predator-prey equation has been postponed for mutual benefits. It’s a ceasefire; burying the hatchet for gains beyond hunger and food. The group of bigger fish becomes stationary, almost sedately retired, and opens their mouth and allows the smaller fish to enter their jaws. Once inside, the little cleaners pick up fungus and other parasites from the mouth. They continue their cleaning services all over the body as well. One party gets its dinner and the other gets cleaned up.

The question is, how has been this fear of the smaller fish for the bigger one stalled in the evolutionary survival chain? To signal that they mean to perform a clean-up service operation, the smaller fish perform a kind of ‘undulating dance’. The bigger fish forgets its hunger and the more pressing issues of cleanliness strike home the message. They stop swimming, open their jaws and turn relaxing like one lies for massage and pedicure.

But then there are always very keen observers of others’ behavior also. A little fish named sabre-toothed blenny has been keeping a keen eye on the housekeeping, cleaning and picking dance of the real cleaner fishes. So here they play smart and perform the same dance. The bigger fish allow them to come near without eating them. They mistake the looters for ministering angels. The cunning blenny then takes a bite of flesh from the unsuspecting host’s belly and scampers away. Well, this would count as paying the costs of cleaning services. But to a different species though.

It seems we can no longer solely count upon human frailties for the darker shades of character. We have co-sharers of the burden. There are species that are anciently ingenious in their machinations to loot, plunder, deceive and run away with their booty. In the game of survival, there is a highly creative incandescence that lights up the cells in all types of manifestations around. 

Deadly lovers

 

The female fireflies of the genus Photinus have a lovely love-thirsty courtship code carrying a sensuous shine, when they are ready to mate, to send loftily high, seductive signals to the males regarding their willingness for lovemaking. This courtship blinking triggers a surrender mood in the males and they run to embrace love. Then there are killer females of the firefly genus Photuris. They seem to have cracked the code. They also send the all goody apparently Photinus-sounding love signals. Seeking the divine direction of an unquenchable love-thirst, the Photinus males flutter to embrace love. They pursue the multifarious glamour with eclectic passion. They miss the desired destination by a long-long mark and it soon turns to death’s ever-lasting final embrace. Then the sensuously stylish ladies, the Photuris females, eat them with awful female valor. The sensuous flowers turn out to be thorn traps. The males hardly getting a chance to even nurture any kind of repenting reflections over their choice. Well, there are always bound to be stormy ripples in the sea of love. This is what we call cracking the code of love to eat your man. And we always relate the beastly, clawy contrivance to the homo sapiens only! All the shades of human character seem to be already etched in nature. All the fifty shades of gray and more seem to be structured inherently in the subconscious entrenchments of the energy field walloping around us. Isn’t this creation a motley mess of wonders?

Year-long summers

 We are piling up data like no other hunter-gatherer, among any species on earth, collects anything. And on top of that we have computers to store data, so here come more and more numbers with each passing second. One little statistical fact: June 19 was the first and the only day since March 11 when the maximum temperature was 30°C, a day of least maximum temperature during the interval. I mean it happens to be the least maximum temperature in the interval from March 11 to June 19. Nothing surprising here, it’s a routine burning summer in north Indian plains. My only worry is that the most of March had more than 30°C temperature. It makes March a summer month. Where is our spring in that case? We have to shift it to the second fortnight of February which once used to be the peak of winters. There would be a time in the coming decades when the coldest days of January, as they stand now, would qualify as a brief spring. Finally we will have year-long summers. These are the perils of global warming. It’s fearsomely hard-hitting. The fragile frontiers of varied seasons will give in. The illustrious legacy of winters, springs and autumns will be held by myths. It surely will happen unless we plant trees, save forests, cut pollution, abandon our deceiving double standards, give an ear to the circumspecting nerves, and on top of that somehow systematically tame the bug of consumerist greed in our brain. 

The elephant lost a human right

 So the court has ruled that Happy is not a person, he is an elephant. A court was hearing a petition whether the zoo-confined pachyderm in the US could have human rights superseding his animal rights. Had the verdict gone in his favor, he would have been released in semi-freedom in a big sanctuary. Alas, that wasn’t to be! I think all animals should have human rights and the humans, with their huge sets of ominous rumblings, will do pretty well with animal rights. After all, we are the strongest animal among the booming bedlam on earth. Mother earth is replete with the abundant sagas born of our criminal candor and odious excesses. So who else is the biggest claimant of animal rights?

