[Travel/Thought]: Shola forests of Ooty - Aavalachi range

Every encounter uncovers the innate desire to be back. The surroundings seem more unreal now than ever before. The tall buildings and their dull grey colors. The protection from elements, while the elements are what make us. I must say, I think I am falling in love. Recently I met someone whoes idea of love was to miss someone dearly when they were apart. What if it is not someone but something. What if every moment you spend away feels like a ringing hollow inside. The quiet the peace and the thrill envelope you only when you are in its presence. Only in its presence do you feel you exist.

It has been weeks since I have returned to the concrete, the loud sounds and the constant chatter of uninteresting kind. Mind drifts back to the harsh sun that gave me my first sun-burn, and the expanse of brown grass. The whole landscape seemed parched in the afternoon sun. Only respite seemed to escape into the intermittent dense forests that spanned only a few meters. As the fury dialed down with the dusk approaching, the birds sang and appeared out of their cool forest spots and chirped around. The temperature that scorched started to drop by few degrees every hour. Soon, I would search for my warm clothes in the backpack.

Avalachi range Shola grassland and forest patch.
Parched by warm sun awaits the cool monsoons. 

My two glorious days working on the fields of Nilgiri forests are imprinted in my being. I am amazed by the wilderness here. You would know you are in deep forests untouched by human beings, when instead of being alarmed by human presence, the animals and birds just seemed curious. I was seen as a object of curiosity by a group of Sambar deer. They observed the two strange creatures walking on two feet messing the tasty grass that grew in the fences inaccessible to them. Even more surprising for me was the few moments I got to spend in the canopy. The forest here holds more mystique than any enchanted forest ever written. The forest type is called Shola. The grassland covers the hill-tops and intermittently dense green patches of forests spring up from nowhere. The forests seem to occupy any part of the landscape that holds the promise of water in the ground. My friend tells me that they also seek protection from the frost that is common here in the early mornings. Grasses may survive the lack of water and the frost, but the little saplings in the forests cannot. Grasses are hardy, they survive the toughest climates. She is clearly mesmerized by the resilience of the grasses. To find a little respite from the sun, I escaped into the dense canopy. The forest floor is rich with old leaves. Such a contrast to the dense grasses outside. Insects crawling everywhere, and gossimers hang here and there even in the tiny spaces in the lichens that are growing on the trees. Life is here everywhere!

In the forest patch, I discovered many mesmerizing things. I love cinnamon and I found the wild ones. I found wild bay leaves. The aroma is definitely more woody and far more richer. Maybe we could not handle the punch and toned the aroma down to suit human taste. I found curious blue berries that my friend tells me is what is called the drinking tree. A few berries are fine, but after a few one would start to hallucinate! A few tasted very good. I stopped. In the canopy I saw a leaf twirl as it fell and miss the forest floor. Surprised, I thought maybe the two berries also are having an effect on me. I dismissed the event. It happened again. A yellow leaf started to twirl and fall towards the ground, mid-fall it flew and perched on a near by branch. It looked at me, first with the right, then with the left eye then sang a little song. A grey-headed canary flycatcher was curious about the intruder in its forest. It did the swoops several times again. While I was having a tete-tate with the canary flycatcher, my friend was busy with extracting fresh honey for us to enjoy. It is not bottled honey, it is fresh out of the hive. Actually it was a part of the hive that you suck the honey from. There are bee larve all over the hive and where there are fewer larve, there is orange pollen. Some patches seemed free from both. Fresh honey is not as sweet as the one in the bottle, it has a slight sting to it. You will know what I mean when you try it. Do make your pick from the bag. Trust me it is worth the experience and you will never regret it. You might however never like bottled honey again.

Fresh honey, with the pollen, glistening honey and the larve.

I wish all classrooms and laboratory spaces were like this. It was the first time that thought hit me. Suddenly I found myself questioning why we left the wilderness. We did not leave the wilderness, we choose to make it more and more comfortable for us. Now we are so comfortable in the little world we created for ourselves, that wilderness seems alien to us. Wilderness is not predictable, it is unforgiving to mistakes and weakness. It daunts us, we feel overpowered and then some survival instinct gone haywire triggers and we decided to tame it. I observed the efforts of taming in Ooty. There are fir trees everywhere before you break into the actual wilderness. Firs are not native to southern India. They were planed here by the British to make the landscape more "home-like". Away from its own natural settings, the firs overtake the landscape from the local plants, unchecked. Another imbalance thanks to misplaced sense of home and aesthetics. In between grasslands, haunting black leafless trees stand. They are bent into submission by the strong winds that blow over the hills. They are not dead, their roots are alive. They await a spell of rain to spring again. These ominous trees are an attempt by the old local government to green a grassland. Most think that the forest should be green full of trees, but grasslands are an ecosystem in the their own right. Our lack of understanding and short-sighted administration decided to make use of waste-land and plant firewood trees. Now only lichens seem capable of interacting with the unruly trees that are overtaking the grasslands and changing the landscape like wildfire.

Only lichens interact with the ghostly fire-wood trees planted to make grasslands more "useful".

