Just living
is not enough... one must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower...Hans Andersen
Hans
Christian Andersen was a Danish author. Although a prolific writer of plays,
travelogues, novels, and poems, Andersen is best remembered for his fairy tales
& who could forget, "The Emperor's
New Clothes", "The Little Mermaid", "The Nightingale", "The Snow Queen", "The Ugly Duckling", and many more. With his stories he has made millions of kid’s dreams more colorful
& yes his above words do tell us in exact words about what is living in
actual! And yes in today’s life what we have forgotten is to understand
what it calls living! Here is where writers like Anderson help us in getting
our lost charm by taking us once again in the world where everything is amazingly
alive, even the trees & flowers!
Why I felt to use this quote is a recent outing trip with my
friends in Tamhini Ghat, a hidden treasure of nature very close to our city
life. That way I am used to have long trips in forests once in awhile but most
of us can’t have luxury of long forest trips & every week on Monday morning
when we woke up thinking, arrr so fast the week has ended that we hardly
realized! And worst part is its gone just like the earlier week & another,
with no change in our routine work oriented life which conveniently we call as
carrieristic approach of ours! Have we ever thought that what the nature god
has gifted us & how ignorant we are about it by not realizing & getting
our self locked in our concrete routine! And this is happening with many of us
right from our childhood, where aliveness was only in books. That way my childhood in a town place was such
a wonderful gift to me that I don’t remember that I have ever had to purchase
things like jamun, chinch or peru or ber (I beg a pardon but calling guava to
peru is something I can’t imagine & so is with other fruits so uses their Marathi
names); all we have to do is in season of respective fruits take out our
bicycles after the school & go on wandering in nearby fields where the
roads are lined up with all such fruit baring trees & either climb over
them or use stone pallets to get these fruits down & eat till our stomach is
full & tongue lost the taste, life was such a fun! And I am sure each of us
has so many similar memories of childhood, especially those who have come from
smaller towns as well are in age of thirty five plus now. After year 2000 suddenly scene changed a lot & even town boys have
lost their childhood along with the entry of internet & smart phones! I
don’t blame technology as it’s just a tool, the tool holding hand & mind
behind those hands is the real culprit; because it doesn’t allow you to get out
of technology shackles & feel the nature surrounding you.
On such
background a day in nearby wilderness is such a boon as in city like Pune where
jamuns & peru are getting rare even on fruit stalls; so where one can get
the trees to chess such fruits? But then all one has to do is if no bicycle take
our four wheelers & reach out to those trees. One such spot is on west side
of Pune popularly known as Tamhini Ghat; it’s a gate way to Konkan, a stretch of
some eighty kilometers passing through green hills. Just forty
kilometers from Pune one can’t ever imagine such natures treat exists as once
you cross paud road & western suburbs of city, suddenly you leave behind
urban signs. Here the hills are green again & the breeze is lot cooler caressing
your face & you can breathe the freshness of air as you no more need AC of
the car which in city we use as a shield from the exhausts of millions of
vehicles! Here still the villages exists & so does the famous
Devraai’s with unbelievable biodiversity. Devraai
is a protected forest of the village which is usually around the temple of
local god. For generations these forests have been considered as sacred &
protected from cutting for any purpose by the villagers. It’s a wonderful gesture
of nature conservation under the shield of religious protocols. Its wisdom of
our earlier generations that they had realized the greed of human being one day
will destroy every good thing in nature around so they must have come up conservations
means like Devraai. In exploring the Tamhini ghat you can still come across few
such devraais & every shade of green as well birds chirping which has
become so rare in our city life. While walking through one of the trails (there
are hundreds of trails here through the vast greens) we could actually hear
sound of barking dear’s calls. Here many villagers have seen leopard & sure
the barking dear wasn’t calling for fun, it must have sensed presence of some
wandering leopard. Then we spotted a tiger print butterfly which is largest of
the specie, its violet stripes were shining in the morning sun. It was at a
time quite & yet happening all around, the feeling itself was so great that
you are in surrounding of such biodiversity; that it made me forget my cell
phone isn’t having network & even after realizing this I wasn’t irritated!
The
very same thing i.e. no network to the cell phone would have pissed me of in my
city life or daily routine, but here I didn’t mind it at all! We all are so used to our gadgets that we hardly
have time to feel the breeze or stop & look at flight of a butterfly or look
at blossom on Amaltaash tree on the road you are driving along; even if we come
across any such sight in our concrete jungle, we have no time to stop &
admire such scene. The only thing that
makes us stop now is red signal & that also we keep cursing or jump over if
there is no policeman standing at the signal! I think this is the biggest loss
of our city life that we have forget to enjoy the stops & worst is we
haven’t even realized what we have lost! This is something we need to experience as its said the bad habits
comes to you naturally but it’s the good ones which you have to practice!
Opening up to nature or the surrounding is something which doesn’t happens to
us automatically, we have to try for it. If you ask any of your friends or
colleagues about what different you have done yesterday than the routine, the
usual answer is in form of a question “where is the time yaar?” followed by
“you know my routine na!” Each of us has our own reasons & which we believe
are genuine for not changing our routine or finding out time to reach out the
nature & end result is we end up in our week end waiting schedule which
never ends actually.
