From greens to grays

Once we were green.

Land, when viewed from the window of a plane gave you a green experience. The human species then used to have gardens with trees and not just few flower pots and grass. People didn't have to watch discovery channel to see what a forest looked like, they just drove off a few miles with their children, who could differentiate between a pet dog and a wild dog with ease. Public gatherings, a source of actual social bonding (unlike Facebook) took place under a huge banyan tree. You could easily spot a tree with the sacred red thread or 'dhaaga' wound on it. Sunlight filtering through the canopy of trees wasn't just a desktop wallpaper then.

Now, we have gone gray.

My younger cousin hasn't seen any snake outside a zoo (it’s not healthy to have a snake in your garden, but still!), or a sparrow sitting on a gulmohar tree, tweeting as the sun pulls up the horizon. He was almost ecstatic when he came to my house, seeing the trees in my garden. He climbed up and down a guava tree innumerous time and kept on saying that I had a superb garden. Next day, he called me saying he told his school friends about his 'adventure', and they were fascinated by it! Imagine a child fascinated just by imagining what climbing a tree would feel like!

 Deforestation has taken a toll on our environment, and, if the current changes appear to be too small to the thick skinned, we will soon feel the heat.

Ok, if there's a need to broaden a road for an ambitious corporate corridor project, or we have to clear an area for mining the most wanted mineral, or have to build a dam to power the dreams of thousands of people, go for cutting trees. But rarely, as it’s quite evident, has there been re-plantation against such massive deforestation.

We cut trees so that we can properly utilize the space for development works. If so, I would like to ask: is there anything that can purify so much air? Give out so much life supporting oxygen? Hold on to the soil so hard? Support life of such variety of animals and birds? Bring about rain so frequently? Cool the environment so effectively? Give out such wide area of restful shadow? And do all of this for so long without the need of any maintenance? If at all there exists a machine than can do all of this in a space even comparable to the little space a tree takes, will it be able to work without any external energy source? If so, then I’ll myself assist, as much possible, to eliminate trees from the surface of earth and replace them by these wonder machines!

Had man been given the power that Mother Nature enjoys, we would not have been alive, or better say, we would never had even evolved from the organisms that walked the earth long ago. Trees (or better say solar power plants) would have been all black, like the color of present age solar panels. What a pathetic view it would be, when one fine morning, you look out of your window to find all your garden trees black, with wires coming out of each leaf and you have a battery instead of the stem!

 Let’s get factual and logical. It isn’t that humans are the best species ever created by nature, nor are we those who have developed the most- we have only developed in a way we consider as development. As I read in one of my science books once, humans aren’t at the pinnacle of the all life forms, they are just one among millions of teeming species on earth.

So if we continue to torture our master, the nature, it won’t be sitting quite for long. It’s like abusing someone who has a gun pointed at you! It won’t take long to wipe out humans from the face of earth, just like we eradicated polio. After all, even the dinosaurs had ruled the earth before they got extinct.

Better, beware!

God? Is He there? Is He good?

As I was typing the article title, MS Word rejected the mere idea of questioning god’s ‘godness’ in its own way. The word ‘god’ followed by a question mark is shown as a grammatical error by this software.

In a middle class Indian family, unquestioned belief in god is generally inbuilt. But as in my case, I come with a programming error. I go to a temple not because of the reasons normal people have, but because I like to see people following an age old magnificent culture.

There’s a temple in Jharkhand, India, that draws huge crowds. This gathering of faith and that unstoppable wish in everyone to touch god’s holy feet makes me shiver when I’m there. Once when I somehow came out of that ultra-dense human concentration camp, my mom asked me, what did you wished for? As I had expected, my answer was followed by an agitated face and a long speech: is this what we travelled such a long distance for? With the answer that I asked god to bring me out of the closed suffocating temple alive, I was having the same question in my mind: is this why I travelled such a long distance, just to enter a room that made me ask for such a wish?

When I share this ‘ungodly’ theory with my friends, there reaction is hazardous to me. It’s okay to me as different people have different opinions. But what I feel is that there nothing such as god. God is a belief one has that there’s someone who will be there when things go south. It’s like having an inverter makes you feel secure that there won’t be a power cut. God’s is a backup for all cases where one loses hope. He is someone who you blame if something wrong happens, so that you won’t feel guilty. He is someone who you thank for achieving something, while keeping the credit to yourself.

Even if it feels like quoting some great personality, I would say the real god is within. Whatever you do, achieve or lose totally depends on what you do. You will always get what you deserve, give or take a few percent for the so called ‘luck’.

Now luck is something that checks how prepared and alert you are for a hostile situation. Take any situation where luck hasn’t or has more than normally favored you. Exempting situations like an asteroid hitting your house, most such ‘unlucky’ experiences make you wiser. Even if a bad event is caused by another person, such as someone causing you trouble for reason’s unknown, you at least get to know how to deal with such a sadist person! Remember, no experience is bad. It depends on what you get from it.

Getting back, if you ask me who is most powerful in the universe including god, I would answer nature. I have seen it, felt it and sensed it with the remaining three sense organs. I haven’t seen god. But I have seen people around the globe, working hard to make this world a better place, from teaching a child how to wash their hands to preventing a third world war.

I once read of a boy who tried to donate bread to an organization seeking funds. The person there told him that the bread would become stale by the time it would reach the needy. This boy sold the bread with the name ‘patriotic bread’ and collected good money. With this money, he bought more bread which he again sold with the same name. This way, at the end of few days, he had collected a large amount of money and donated the whole to this charity organization. Later, with his money and money from people inspired by his act, the crisis was solved.

I can think of him as god. I think of bankers working for the poor as god. I think of scientists finding ways to cure a disease as god. Since god is defined as someone who watches over and selflessly cares for you, I think of my parents as someone above god. Someone said, god couldn’t be everywhere, so he made mothers.

God is in little things. God is in whatever good you do. It isn’t just that god is good; it is that good is god.