The savior of a poetic heart

 

The sea of greenery is receding very fast. The trees are vanishing. We are now living in a barren and brown world. Today another tree was chopped down. A blackberry tree that stood at one corner of a cropped field, lovingly shading the engine room. Here the farmer and his friends enjoyed cool shade and delicious blackberries in the summer. Nearby, some plates of a field solar pump occupied a little portion of the field, giving a clean source of energy. Then the farmer calculated, like we humans usually do. ‘These solar plates waste the corner of the field where I can’t sow my crops. Let me put them on the roof of the room. That will clear the field corner for sowing.’ So he decided to chop down the tree because it shadowed the roof where he planned to relocate the solar plates. And in this way, dear readers, the tree was chopped down. It was just preparing to give them another season of ripe, delicious blackberries. There it lay with its raw, green fruits. Its leaves losing life under the scorching sun. Wilting and melting. We humans very easily forget about all the things that a tree has given us for years--shade, fruits, clean air. We would chop down a tree to clear a few square feet of farmland to sow some more pesticide-soaked crops.

Mother earth has been critically overexploited. Every square inch is under stress because we humans have broken all sustainable barriers. Consequently, even the plants, birds, animals, reptiles, insects, bugs, fungi, bacteria and virus are fighting in a cramped corner. The birds are fighting for some odd nesting site that is available in the urban jungles. Under our barn roof, there is a mud nest clinging to a steel rafter. Earlier the bird nests were just temporary camps set up by the winged nomads roaming freely in the skies. But things have changed. The skies have wires and planes. The houses are plastered. The trees are vanishing. So even nests are becoming costlier, on account of their rarity, and hence almost permanent properties. The swallows couple always returns for their next hatchings here. Sometimes the swallows fight among themselves to grab the property. It’s a very noisy fight. Then recently the house sparrows thought of taking it by force. Soon the fight between the sparrow and swallow couples tuned into a community affair between the two species. A few sparrows and some swallows fought for a couple of days. Finally, a sparrow couple has grabbed the property—after another battle among themselves. It’s a small mud nest. It doesn’t have enough space for a grass nest which the sparrows are trying to fix on the top of it. They keep fetching dry grass and the stalks keep falling down. I am sure they will realize the futility of it all—that it was a useless capture. It’s so symbolic of what we do in our competition and fight with our fellow humans.  

These are sad reflections for a poetic man walking on some odd uncluttered trail among the farmlands. But what does a poet need to uplift his spirits? Not much. Just coming across a new flower uplifts the spirits. I come across a beautiful painted leaf flower! A natural coating of bright red on the green leaf! A summer beauty! And we think we have innovated the art and craft of painting our houses. I think we are mere small imitators of the grand design that mother nature is. This flower helps me in regaining my smile after the tree-cutting episode.

And then the ever-smiling sadabahar says, ‘Don't worry! Cheer up! There is hope for humanity till there is even a single flower on the earth!’

And these little trumpets of four o'clock flowers give a little pep talk: 'See brother, we don't lose our smiles even in this 40 degree Celsius heat. We have adapted our smiles to thrive in this fire. Similarly, you too need to adapt your flowery heart to the fire that's going around in human affairs!'  

An unassuming, humble flower

 

The least cared flowers blossom the most! Sadabahar, nicknamed by so many like a homeless street urchin: Catharanthus roseus, bright eyes, Cape periwinkle, graveyard plant, Madagascar periwinkle, old maid, pink periwinkle, rose periwinkle. Cut them, leave them waterless, don't look and appreciate them, forget them, treat them cheaper than grass, they will bear all insults and ignominy just to smile all through the year. Seasonless beauties! Mollycoddle your nursery rose like the Apple of your eye, they don't feel jealous. Feed the cherished and highly pampered exotic flowers with the nectar of your love and affection, these orphans still don't mind. Let your pruner go carelessly over their eager to play petals, cutting and bruising them, they still don't lose their smile. They are happy with what mother Earth has given them. They don't need more. And still how much we hanker after the spoilt dandies who bring many tears in our eyes to give a solitary smile in return!

The story of a little plant

 Hi, I’m Jasmine, a little flower in a tiny garden in a modest house. I have a message to pass. Or do you think I smile for nothing? I have a sweetly whispering tale to tell! Or do you think I have such nice scent in my petals for nothing? But sweet tales are of no use these days; even children are being taught to be rugged puppeteers to create their own unique miracles. So I would, for the time being, prefer to give an invidiously yawning message. These are not my own reflections, these are inspired by a dew drowsed rose last night, an old one, who ruffled his old petals to unfurl the tale of mankind’s doomed destiny.  

