Visiting Dense Forest will make our Life Healthier/Happier

Recently, one Yazhini Parvatham from Chennai sent a few poetic lines to one of the popular weeklies in Tamil- the lines which appealed to her heart. Those lines are from Baltimore Khurotta, which she must have translated into Tamil, I guess. The poem resembles like a truncated autobiography of the trees in a dense forest, giving vent to their feelings. I am trying to capture those lines in Tami into English again in my own way as they also appeal to my heart. Now the lines.

If you want to take away

Anything from this forest,

Kindly capture them in your camera lens

Or through film rolls.

If you desire to leave behind

Something substantial here,

Please leave your footprints alone here,

And nothing else.

If you feel deleting something in life,

Spending away anything,

Please spend your precious time here

In this dense forest.

How many of us have the heart and mind to wade through the dense and dark forest and drink the air of fresh oxygen. Do we have the physical and mental stamina, including the financial wherewithal to undertake the trip. Will family and friends give adequate company or will prove to be a nuisance and going alone is better. Compared to concrete jungle, the forest is still clean and green and we miss all these treasure while living, if we don’t bother to spend our precious time there.

I can never forget the cool breeze fused with droplets of water in the coral island while marching towards Mayabandar from Andaman Islands. While thinking and ruminating over it, I now feel and smell those precious moments of life.

Despite all adversities and cumulative humiliations heaped on life, I must say that I am one among the luckiest to travel to many places, particularly when I touched the threshold of Sixty- the sweet sixty, the period when the life has really begun for me.

Every day I feel that I am living on bonus time. I feel incredibly bad and sad that I could not read more and write more in the last sixty years of my life. But I taught more and lectured more by reading the subject in a more disorderly way without any target or goal. I only know how much I studied Economic Thought .Now, where are they in my subconscious layer of mind, I don’t know. In the remaining part of life to feel young and also to render some academic contribution I must read more and write more. I should, I can, but will I? Let it not remain the question. I have the goodwill of many and more important, strong parental genes which will help realize all the essential things which needs to be done, before saying a temporary goodbye to this planet which has become Flat, Hot and crowded. Until then, I will live and labor, besides loving fellow human.