When Nature says, ‘I need back my space’…

India is a country where one will find a mix of nuclear and joint families. A nuclear family would be a family comprising of 3-4 members while a joint family would comprise over six members. But the common thread that binds these families is contact. In today’s generation both husband and wife are working five days a week in some cases six days. So, weekends are meant to let go of yourself which usually resort to a potluck with friends, or being at the movies and finally ending it with a dinner at a decent restaurant.

But, imagine those moments when your parents or your near ones had requested to give them a bit of your time. You would retort back and say, “Mom, it’s the weekend and its my time… Give me some space”. While you would rush out of the house your parents would return to their own world of thoughts and melancholy. And then arrived an invisible ghost in the form of a guest. Well at first, we couldn’t recognize this person until it showed its true colors. 

Today as I write this article, we are almost nearing a month of the lockdown in order to hide from this guest. In a world where we are all caged, there comes a new terminology in place, ‘Social Distancing’. So, now you suddenly find that in a two-bedroom apartment you have been asked to confine yourself to a room that looks like a cage to you - Well that is your bedroom! And to top it, you find a lot of new faces roaming around in your house with whom you have barely had the time to even say ‘Hello’ - well they are family! Further more people have resorted to taking psychological treatment as the absence of social interactions have been hurting their physical and mental well-being.

Now imagine if you were said to live out of that one bedroom of yours with another six members? Sounds shocking. Well in the gallows of Dharavi, Asia’s largest slum house, is home to over a million lives. 

Day in and day out they stand in a queue with the dream that they would be able to fill in their bucket of water to get at least a day’s bath. Contrarily, there will be a serpentine line at the ration shop with the dream that they would be able to arrange for a day’s meal. At the end of the day when the members return to that room it is ‘HOME’ to them! So, how would you explain them what social distancing means and how would they for that matter follow this norm?

But there is yet a great insight to this thought of Social Distancing. It’s the thought of giving one their

own space. Over the year’s mankind has made way for fulfilling its own plans and in this manner, it has not bothered to think whether it has by mistake encroached over someone’s space. Over time, it has even taken advantage of such spaces and have misused it by not maintaining it, instead littering it with dirt. Well, this space that we are talking of belonged to Nature.

Today, while lives are being lost there are even more lives which are being saved. And, mind you God isn’t saving them! But normal human beings just like you and me in the form of doctors, nurses, police personnel have forgotten what it seems to be at home with family. When they return in the dead of the night to their respective homes, after ensuring people are safe that the law is in order, they yearn to at least have someone to be near them or speak to them and greater need has now become for us. We feel to be with our parents and with our near and dear ones but now that space has been taken away from us by Nature’s order.

Ironically, the way to one’s survival is to keep one distanced from the rest immaterial of the relation you have. Further more while now Nature has shown its true colors, we are not even being able to enjoy the best of Nature. And, the reason is that over the years Nature has been shouting aloud requesting us for something and we have been ignoring it. Today we have journeyed back to the same situation, just that this time we are requesting Nature the same thing - Please give us back our space!

Happy April Fools Day

"Once destroyed, nature's beauty cannot be repurchased at any price" 

                                                                                                     - Ansel Adams

Billion years ago, when the world was building up God gave mankind a unique gift. A boon to us and had asked to preserve it and nurture it from time to time. He had said that the way you show your respect to it accordingly it shall reciprocate to you. We know this unique gift as NATURE. In the beginning we started to enjoy its fruits, compliment it and then made an attempt to expand it. But as mankind grew its needs started to grow and it then started to slowly find ways to use Nature until it forgot its own duty and promise made towards its upliftment. Instead, it started to sacrifice Nature in order to fulfill its own needs.  



It marked an end of an era of Nature and began the era of construction in its various forms. Gradually, this reached a level where human beings noticed that there is a dearth of space to continue fulfilling is needs. So, we started to make space by cutting trees.

Mankind discovered that this was a new way of progressing its race even though it meant exploiting Nature and ‘fooling’ God by telling him that we are doing this for the betterment of Nature. Over the few decades we realized that we could not only use Nature for the progress of mankind but also use it to begin trade and business. 

Meanwhile, in order to keep God happy (for a while), we decided to make some parks and wildlife sanctuaries not for animals to live but for mankind to enjoy seeing these animals caged!

Over a time, empty spaces converted into construction site and some unknown areas converted into beaches. So, we now took the next step of making it dirty and in helping achieve this we created a deadly weapon - PLASTIC.

We took this invention further by using this extensively and then throwing it away either on the road or better in the sea. Till now while we had quite beautifully killed Nature’s guests on land, we decided it why should marine life also not get a taste of it too. This led to poaching and fishing and it made great money.

We set foot by starting to poach animals and sell them to other nations. Next, we would kill animals and make business through various means. On the flip side we decided that to take out an entire forest so that we could construct buildings for people to stay not thinking where Nature and its guest would stay. 

