Thursday, August 30, 2012

Green with Joy

How can green be the colour of envy?!

A late bloomer, I have only now dared to have something more than tulsi in my balcony. First a friend's photos of the flowers on her windowsill used to have me longing for blooms of my own. But I didn't think I quite had the green thumb. Then another friend put up photos and now that my kids are older, I started thinking, why not.

Today I have a few - not many, but just enough to fill my heart with contentment. Each new leaf brings joy over the fact that the plant survived another day and will survive another fills the heart with a pleasure that can only be compared to watching your children achieve the milestones. One variety, which my maid calls patrose, blooms almost everyday and each morning, the sight of the three different colours that burst forth in the pot makes me hum. As the regular rose burst forth in new leaves, I detect small buds that I am waiting will bloom. The hibiscus came with a bud that withered. But now I detect a few in the plant as I examine it closely. My jasmine stopped awhile, but new leaves are erupting forth...


Imagine having a garden full of plants and trees, a street full of them, a world filled with greenery... Can we reverse the trend and work towards increasing the world's green cover? It can only give joy, isn't it? Do we have the heart to relish it?

Friday, August 3, 2012

May Not Bee

So, we know it stings. Many of us are scared to cross a beehive because we expect the bees to just get a whiff of our body odour and rush at us, their' stings ready - 'Tom and Jerry' style. We love honey, but we are glad it is someone else who collects it from the honeycombs up the trees...

And then newspapers tell us, no, the bottled honey with a nice brand name is really not from the natural honeycombs in wild areas. Care to guess why? Because maybe there aren't so many beehives left in the wilderness in the first place! So these are box honey - bees bred in boxes, given jaggery water, and the honey nothing more than sugar syrup - coloured right, of course! Let's not even mention the antibiotics in that honey, making it more harmful than good. Being a regular honey user, this has really left me in a dilemma. Should I or shouldn't I?

But this is not the only cause for worry, it seems!

By divine grace, or curse, I was drawn into a street play. The grace or curse is not in being drawn into it. It was a pleasure all along, mixing what little I know of dance, with four others, to merge with a 20-minute street play on bees.

The grace/curse was to be the bee. To  lose my way back to the comb because of the vibrations caused by all the towers set up by human beings that confuse me. To suck in pesticides as I draw nectar from flowers, develop illnesses and stay away deliberately so as not to infect my brethren too. To be the queen bee that waits for her slaves eagerly so that the honey may be made, only to be disappointed at their not returning home.

Apparently the bees are needed to pollinate certain specific plants/trees like apple. In China, it seems, because there are not enough bees to perform this job, human beings use cotton for the process.

Is this a curse or a grace, to be part of a species that only seems bent on destroying everything around it for satisfying its insatiable thirst for 'development'?

Is it a curse or a grace to be made aware of how even the tiny bee is not spared in our march to progress.