Soul and the City

Exploring Green Patches in Urban Areas.

Published in Spectrum – Deccan Herald on 4th July, 2017.

Thanks are due to the team at Decccan Herald. The piece on their website here.

Unedited text below.

I listened to the sound of tyres caressing sand. The music as if changed tunes with the strength I put into my pedaling and thickness of the sand layer. In the silence of a winter afternoon these tunes went in sync with the gentle slopes the cycle manoeuvred and every once in a while, as the tyres hit a stone or a fallen branch, got happily disrupted. As I paused near a bend in the path I listen to undesigned and welcome sounds, of bamboo bending to touch another bamboo and a squirrel moving over leaves resting on ground. I was in the heart of one of our metros and savouring one of our larger University campuses.

My exposure to the campus began with walks along the black roads and over the weeks I moved along the brown paths as well. Trees touched these roads and paths, and I loved touching them; caressing the roughness of an old tree’s bark smoothens something inside me. As weeks turned to months I saw more of the rocks and open spaces that abound and also had moments of joy on coming across the hornbill and the ibis. After little more than a year of walking the campus I got a cycle. This enabled me to move into newer areas and I had fun seeking fresh paths and patches with trees and rocks. These patches, where nature still reigned, I coined as ‘nature patches’. The largest amongst these was once a deer park. Lord Google informed me that at one point it housed about 100 deer!

The beauty of Bhagwad Gita, learned people have said, is that, each time you read it, it presents a new meaning. Similarly every time one moves around amidst these creations of nature one experiences something anew. During monsoon, the paths, I cycle on, are only twice the width of the tyres and my legs brush the wet vegetation. Pools, shape of a saucer, emerge. They often have leaves silently lying in their clear waters. As the rains taper off the path gets wider, dominant greens of the vegetation transforms to accommodating browns, and the rocks, which lie all around the campus, slowly raise their heads.

Not all these changes are easy to comprehend. They bring in the realization that one does not know it all. Some birds, for example, are more visible during some stretches of the year. What drives them or where do the birds go remain a mystery, to me. During the monsoon drizzle I have come across avadavats in flocks of 15 – 20. After the monsoon as the rains stopped, sometime around Diwali the hoopoe and the coucal appear to frequent the paths. A day before Christmas I finally saw the woodpecker, around this time I also frequently came across the peafowl, moving around with younger ones, in flocks of 3 – 5. My heart beats in a musical pattern when they move along the cycle! Then of course there are the babblers and partridges.

Savouring these patches is more akin to enjoying the rains or the sunsets than a safari in our tiger forests or studying select elements of nature. More of a poem that lingers in one’s head than a prose that talks in black and white. It is also about being open to surprises - to look forward to the unknown and planned. And like much that is of value for life it is unstructured, unguided and free. These patches may touch each of us in a separate manner, like perhaps love does.

It is neither about the ecological role of these patches (water level, carbon and more) nor about how we need to leave these for the generations to come. This is also not about using these patches for environment education or botany classes. It is selfishly about us, about being amidst trees and silences, being with ourselves, being at peace. These are not just lungs of our city but also its soul. To quote Richard Louv, who coined the term ‘nature deficit disorder’, this is ‘a different way to look at the future that is not just about survival, but about something much better’.

On the one hand we just need to ensure that we retain what we have and not let our ‘managerial’ instincts take over. On the other hand we need to be open to put in time here and just let ourselves be. Once we play our part these nature patches will play their roles. Many of our urban areas still harbour these ‘nature patches’. It may augur well to be able to hear these sounds as we continue our march on the path to urbanization.