The summer has fire in its heart-kiln. Hottest dusty winds swerve and swirl with an all-consuming passion. Temperature creeps like a restless climber to boil all and everything. The sun shoots off billowing streams of sorrowful rays to soak the last ounce of moisture to appease his current mistress, the unsparing summer. The weather’s torturing squeals tame even a bull that pants with thirsty foam on the muzzle. 

I know Corona has had full-fledged orgy leaving you guys caught in devilish bewilderment. I but have the indefatigable and irrepressible grain of the Holy Spirit. It still lies at my petalous core because I have retained some room for it to keep it thriving, unlike you guys who have stuffed yours to the gills. The grain of Holy Spirit stands firmly forthright. Otherwise why would I smile with a spirit so deeply exuberant? I am not bothered much about the nightmarish twists and angry shoves of the noon-time hot wind that builds up with a barraging crescendo. 

Amidst all this groaning commotion, I stay unmindful of the garish and grotesque, and always stay mindful of the opulent aura and nostalgic contours of the fresh sips of early morning cool breeze. It caresses me with luxurious swags. I have a single-pointed—unlike the multi-pronged memory of yours—sharp memory that helps me recall all treasure of my good fate, while the testing noontime passes over my petals with a gibberish squelch. Unfavorable time with its tendency of criminal confiscation can’t erase the songs in my heart which the cool early morning etches on me with its hurryless, sweetly crawling pen. 

You may have an eternally rampaging brain, but where is that eternal equanimity of the soul which even a tiny flower like me is blessed with? You are firmly in the grip of the riotous renaissance of your passions, but do you have the time even to get a genuine spiritually suffused and nectar-imbibed smile like I possess? Your rapier sharp reflexes, born of your insecurities, have turned you the ruling supernovas of the earth. But restless journeyman, mind thy faltering strides and the fanatic noose hanging down the line as a kind of primordial penalty for rising too high and sinking too low at the same time to be the ugly emissary of some evil, spurious speedster. Take care, thy condemnatory encroachment is continually coiling around your own self. 

You guys are superbly theatrical with your eloquent arguments. You are energetically resourceful and proclaim your resounding resourcefulness. But can you even smile with this feeling that you are light-headed and unburdened of some insurmountable restlessness? Can you ever be free of the guilt about the longly repressed real self? Isn’t all your so called growth and development a mere flailing of arms at the unbreakable bars of the perpetual prison?

You are everything and I am nothing. I am a tiny speck of formless and relationless love. I have the golden reminiscences of the slow-moving remotest wilds. I smile fulsomely beyond the teasing tussles of the cringing anarchist who is foredoomed to end in the failure’s meat grinder because he churns his own ill-fate by pulling strings this way and that way to break everything in two, in pleasure pain, light dark, love hate, etc., etc. 

I am deep in the docile domesticity of just being as I am; pulsating dynamics of the eternal light flood through my petals. With your copious consumption and arrogant aloofness, you loop around your desires’ dragnet and kill the spirit of the forests. ‘Animism!’ I coo even at my modest most enthusiasm. ‘Humanism!’ is all you can manage even at your best. My worst is still better than your best. Engaged in your piercingly protracted struggle, you may proclaim self-righteousness in your own courts, but in the eyes of the supreme colorist, you are nothing more than a perilous pimp of criminality. Your self-created Gods and Goddesses are nothing more than goblins and elves of fairy tales. 

With my silent spiritual reflections, beyond the drag of expectations egging one to write permanent lines on the shifting sands of time, I enjoy the flourishing inspiration of my soul. And sorry, I turned condemnatory like you guys for some time! Now forgive me and inhale the olfactory nectar that I offer in full humility!

Tiny superheroes

 

Let us talk of tiny superheroes. They are not visible but can outfox even the wildest imagination. Conan the Bacterium is a little multi-celled superhero that grabbed the show from its discovery in the cow and elephant dung. It kept its bright orange smile in the face of sterilization, exposure to dangerous radiation and extreme temperatures. The Japanese researchers put it up for a Sumo fight in the space. It was left sticking to the outer walls of the International Space Station. It flashed its orange smile even after three years when they rechecked it. Now they estimate that it can survive for millions of years on the Mars. I think Conan the Barbarian (in a movie)did full justice to the name. Now, I’m convinced that the original shot of life was some such superhero microbe that came darting on the back of a burning meteorite and landed on this little planet.

Bacillus Subtilis breaks down toxic industrial waste and crude oil by almost 85 percent. Hasn’t it got wonders in its metabolic pathways?

Rhodococcus Ruber has probably the strongest gut on earth. It has a flair for eating and digesting plastic. It breaks plastic into nontoxic waste.

