GB’s BLOG 6
WORLD RE-BOOT DAY 25th March – FOR ONE MONTH
“There’s a kind of rush, all over the world today,
All over the world you can hear the sound of nature in love….
….so listen very carefully, get closer and you will see what I mean,
It isn’t a dream…”
(My apologies to the Carpenters who sang this in 1976).
A Gliricidia tree full of nectar filled flowers for the bees, the bee eater and sun birds. As seen from Svanir’s dining room window, March 2020.
Amidst the fear of catching the Covid 19 virus, and the ever increasing number of deaths all over the world, we at Svanir, and many others have been noticing that during the lock down the birds are singing ever louder; they are flocking to our garden in larger numbers, bathing in our bird baths in gay abandon, some after eating the cherries, some before. The trees are working in full strength, producing green leaves to see them through the rest of the year till next winter. I would like to believe they are doing so also to accommodate the influx of the winged creatures. Indeed, just two days ago, Soumya and Indrani saw a Paradise fly catcher with its long while tail and its mate a smaller brown one, on the Karanj tree just outside their home.
During the clamp down, people have been noticing a freer behavior of the so called wild life in and around cities, villages and beaches. A long tailed civet cat has been seen at a road along the Zebra crossing at Trichy, sea birds are flocking in hundreds of thousands to beaches abandoned by sun bathers in Peru, an elephant was taking a short cut along a road at Dehra Dun, and so on. If you need to be convinced, please see the following links:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DO4NZXJJYz8
https://www.facebook.com/groups/2890369427712300/
https://ebird.org/india/news/whats-on-in-april20
A chameleon does not need to change its colour at Svanir. It knows it is among nature lovers.
Delhi residents have noticed that the atmosphere is cleaner, less polluting. To quote News 18 of 4th April, 2020, “PM 2.5 pollutants fell by 71 percent in just one week of lockdown”. In Bhubaneswar city, cars don’t have to be given a daily wash – the dust content is so much less. Similar are the reports aired by world news channels. They have shown that the ozone layer has increased over the Antarctica and the haze over major European cities has almost vanished. But the icing of the cake seems to be this news report: “The Dhauladhar mountain range, part of the Himalayan range in Himachal Pradesh, became visible in Jalandhar after years as pollution dipped across Punjab”.
So the micro bacteria scare has, for sure helped re-set the unbalance between nature and production oriented development; much more rapidly and starkly than what our aged politicians and leaders have been unable to do for decades. Unknown are the ways nature teaches us. It is up to us to see it or close our eyes.
I would like to end with a thought, not really original though. How wonderful it would be to observe a month’s lock down every year for the whole world, beginning from 25th March 2021. We would sacrifice production related activities including transportation so as to give nature and wild life a break. She can then, at the beginning of spring, get a chance to recuperate. We humans likewise would get a chance to revitalize our mind and body. A kind of rebooting nature’s CPU.
I am requesting Soumya and Indrani, the facebook/ twitter generation, to take the idea forward. Please join us at Svanir when the danger is past.
GB