This was an attempt at writing prose-poetry for Alpine Fellowship Award. The idea was to try out a different style of writing using the Award as motivation.The topic was civilization and the wild and the post is about my experience with the last standing virgin forests in Chhattisgarh
The land spoke, the children of the land spoke. Only we could not hear, land’s children bred of civilization.She throbbed with an energy that no human
commune, today, can bring to birth. Deep and ancient, it ran through the veins
of the forest, held in the trees’ girth. The trees spoke of times when they grew
with a wild freedom, carrying with them centuries of wisdom gathered with
patience and groundedness. Were they there when our land was drifting in the
great wide oceans, I could only guess. These ancient teachers: so old that my
life, here on this land, felt just an exhalation long. So huge, their panoramic
canopy I could fathom only lying on the forest floor. So tall, I felt like a
grain of sand at the base of a Himalayan mountain. The soft winter sun filtering
down threw shadows that reminded of a time when my ancestors roamed the land on
all fours, their memories perhaps carried in our cells. It made me long, just
long, for what, my heart then couldn’t tell.
Oh, you speak of a land, imaginary
and magical – you would say. Which ancient forest is left now that speak of
age-old tales? It’s no fiction, I say, for its there, still there! Right in the
heart of my country, a land of forests filled with tigers, elephants, and bears.
Where jungle streams gurgle with happiness and flow with ease. Where tribes live
among them deeply caring for others, away from things plastic or life filled
with disease.
But young towns nearest to the forests, slowly being fed on
adrenaline that is money, were abuzz with the idea of wealth under their feet,
forgetting that abundance not wealth lay in the nurturing land and wisdom of
grandmother trees. They dreamt of a glitzy life and said rightly – how can you
have a forest if you desire a city like Mumbai and a life of ease?
I was
following the trail of coal, Earth’s gift but civilization’s greed. And it led
me here, India’s last wilderness untamed. Deep in the forest, peopled with
innocence, were villages unaware of what civilization had in store. For hundreds
of acres of this primeval land were marked for mining, and the rivers for dams
to clean the gouged coal. They did not know that their home and a life of peace
were being readied to be handed away to companies who termed mining – “clean and
green”.
Did anyone ask the land, these ancient trees, the people and other
children of the forests, if they wanted their home plundered to fuel the lives
of the rich? The forests, trees, rivers, and land are all a waste if not for the
use of humans. And animals - are they really there or figment of tribal
imaginations? The tribes who ‘are so backward’ as to not even know plastic, will
be ‘compensated’ with money and given offers of manual labour to ‘improve their
livelihood’, they would preach.
As I stood carrying the weight of consequences,
a deep ancient grief as old and huge as the trees, welled up in me. Desperate, I
walked inside the forest and looked at the trees. And I whispered, “Sorry for
all of humanity’s misdeeds”. In that moment, the forest fell deathly silent, no
birds chirped and not a leaf stirred. In that eloquent silence, I understood,
without a doubt, that the forest knew what her future held.
I turned away
helpless, stricken by the collective loss. But even in that loss, I returned
with a gift. For now I know that the land speaks and all children of the land
speaks - of magic and wisdom, of non-judgment and compassion, of balance and a
future shift.
