We Want.....

    

     It's 10 in the morning.Ravinder is 65 year old and runs an electrical shop in the busy market area near Amberpet.His day starts amidst the traffic jams that surround the locality with a queue of engineering college buses racing with time
caring for none, polluting everything and everyone. Life has changed a lot for him in the past 40 years of his stay in the same locality.

     The entire locality once upon a time was a lake and human settlements started around some 40years back when his family was one of the few to have moved in into this new locality. By that way, he is the member of the first generation of Amberpet. He recollects that as it was a lake area, the entire fleet of birds that visited the lake used to visit his house and be his proud guests. Pigeons and sparrows were his best friends. Street dogs were the watchmen. The trees which he and his neighbors planted in those days have unfortunately become the first and last generation of Amberpet.

         His backyard boasts of the beasts like neem, badam tree, coconut, mango etc. He says that they even had guava tree and another mango tree which were felled down by the municipality as one came in the way of road extension and another for the fear of brain fever. One can sense a pain when he talks about a fully grown tree which he took care for so long was felled. He also shows us different flowering trees the jasmine, kanakambaram (Fire cracker flower) in the back yard of his house. He adds that there were around 30 to 40 independent houses in that area that also boasted of this rich plant life. As the city developed population increase...came the corporates... corporates in real estate business they all paved way for bigger apartments making Amberpet skyline thicker but the ecolife line thinner. The house even contains a well which he says never dried up in 40 years of its existence which he fears could dry up soon with the rise of every apartment and the depth of every bore well.

EPILOGUE

As a child grown up in one such an apartment far away from the nature, two hours of interviewing Mr.Ravinder and roaming around his backyard made me realize what I have missed, and what we are all going to miss if we don't act now.

We want our trees back.

we want our birds back.

we want our nature back.

We want our LIFE back.

( Article by Murali )