Back To The Roots

On World Environment Day, I woke up to the smell of burning plastic. It was most probably coming from  the garbage dump outside the boundary wall of our building, though I was too diffident to go look.

It is not meant to be there, that dump but it grows unmonitored, unchecked everyday. Spilling over the road, claiming space meant for pedestrians and vehicles. Many complaints have been registered against it but it is still there. Yes, a garbage truck comes and attends to it but the next morning, you find more garbage systematically dumped there. I don’t know if a big garbage dumpster in that space will help or if citizens need to now start monitoring where their trash goes but at times, someone in their wisdom sets it on fire and the hole in the ozone layer grows just a wee bit wider.

 Before the smoke filled my nostrils and woke me up, I was also dreaming that two beautiful, full gown trees were being brutally pulled down and the sense of helplessness I felt then did not leave even in wakefulness. Bangalore’s lung spaces are increasingly being denuded, interfered with and it is commonplace to see hacked and murdered trees dying in pieces by the roadside. At times where they have been left alone, they have been cemented and hemmed in and their roots do not show. It is suffocating to see them gasping for breath and rain but there is little one can do or can one?

 Citizens have protested against avenues of trees being destroyed to make way for bigger roads and the Metro network but for someone who has lived here only for 16 years or so, even I can see that the city has lost its sheltering, green silences and acquired  glass shafts where there once were clusters of fully grown trees.

 There is nothing more alive than a tree. It has roots connecting it to the earth. Branches reaching out to the wind and sunshine and rain and eyes turned to the sky in a smile of gratitude. The rustling silence of a tree can heal anything. It can connect you right back to the centre of your soul. And the fact that we have less trees and more buildings in our neighbourhoods means that we are off centre. Our souls no longer listen. They chatter. After spending hours at my computer, I sometimes forget that I am an earthling and need to be close to the earth, to things that grow and change with seasons.

 And there are many like me. Trapped in the virtual tyranny of an existence that loses touch slowly with what matters. The touch of grass under our feet and a tree growing unthreatened outside our window. A few years ago, I had interviewed a family that chucked a high-profile career to grow more than 200 trees in a farm. They did it when they realised that their life in a well-appointed high rise apartment had made their children afraid of walking without shoes on grass. Not everyone has that much courage to change their lives so radically.

A recent newspaper report says that the notified forest area in  Bangalore limits is just two per cent. The total areas of vegetation used to be around 12.04 per cent in 2000-01 but has dwindled drastically now. The Bangalore District forest cover is only around 6.80 per cent. Today, on World Environment Day, a tree planting was to be taken up on 2.25 acres of barren land along the periphery of the Madivala Lake and the TCS World 10K Bangalore run is a welcome initiative to connect citizens to the roots that will one day grow into an urban forest that Bangalore deserves. 

 I will make a beginning too and commune with the neem tree outside my window more often to feel more centred, rooted and aware that Nature is not just a resource but a companion we are incomplete without.