I think
answer to all such things lies right around us, many a times you get it in a
trip like Tamhini, provided we go with open mind. In
accepting nature as your teacher, best thing is you don’t know what it will
teach you as there is no syllabus for this course. It will keep throwing
lessons at you in the form of trees, birds, insects even the wind carries many
fragrances, all you have to do is keep grasping. And you not only get charged
with this learning but in a way you reinvent yourself. As we
have forgotten what we like to do from within & that’s the biggest problem
of today’s modern world. We have everything for our entertainment but we don’t
know what really makes us happy & at peace. Like Tamhini
ghat, there are thousands of trails to explore but which trail leads to your
destination unless you try them you will never know. That is why it’s good to
get lost in nature as unless you don’t get lost you don’t really start thinking
where you wanted to go in first place!
And there are many such
places where nature still exists in its pure form, free from our city adulteration's
like mobile network or our two wheelers. It exists right where we live or work
provided we practice nature to feel it. Here many will ask what I meant
practicing nature, well its nothing but give some time to our self to be with
nature, to feel it, to understand it, that’s all, nothing more! And you don’t need any special occasion for
practicing nature as any time is a good time for meeting nature. I am diehard
fan of advertises & always watch keenly many of them. In one such ad of
toothpaste the tag line says “aaj close-up kiya kya?” means have you brushed
your teeth with that particular brand of the toothpaste; on the same line if
not every day we should ask our self every week, “aaj Nature Practice kiya
kya?”
Sad part is, all such
places like Tamhini ghats which naturalists’ calls habitats of many species of
flora & fauna are fast getting surrendered to human greed. Best
example was in our Tamhini outing, our friend who was acting as a guide &
who used to visit the place quite often, took us to a spot which used to be a
grass land & habitat of many species right from snakes to wild cats to
jackals & many birds. To his horror we found the entire place has been
fenced & work of some resort was going on, driving out even remote
possibility of any animal or bird sighting, even the vegetation in form of the
grass land has been removed from that piece of land! And as I mentioned above it’s
not only at Tamhini but across the country everywhere places of natural
habitats are getting encroached for every other use than nature. We need to
work out a plan by which a balance can be strike for e.g. reserve some part of
land surrounding such places for only residential or commercial purpose &
acquire all lands of habitat potential & relocate the land owners at one
place which has been reserved. So they won’t be driven out of the place keeping
value for their investments at the same time nature conservation will also be
achieved as importance of any such private land is only because its amidst or
in surrounding of such natural treasure or else what value it has? Agreed that each such piece of land in
Tamhini ghat belongs to some private owner & every owner has right to
protect & develop property what he owns. But the challenge is how we
conserve nature with all such ownership's as if everybody owns some piece of
land & has a right of protecting & developing it, then finally the
question arises who owns the nature then & who will be protecting it, leave
apart developing it? Again the answer lays in practicing nature as unless
each of us starts doing it, we won’t realize what value this treasure contains
& so finally passing of responsibility buck stops at me, is what each of us
has to accept & agree. Once we accept this responsibility then we can not
only save places like Tamhini but can conserve nature right in the heart of
even the concrete jungle we live in! And
what better time than start of a New Year to not just read but live the words
of the great fairy tell story teller; so let’s welcome the New Year with a
promise to practice the nature & understand the meaning of living the life
than just counting the days of week & waiting for week end! That will be
real start of not just a New Year but start of a New Life & isn’t that more
important than celebrating just a calendar date?
With this note saying
good-bye to the year 2015 & wishing you all a Happy & Green New Year
for Practicing Nature!
--
Sanjay
Deshpande
Sanjeevani Dev.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=1415&v=blgni8HSfDU
Please do visit my blogs to know about our philosophy at Sanjeevani ! (Click the links below)
http://visonoflife.blogspot.in/2015/06/agreement-ho-gaya-rabba-rabba-permanent.html
http://jivnachadrushtikon.blogspot.in/
Social Side of Sanjeevani ! (Click link below)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/65629150@N06/sets/72157627904681345/
For any of your complaints about city, log in at link below
http://www.punecorporation.org/GRS/Complaint/LaunchComplaintCitizen.aspx
Think Green, Think Life
www.sanjeevanideve.com
Sanjeevani Dev.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=1415&v=blgni8HSfDU
Please do visit my blogs to know about our philosophy at Sanjeevani ! (Click the links below)
http://visonoflife.blogspot.in/2015/06/agreement-ho-gaya-rabba-rabba-permanent.html
http://jivnachadrushtikon.blogspot.in/
Social Side of Sanjeevani ! (Click link below)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/65629150@N06/sets/72157627904681345/
For any of your complaints about city, log in at link below
http://www.punecorporation.org/GRS/Complaint/LaunchComplaintCitizen.aspx
Think Green, Think Life
www.sanjeevanideve.com