Geobacter is named Iron-Man Bacteria. It has a flair for flirting with toxic cobalt. It hunts like a great miner. It sucks cobalt from the surroundings and makes a cobalt suit with it and wraps itself in it. In this way it stops the poison from seeping into its cells. A cobalt suit it wears! Can you believe it?

Methanotrophs is methane guzzler. The best and the most helpful addict to substances. The more it abuses, the better it’s for us. As the permafrost melts in the Arctic, it releases massive amount of methane, the notorious greenhouse gas. And there in the frigid environment, this unsung hero fights for us by consuming methane.

Mother's Day

 

Mother’s Day falls on May 14. Maa left us in January 2020. With Mother gone, one is suddenly less loved, forever. Because who else will love you so selflessly? The space that a mother leaves in one’s heart stays vacant forever. It cannot be filled. Till your mother is around, and even if you yourself are old, you hardly feel that you are old. After all you are still someone’s child and your mother would show the same care like she did when you were small. So how can you feel old?

I keep convincing myself that Mother is now part of everything around me. In her human form she gave me birth, reared me, protected me, nurtured me. She still does the same as Dharti Mata, Mother Earth. So to me Mother’s Day and Earth’s Day are just the same. In her lap I walk, enjoy, shit, pee, cry, laugh, throw tantrums. The very same child of yore.

It pains to see Mother Earth getting older and older, her strength failing to support the errant kids. But She will give her all till She lives. I’m not a power aspirant. I know I cannot handle it. But if ever I’m given some authority I would make cutting the trees without justified permission a punishable offence. I know it’s hardly possible. But this type of daydreaming helps me in imagining a lush green earth at night.

An ode to the spring

 Summer the moth is passionately kissing the dewy petals of spring blossoms in my courtyard!!! The heat of its greedy passion is building up!! Aye, summers plz stay away from my flowers for some more time!!

All pains and suffering lose their meaning in the face of such smiles. Wake up to a beautiful spring morning. The worst of frosty nights are over. The sun shines warmly. The air is fresh. The skies bathed in repainted blue. The trees assertive through new saplings. The birds ecstatic. And with a kissable smile, Mother Nature sends her assurance through a belated spring. The message of love, life, living and compassion. Listen to it. Read it written all over. Her child is sick. She has redecorated the garden with utmost care. So when the child comes out of the sick bed, there will be plenty of fun and frolics. She just just put her child to bed for rest and recuperation. Most importantly, she has given the little picture of alphabets for the child to revise and recollect the basics of existence, the simplest things which the child has forgotten as it made its postdocs thesis too complex. Time to shed the burden. High time to smile more. Acquire the natural cosmetics of health and glow with peace of mind. To hug the trees. Kiss the flowers. Listen to the singing rivulets. To lie on grass and stare at the vast canvas of the sky. To breathe in life and let go of anger, hate and jealousy. To shed animosity. To love animals. To allow Mother Nature to stay undisturbed in pristine forests. To maintain the sanctity of the seas. To distribute dignity to the masses instead of amassing wealth in select pockets. To make this little home earth a paradise instead of seeking heaven in the cosmos. To liberate faith from the clutches of dogma. To replace paranoid competition by balmy cooperation. To rest, repose for creative imagination. To walk joyfully instead of huffing and puffing to another same boring destination. To be joyful and help others be the same. To complete the journey so joyfully and fully that the culmination loses its pain. To reach the destination full of grace, dignity and with a smile. To say goodbye not with a painful sigh, but with smiling tears of feeling blessed!

The storm screeched through the night,

Poured its fury through sadistic love bite,

Undefeated but smiles the beauty,

Still doing its fragrant duty,

Her holy petals bear 

the storm's violating drops without fear,

Holy beads now they are,

Smiles, smiles and no war!

There is always hope,

As long as nature holds the rope

through its smile pure, 

Survive we will for sure!

A sad tree

 

The mourning tree...it was once a huge, luxurious semal (silk cotton tree). In March and April it used to smile with big, red, luscious flowers. Then the sand mafia came. Greedy for the river silt piled around this tree, they scraped away earth, cutting its big roots. The tree survived somehow. But it hasn't smiled even once, not a single flower, during the last two years. And now when the spring is at its peak and flowers are abloom on uninjured semal trees, this sad tree stands without even a single leaf, forget about flowers. It's its way of showing its mourning over the loss. It still greets me with its sad barren silhouette. I feel its pain. With a little extension of our sensitivity, we can feel and be aware of the joys and sorrows of the non human component of life on earth. The flowers are their smiles. The sap oozing from the cuts on the bark are their tears. Their luxurious canopy swaying to the winds is their dance. The ripe fruits, shadow and fresh air is their kindness. It's all there. We just need to be aware of it.