Fusillade of the furtive flautist

As the furtive flautist goes raising dust on the path of time with his rag-tag show, many a petite songstress loses their songs and melodies. The forests turn quiet and a silence reigns with its unabashedly parochial throbbing. Mother nature looks a travel-worn sailor not able to recall or even imagine pure mythological horizons of the past, a wonderfully wild past with its generic sacredness. Then one species rose supreme with its sadistic leer. With clockwork precision it lugged it out and lugged it in by scattering the deviants of its overworking brain. The forests vanished and devolved into potted plants. Spring sunshine and lovely desert nights encradling sand and stars became one and the same.

There is an incessant face-off between mankind and nature. We are the new gods with our particular perceptions and selective denunciations. The new god sordidly swarming over everything in its path. And its deeds almost a devilish enclosure for mother nature. The disciple that started with a rudderless reverence to the original god and then passing through dark doorways declared himself to be the new godly sovereign. We are too big a source of change on this little planet. The force of our hand is visible through rampant global warming, furious tornados, forest fires, poisoned air and polluted seas. The forces of evolution have gone into a tizzy. The wheel of evolution is spinning too fast. Many species are in a desperate spell of adaption and evolution to extend their survival for some more time. But that seems futile in the face of massively changed environment.

In a matter of around 150 years, the beak size of Australian parrots has grown by 4-10 percent. All this is to cope up with the increased heat. In a matter of just half a century, the wings of round-leaf bats have increased by one percent. In a short span we have now larger billed finches adapting to survive in hotter climate. Larger beaks help them to dissipate excess heat. Brightly colorful butterfly fish are usually aggressive in the seas. They stoutly defend their territory with a squirming valor. Now they are becoming less aggressive. This is due to the menace of coral bleaching going at a big scale. They are less on calories and that turns them docile. You need a lot of energy to fuel your aggression and territorial ambitions.

In warmer Alaskan regions now more berries ripen and the bears eat more of berries than salmons. As a result they turn lethargic and plump. It needs less effort in feasting upon berries than chasing salmons. Who is interested in unavailing ransackings and flunging forth for slippery agile preys when you have unmoving berries harking your attention? There was a time when in the subarctic region one’s next door neighbor was many miles up or down the line. Now there are harassing hundreds every square mile and our footprints write title deeds of ownerships in every nook corner of the icy wilderness.

The conditions have turned windier and stormier, so a lizard named Anoleshas now has bigger toepads and more muscular front legs to cling onto survival chances among the terribly shaken vegetation. To beat hurricanes you need stronger toepads.

Ever lost in our maneuvering mists, we have unleashed evolve-or-perish situation for scores of species. Of course, most of the species won’t be able to keep pace with such highly accelerated evolution rates and would become extinct in the coming decades.

In response to the changing sea water temperatures, squids are now coming of age faster and changing their food pattern.

Galgapos finches are adding to their beak size. Small beaks mean less chances of survival in a boiling world.

Turtle hatching in warmer seas results in more females. With warming seas we will have almost many hundreds of females for a male. So rising temperatures are now determining sex in the species.

It seems a gloomy tale. However, let’s make the most of what is still left—aesthetically.

A whisper for peace

 At the current rate of global warming, we will have ice-free summers in the Arctic in the next decade. The snows are drifting away from our planet. First it disappeared from the exotic peak of Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa. The glaciers are gasping under the heat. In the same series, the summer snows will vanish from the Arctic and so will the majestic polar bear. But for those who run this world it's almost a nonissue. Who cares for vanishing snows? Especially when there are wars to pacify individual and institutional egos, when there are more territories to grab, more mines to be dug into earth’s gut to take out the still remaining things of utility.

The modern Czar has burnt down an entire country in pursuit of impearlist dreams. Beautiful homes, lovely orchards and gardens have been charred by falling bombs and missiles. Homes have turned into rubble. Death and destruction is dancing freely in Ukraine. The ants, dogs, wild animals, homes, cities, gardens, agriculture farms all are charred to ghastly rubble of broken dreams and decaying humanity, while the Czar is going full throttle, creating present time hell to capture past glory.

Sadly, the mankind is ill-fated to live in disorder and strife. It seems to be in our genes. We abhor peace and harmony. To be human seems to be unruly, chaotic, aggressive and angry. We keep creating more and more chaos with modern inventions and discoveries. Power blocks and superpower aspirants are sharpening their swords to once again unleash blood and mayhem. Just like it’s been going for thousands of years. We seem to be under the curse of this self-destructive mind that keeps spinning out fears and phobias, prompting us to guard ourselves and attack others.