Tame the wild. It seems like the slogan of human kind. Ingenuity, creativity, wielding the power of the elements to fight the elements. We are fighting, always. Sadly, the enemy we choose is our own home. We lack the maturity as a species to understand the course of nature and evolution much older than ourselves. To add to it, we lack the patience to understand and comprehend the consequence of our actions. Short-shortsightedness plagues our decisions, that seem already biased by our greed. Ecosystem is fragile, nature is fragile. Grasses maybe resilient, we as a species may be resilient, but all of resilience cannot sustain after repeated misuse. Ecosystems will falter and so will the chances of our future generations. We may see our doom as species, we cannot regenerate, but nature can. Someone aptly said, Earth has survived a lot, it will survive humans. The question is not if the Earth will survive, question simply is - will we?

A little enraged and deep in retrospect, but unable to escape observing the lovely landscape as my friend and I discussed implication of unchecked human activity. I bounced back to my lessons learning about the various trees and plants and eating the wild guavas here. We headed back, sadly to human jungles.

I was already missing the open spaces, clean air, chitter-chatter of the numerous birds, silence of warm afternoons. I realized that everything is running on clock of  daylight, my watch seemed futile. The most precious currency is water, my wallet seemed heavier. A little berry can intoxicate you, another can kill you, the only food is the one you learnt was safe from collective experience of the family, all the food processing and the packaging seemed futile. The only communication is the one that can add more to the survival of the ecosystem, everything else is useless. I am carrying back a silent determination to see that the silence of wild is not taken as absence of protest, but as the silence due to futility of any protest against greed of a species to tame what is born to be wild. In this protest the desk and the offices seem futile. I am hoping as a part of a species, that someday we connect back and grow with nature rather than fight against it. Together is the only way we can ensure we survive, or maybe we will need a one way ticket to another planet altogether, a little more "home-like". Maybe we can make the buildings in brown and green shades there. Fiction is what we are creating every step of advancement, I hope some reality was retained. I hope to get back to reality, I hope to find my way home, close to nature.

Closer to home.

[Thought]: Womanhood is not pads with wings! Happy women's day btw.

I am stunned. I am a woman. No not stunned by a fact like that, but by the international women's day ho hum. One advertisement after another, must programmes are being sponsored not by the diamond or gold or luxury product companies, but by companies that make sanitary pads. Seriously, I am a woman, on woman's day the sight of a sanitary pad for myself is the last thing I want. I wonder how we as a species even got here.

I can't stop wondering about how half of the species accepts walking almost all their lives with diapers of one sort or another! Let me break the rules and tell you what they did not tell in the gender education class that gave free samples of the pads. It was in high school, just a regular day. All the girls from my class were asked to assemble in a room. There were rumors as always. Rumors said they were giving gifts only to girls. We were happy to be favored over the boys, and hoped we get some nice cakes. The meeting was a haze. I understood nothing, I know most understood nothing too. Some girls would stop speaking for a while. We all walked out with indifference and a small packet that did not have cake. Somewhere it was agreed upon by all girls to be hush about the contents. I had bought some of these for my mom and sister, but was ignorant about what it was. Well, the day ended. I don't think I was much educated. The application of the class came many months later. I did not even think about the class, looked at mom helplessly. For the first time in my life I had hoped to find an instruction manual, but had none but motherly advice to go on. It was not that the advice was bad, just that most of it never tallied. Some moms said play as much as you want, others asked to practice restrain. Some brands were supported while others no. No one said anything about so many things. And even today, it is a hush hush talk and even today I wish there was a manual.

I know like many many girls out there, when I had to sit through play time or was desperately hunting for a pad because I was not prepared, I wished I was a guy. No one is ever ashamed of asking for band aid or dettol, why are we made to feel ashamed of asking for a pad? Isn't being hurt not enough,  why is shame taught with it?!

Most of the other times, I am perfectly content with my allotted gender. On those days I wonder what a terrible engineering fiasco this design is. It's unpredictable, messy, bloody, painful and a great source of anxiety. Inspired by the latest movie on Allan Turing, I must say this feels very much like ENIGMA. The operating principles just reset every month to factory settings. Almost like having customized your browser over a month and it crashes, every pointer, bookmark, app deleted. You just start over.

I have been wondering why sometimes women don't plainly state what they want. Why do words get muffled with emotions. As I am growing up, I realize among the million threads my mind is processing, it is very hard to decipher my own feelings. It's mixed with a cocktail of hormones who's stoichiometry changes every few days. Too little time to decipher things. It somehow is not such a problem at all. It makes one wiser, compassionate and a little more human where you on some days have more patience and on some lose your head with others. All in all it is an amazing joy ride, full of experiences.

In the absence of this chaos I think every moment would be boring. An utter lack of drama, passion, romance, music, good food and just so much less color. All conversations would be limited to facts and very few about dreams opinions and long arguments. This is perfect, just a little restricted because of pointless rules from society.

To be a women, I think, is to be so alive every minute that everything else comes to life because of her presence. For her the world is an ordered chaos, it has all the elements that make things interesting. There is a lot of mystery in her world, even for her. She is alive everyday with a new dream. Once she has that dream fixed, she will chase it with such fierce passion that it will make an epic saga, if you care to hear her. What she is not is just five days of a month. To advertise her limitation is a shame to the society that is expected to nurture her.

If you really want to celebrate womanhood, don't limit the symbol to pads with wings. Give her the wings to be herself, to ask what she needs, to be unashamed about herself. Simply let her be, simply let her free. Change the symbol of women's day to just wings, because she just needs freedom to be herself and that is enough.