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Showing posts with the label environment

Ghosts

Fiction It was years since I had left Kochi.  Sitting on the shore of the Vembanad backwaters sipping beer with an old classmate, I remembered those days of my life as a college student.  Professor Leela Menon wafted into our conversation as naturally as the breeze from the lake set the coconut leaves nodding gently.  “She retired more than ten years back,” said Mohan.  “She now lives all alone in a villa facing the Vembanad.” I decided to visit her.  I was one of her favourite students.  I adored her poems as well as her lectures on literature.  I participated in every essay competition to which the college was invited; I participated more to please her than anything else.  Professor Leela Menon was a poet and a social activist.  She did not marry; her life was dedicated to social causes.  She was bitterly opposed to the kind of development and that was overtaking the city.  She hated people cutting down trees in order to widen the roads.  She deplored the roar of the tr

Contrasts

Yellowing vs Greening Winter gives way to summer in Delhi without an intervening spring.  That's, perhaps, why Nirad C Choudhuri wrote in  The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian   that life in the Indo-Gangetic plains saps vitality.  I took the following pictures this morning, vital Sunday for me, from my surroundings.  The changes in the environment in Delhi always fascinate me: they are as quick (pun intended) as the denizens of the place.  Does the environment affect people's character? Fresh vs Stale Vitality strives I count myself fortunate to be living in such surroundings.  But I also know that surroundings are not always one's choice.  They may be a gift, an evanescent gift.