Despite all scientific advancement, we have the same archaic old malady of ego, violence, selfishness, hate and anger. Earlier we killed with stones and sticks. Now the same hate can annihilate entire earth by just pushing a button. What has changed? Nothing. It’s the very same fear, agony, insecurities and discontent. Modern civilization seems a pile of dry fodder to burn at mere sparks. All ready to defend themselves and grab more clout and influence. The plague of unrelenting ambition infecting each and everything; diseasing all from individuals to groups to nations to blocks. And a dying planet helplessly watches all this, sadly marveling at the species that got so ambitious to start chucking out its own house. A behemoth snake twisting and coiling to attack its own tail and devouring its own back from its front.

The air we inhale is poisoned, the food we eat is full of chemicals, the people we stay among have stressed, burnt-out minds, all ready to go blasting at the slightest provocation. The seas are polluted. The sea creatures die slowly. The polar ice melts. The polar bear takes last breaths. We too will meet the same fate if the way we run this world isn’t overhauled completely.

More missiles, more bombs, more jets, more hate, more anger, more greed. More noise while bird songs go achingly silent. What will be the outcome? Destruction. Strictly calculated from the scientific equation of input and output. Out of so much systematic hate only destruction can be the logical outcome.

Pristine forests vanished, beautiful birds became extinct, majestic animals went off the scene, and so did pure air, water and peace. On this dying planet, the natural physiology of the mankind will be unsustainable within a few decades. A weird semi-human, semi-machine species equipped with artificial intelligence will replace we the real flesh and blood ones. We have to take it as the game of evolution only. Take it any way but that’s how it will happen.

So as one of the last lucky generations to see blue skies, forests, streams and the free seas make the most of it. Cribbing won’t help. What’s done is done. Mother planet has suffered irreversible damage. So smile thou the last of real homo sapiens and make the most of what is left. Go into the forests and hug giant trees standing for centuries but won’t be there for long. Swim in the streams that aren’t stinking nullah yet. Inhale pure air in some solitary valley, keeping its secrets still intact somehow. Listen to the whispers of air that still has free oxygen.

And never forget to smile at people because they still are humans and would appear godly in comparison to the mechanized monsters of the next centuries. The new species will write our history then. It will be the sorry tale of a species that went extinct because of its inherent weakness to be stronger and stronger. But till then enjoy whatever little is left brothers and sisters. And let the angry leaders fight. They will fight come whatever it may.

A little pilgrimage

 There is an open large sewage drain, the mother drain of all the smaller sewage drains and nullahs, in the town. It flows with its black, stinking sludge. An eliminatory canal taking away the waste and refuge emanating from the overworked urban bowels. People grimace and cover their noses as they pass near it. But this impurity is what defines the purity of holy waters. There are little temples nearby. Here the people enter, open their soul and breathing to the incense smoke in front of the idols. 

I walked for a considerable length by the big open sewage nullah. It's a strong smell. The smell of our stress, pain and struggles. Of overburdened humanity. Of mass transformation of life into mere struggle. I love walking by holy rivers. But this also is an avatar of mother stream. The all-accepting avatar of primordial mother who is happy to accept all the dump Her children put on her. A mother unbothered about the urine and shit dumped on her by the infant child. My head spins due to the strong odor after 15 minutes. But this also is a little pilgrimage for Maa's blackened avatar. She is smiling even with all her filth. But she is after all the very same mother whose divinity flows in crystal clear mountain streams. As I move away it seems like a little pilgrimage I have performed.

Walking through the natural remnants

Cornered by stressful notes and peppered with pungent perspectives, I decide to beat my sense of victimhood by opening myself to the friendly humor of the farmlands surrounding the village. There is intense agriculture. Under the haunting patriarchy of the supreme species on the earth, the mother soil carrying a long haul of miseries, burdens and unmet dreams. Where will you dump your feeling of victimhood when the earth itself seems carrying the same burden?

Gone are the days of dark and deep woods. The wastelands and fallow lands, which were the last refuge of the wilderness until a decade ago, have shrunk to invisibility. The anarchist has shrewdly turned mother nature into a shadowy realm where everything is a mere utopia, a poetic fancy, judged from the mainstream perspectives. Still there are some scanty patches, almost imagistic, which pay a feeble lip service to the not so distant past when we had smatterings of scrub forest in the area. There are solitary trees and beaten down bushes by the pathsides and field embankments. It is enough to leave me bemused.