I put my hand on its hard bark. A handshake. An acknowledgment of we humans' rapacious ways. I feel sorry from the side of the humans. 'Don't worry, I am trying to smile with flowers and one fine day I will welcome you on this solitary trail with my flowers!' it seems to say. Well, best of luck you fighter tree. You are injured but big and strong. Keep your faith alive. Let's hope for the best during the next spring. And till then our handshake and greetings continue...in my heart and your wooden tissues, let this friendship stay fresh!. It's a lovely friendship and I'm honoured to be your friend, privileged to feel your pain and would be joyous in sharing your spring smiles.

The story of a wounded tree

 

This is for the history-minded common people who care to know about small things. We trees are highly underpaid and under-appreciated. What’s something preposterous is that it’s we who have sired the evolution of mankind and now we depend on him for our survival. We are numbered now—from that countless status when mother earth was lush green earlier—and there will be a time when the heritage lobby will be fighting to keep our ruins as a memorial for the past when mother earth was alive. There will be machines all around and human brain itself will be replaced by the artificial intelligence.

I’m a seemal (silk cotton) tree standing by the canal-side pathway. It used to be a beautiful thin ribbon of solitude between the canals overgrown with few trees and lots of grass, bushes and reeds. A poetic man would walk in somber profundity on the path. Then the developers hoeing the dirty grind of parasitic business arrived. The sand mafia would arrive at night and scoop away the sand from the canals and the path between them. The chauvinistic pigs would scrape out as much grains of sand as possible to build their big buildings. The earthmover’s claws were lucid, pertinent and driven by soulless precision. It would work with pure sense of abstraction. Its zealousness would cut the upper lateral roots of we trees to dig out more and more sand to fill the truck to the brim. The solitudional luminosity for the lone poetic man was gone; the grass, reeds and bushes obliterated; the smaller trees fell and bigger ones like me survived the onslaught with cut limbs and big gaping wounds. The cast and crew of development are too big actors now.

When the poetic man came and saw my big roots exposed and cut, he put a healing sad hand on my trunk. The edifying notes of his love touched my innermost rings in the trunk. He made a very little effort, this is all he could manage being a poetic man, and sweated for a couple of hours to gather soil around my wounded roots. For me the spiritual symbolism of this love is beyond its physical limits. It feels good to be cared and one’s pain acknowledged. But a small group of thugs took away even that little heap of earth this man’s poetic hands had built around me. I think they did it specifically to make it seem self-mocking to the poet—that your kind of emotions are meaningless in the modern age; that this artistic outlet is nothing more than a speck of dust in the face of the horses of greed in full trot. Since then I have tried to muster up courage to the extent of granitic endurance just for that poetic man who sometimes comes and puts a friendly hand on my bark. But I missed my flowers this season, the beautiful big red flowers, one of which I had intentionally dropped on his head as he walked under me. That’s when we became friends. So there have been no flowers because I have been using all my energies in keeping myself up with the remaining roots. My foliage also has been the same for the last one year. It’s pale without any new shoots. I’m still in mourning, you know.

They have cut a little square on my bark, a sort of numbered nameplate declaring my number, a kind of my leasehold to stand on this small portion of earth till they decide to terminate it any time. I sanctify their insinuations and grotesqueness by oozing my sap, my tears, through the square marking. This disquieting incision on my skin keeps reminding me that I’m their numbered property under some forest law that easily allows some thugs to lacerate me. I have a message for the bloodhound. I let out a yellowish sap through this little square of licensing cut. It coagulates to a meaty sanguine blob. I have obliterated their despicable number that they had assigned me. It’s my revolt. I don’t agree to their lease contract under whatever forest laws they have. The law that doesn’t provide me any protection and leaves me open to be vandalized by any thug whose spirit itches to play truant.

The poetic man sometimes comes and puts his gentle fingers on the protruding sanguine crust from my guts. I see his mournful countenance. This human touch is astonishing. It snaps off the thread of pain for a few moments. How I wish more humans could touch we trees like this! How I wish that more humans realized we are half of their lungs!

Reparation and redemption

 

Greying, thinning hair and pepper and salt beard. These are the changes in me that I reflect over. It’s just natural to spot the change within and without. But aren’t the little saplings of banyan and peepul that I had planted are handsome young trees now? Yes, they are! They are the expression of my youth. They are me. If you ever get bothered about age, do something fresh and young in nature, where you will always see the traces of your youth expressed in those creations. Plant trees, for example. Keep doing it periodically so that you always have some young tree lad youthfully swaying to the breeze as an expression of the youth of your spirit.

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!