Who isn’t interested in a retrospective of what happened to you? How did you spend your life? How you made choices? What made you follow paths which you never thought you’d have to? How you could have changed things, tweaked it a bit so that you get to your so called perfect life?
And so on…
I’m sure all of you at some point of time might have had these thoughts flashing in your brains – probably on a rainy evening sipping a hot cup of coffee and having nothing else to do.
So, on a similar evening, sitting at the veranda of my house I had this “flashing of images” and it left me with a weird feeling – honestly it didn’t last for long, but as long as it lasted it was very painful for me. In a few hours I forgot everything and went back to my day to day life eating and sleeping my way through. This happened a few months ago and today I had a similar experience which woke me up again and thus thought of sharing those with you.
I stay near the NH Bypass – in fact a few feet away from the main road. We moved in almost 26 years ago! Now, that’s a long time! And people who have been in Trivandrum might know that it’s not more than 15 years since the Bypass got was constructed and became fully functional. So, before it was constructed, how did the land around look like? Any idea? The stretch from Chackai Railway Bridge to Aakkulam Bridge – can anyone imagine how the landscape was then prior to the construction of the NH Bypass?
Well – that’s where I spent a major part of my childhood. That narrow stretch of land where scores of vehicles pass through each day now was once the fields where my generation played all day, ran around with kites, sat like monks for hours with fishing rods, ran behind the birds which occasionally ascend to the mud fields hoping to catch a frog and in the evening when it is so dark, that we no longer can differentiate the land from the marshes, rushing back home promising to meet early morning next day – yeah to quote Bryan Adams – Those were really “the best days of my life”!!!
Such is life – when the work for the Bypass began, we were all eagerly waiting for its completion so that we don’t have to travel around to get to the city or towards Kollam, hardly realising what we were about to lose during the course of the construction work.
So where did I start and where have I reached now?
Oh yes – the “flashing of images”!!!
Yes – it was about what we lost then and what we miss now. The “new-gen” are never going to miss this really – they hardly know such a world existed.
The memories of those green pasture “kind-of” land with intermittent stretches of water bodies interconnected by narrow passages, occasional coconut trees sometimes half submerged in water during the rains in small islands, abundant fishes, tortoises and frogs, large number of herons adorning the green fields, the parrots and the wood peckers, the king fishers and the black water birds called “Eranda”, the Kites and Owls, the large bats which sometimes flies around in the evening to haunt you and the occasional visits from the Serpentes family…the list goes on…and on…
It’s sad to recall these as they are now just memories and we all know it’s not going to come back.
I do enjoy the amenities that came along with the development of the Bypass – but on occasions such as one I mentioned earlier, there is a feeling that I’ve lost something greater when compared with what I am enjoying now.
I know there’s little that we can do about to bring back those days of beauty – but let’s not give up. The days of “preserving what exists” are over – the time is now to fight for what still exists!
I remember reading this somewhere:
I kept a bird, one day it flew. Then I brought a squirrel, one day it also left. Then one day I planted a tree…..Both of them came back to me.
Let’s all together fight for the world by planting as much as trees as possible and thereby welcoming back the birds and squirrels. Remember, the light looks better when you are in the shade.
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