At the outset I would like to bring out two scenarios and let us see if we can relate to it.
Scenario 1
A house in a quite neighborhood, Father reading the newspaper in the porch, a little garden with flowering shrubs and small trees, a child playing on the swing in the shade. Mother working in the kitchen probably making a lemonade for the child and husband. A dog with its wet nose to the ground lying content.
Couple of men in bulldozers drive in. demolishing the gate destroying the house and pulls down everything. Only the swinging swing in the garden still creeking and swinging a silent witness to all this.
Scenario 2
Amzon Rain forest. Tall huge trees with stumps as wide as a house in the suburbs. In each tree lives thousands of parrots, nesting eagles, flying squirrels and monkeys busily feeding its small ones. The sanctity of the place is amazing as each denizen of the forest from the hardworking ants to the Boas in the boughs have laboriously made this forest over a couple of million years, a delicate eco system thriving on the respect each of its citizen commands. Every being has its pride of place in this sylvan heaven.
A pickup truck stops in the periphey of the forest , with the logo of an MNC in the fortune 500 list.
Out jumps ten loggers carrying mobile generators, electric saws and a fuel supply to feed the synister looking gen sets. Each carry a tool box and a lunch box which carries the sandwiches to feed these giants.
They walk for an hour and reach an area which until a minute back was the favourite swinging place for the young monkeys. A bald headed eagle atop a 200 ft tree cranes its neck and peeps down in fear. The thought upmost in its mind- Will my tenth nesting attempt survive these loggers? I hope they do not select this tree. Birds feeding their young ones unable to leave the young ones , keep circling the tree in fear. What was a quite beautiful hallowed ground becomes a mayhem of activity. A new sound is added- gen sets coughing up smoke and electric saws humming while cutting the huge tree trunk. The eagle , its nest and the birds with the young ones all fall and their beady eyes do not see anything anymore.
The loggers tired after a good days work and rest their back against another tree trunk a hundred yers old. As they leave one takes out a white paint and marks an X on the same tree on which they were leaning, marking it for their next visit.
Krishnamachari Santhanam