In future, the things will take a shape when even these trees that can be counted on fingers will be viewed as forests of the past. Gladly there are still many birds left and their calls somehow sound reassuring. As the battering ram goes estranging itself from the roots that have supported its evolution and growth, tottering and honking menacingly, spewing out darker and darker parables, the songs of the birds still hold feeble musical threads linking our imperiled existence to the divine melody emanating from a distant corner in the universe.

I spot an Indian roller, a striking Cambridge-and-Oxford-blue bird. It was obdurately peeking into a bush from an electricity wire, its biggish head tilted at an angle, just about to pounce upon some frog or lizard. It batters the prey on some nearby branch to have a nice supper. The colorful bird gives an assortment of extolling, raucous chuckles and croaks. It’s very volatile in proposing to its remote and cold love interest. It’s a very indulgent courtship—a spectacular display involving nose-diving and somersaulting while letting out grating harsh screams. It seems to possess a pretty informed attitude. Well, you see a beautiful bird and it seems all isn’t lost yet.

Till a decade back there was a sort of wasteland stretching for about hundred acres in this area. It presented a beautiful landscape picture entirely modeled by the untamed forces of nature. I remember wandering around in that pleasant desolation. It was a wonderfully sublime feeling there. That small world of little insects, rodents and reptiles had its very own gleaming myths and anecdotes for this small-time writer. During the monsoons it would turn into a little marshland. It further accentuated the isolation treasured in its little bushy coffers. The water wouldn’t dry before the spring or sometimes even till early summer. Thousands of birdie guests displayed their adventurous quirks. What a high-pitched quacking thoroughfare it used to be!

The human population grew further and the jabbering human hands arrived to cut these last tufts of hair left on the balding head of mother nature. The pressure on the farmlands grew manifold. The low-lying area was filled with earth. Its level was raised to meet our ever-increasing demands from the cropped land to meet the perennial shortage of produce from the farms. Now the lashing raindrops just fill the furrows in the cropped fields and gone are the little ponds and puddles.

A couple of years back there still were the last remains of that scrub forest. It was a little patch of roughly three acres left out as the remnant of the fledgling wasteland of yore. A few dozen ducks and cormorants swam in its languid waters. A few waders were busy on its grassy banks.

Come now to the present. A netting has been set up above the water. The human heart seems to be possessed by the spirit of a licentious hyena that forces the mankind to put barb over everything on the earth to nail down all fellow claimants to resources on the planet. These are imprisoned waters, denied to the birds. The wires shine under the sun with beguiling perspectives, drawing a kind of superfluous resonance in the air that claws down all softer emotions with its unsentimental tautness. So we have fisheries even here in this tiny bowl of a pond. The deadly strings over it would cut down the wings of the transgressors.

There seems to be an overdose of humanity. There are no more any winged guests from the Himalayas. A lone common teal is wading through the sullen waters. A morose kingfisher vainly ogles into the muddled depth from an electricity line. Is it free to dive? Diving into the barbed waters would mean the beautiful bird itself turning into a prey, suddenly catapulted from its status of predator a moment before. There are no foragers on the banks. There is just a greater coucal sneaking among the bushes looking for eggs in little nests. What a decline in a decade—from thousands to dozens to a common teal. I’m sure the next year even this singular common teal will also be gone. There will be more people, more enterprise.

The silence around me is imbued with a sense of loss. I can vividly see the piteous corrosion of wilderness around me. The human juggernaut is plonking ahead with a sure-footed assertiveness. It hammers home the point of human triumph and majestically ticks off the last lines of natural defense that raise its challenge on the way. The sweeping fury of a brutal landscape startles me and I take hasty steps to further explore some untamed corner in the countryside.

A little air purifier

 

Mother nature's little air purifier in front of our place. These green leaves are an extension of our lungs. But people take nature for granted and hardly anyone speaks in favour of these green tissues of our lungs. People usually complain of a couple of Cobras that stay here. A few sightings and people go paranoid. Why stretch your fears beyond a point. Just be careful a bit more, that's all. Use torch while moving in the dark. Walk gently to allow them to creep away as you approach. And they eat mice with relish. The area is almost mouse-free. And mother nature knows more than us. There were mice that's why there are snakes. And to ensure that the snakes don't crawl at each human step there are plenty of peacocks doing the rounds. They must be eating many little snake hatchlings to keep the number finely balanced. But who is there to keep a check on us? In our case only we can do it, individually and collectively.