In the meanwhile, God had been observing all this and was extremely shocked and he questioned us why are we doing this. What happened to the promise of protecting Nature?

So, you were all fooling me all this while? And, to that we responded by a very wryly smile. “The problem was that we stopped checking for monsters under our bed when we realized that they were inside us”. (The Joker)

Today, as we are in a war, God has returned us the favor and taken what it had owned from the very beginning. But before it did return us the favor it introduced a little anarchy, upsetting the established order and made us experience how it feels when you play with Nature and its guest. The result is utter CHAOS! Well, yes, we had thought we had been fooling him all this while but God had its own agenda. 

It played its cards well and today we are bowing against its force but in silence. And, as he continues to open his wrath in this manner, he wishes us all ‘Happy April Fool’s Day’!

Sound of Silence

 "The quieter you become the more you are able to hear."  - Rumi

                                                                  

The honking of the autowallahs, followed with a siren and the cacophony of sounds that would probably had given Mozart or Beethoven a headache. This is how the people in the city of Mumbai is greeted.

How does it feel when the first sounds of the day are the notifications on your phone that does not seem to stop? It’s almost that your body is programmed to first check your messages as though that becomes the deciding factor of what your day will look like.  And, while that is not enough to barge your ears you will hear the blaring music of a typical Bollywood mix playing in the nearby locality as though it’s a ritual.

By the time you reach the station you are half famished as you find yourself semi- skating through the stairs and find yourself stuffed into a compartment. If you have found a place to sit man its your lucky day if not does not matter, the entertainment is about to begin. No matter how hard you plug in your earphones the sounds of the vendors will always catch your attention. Post which you will start getting calls from your clients so frantically as though it’s going to be the end of the world… Especially for those in the advertising/media industry and excuse my being biased.

For a musician one must be in an advertising agency or call centre. Just close your eyes and one can listen to the continuous ringing of cell phones. Most interestingly these come with some impeccable ringtones that will make Goddess Saraswati put an ear bud and for you well just record all these sounds… And their you have just made a new song! If that was not enough for you, please join a conference meeting. It's more of squabble followed even more of sugar injected in your body with cups of tea/coffee and at the end of the day the problem is always a mystery that remains unsolved!

We are now in a situation of a complete lockdown and we are cribbing about the problems we are facing. But did you realize that this situation has become a boon to us. Now the first sounds of the morning that you hear is the whiff of cool air.

The sound that you had completely deleted from your mind is the first wish of the day…. GOOD MORNING and GRATITUDE to the Almighty that you are alive. 

You can now feel free when you step out in your balcony because there are no cars, autos or buses, no blaring cacophony of songs. All that is there is the open sky with birds chirping, the thoughtless mind, the smell of pure air, the touch of surroundings and the only sound you can hear is the  Sound of Silence. 

A ghost to mankind. A friend to Mother Nature.

"Mankind can only disappoint Mother Nature for so long." -Anthony Douglas Williams 

Most of us or rather the world at this point of time is in a war to fight out the Invisible Guest. And, while we all are in a state of dilemma thinking when this guest will leave the world, we have probably unnoticed the change that this guest has brought with itself in this process. It has got us closer to each other. It has made us retrospect the meaning of family time and ‘me time’. But most importantly, it has made one point loud and clear. 

With the entire world in a lock down state there is one world who is enjoying this time. And that this Mother Nature. So where on one side where the world’s lifeline is slowly diminishing, Mother Nature is progressing. It has after all now regained its freedom from human beings, pollution and other deadly viruses that it had been bearing itself with in silence over periods of time. So, does that bring us to a point of introspection? Where environmentalists have been shouting out loud to keep our Earth clean, have we really been paying attention to it? 

It is not this guest that is to be blamed for entering our house, but it is us who are to be blamed for creating this guest. We have always been so engrossed with ourselves in our life running against time in a materialistic race that we have let go the softer moments of our life. We have forgotten about ourselves, our loved ones and most closely Mother Nature. Today, we are on the other side of a world filled with panic, fear and emotions, while Mother Nature is freely regaining its position what it had forgone. 

This guest has also taught us another big lesson and that is about Social Distancing. Today we have been locked down by this guest and we are getting so restless and anxious to somehow leave our den and meet our loved ones even if it’s for a minute, but cannot do so. Welcome to the animal kingdom my friends. For ages we have caged animals, who are a part of mother nature and have dominated their space. But today they have too regained their space and we are staring in awe at the progress of this evolutionary change. In fact, I will term it a Revolutionary change in Evolution. 

It is high time that we realize the atrocities we have done on Mother Nature. Now, is a testing time for us to warn ourselves and preach others that the world does not just belong to we human beings. Mother Nature is also an important part of this family. 

If we do not learn to respect its existence it will show us the same reciprocation. This is just a beginning to the rise of a Ghost to Mankind…. But a friend to Mother Nature.