making life more meaningful

It’s  really sad to see the land covered with concrete to look good and clean. This is what is happing at Vijaya bank layout, Bangalore.

Few weeks back, layout and park maintained by Vijaya bank started cleaning the park and it’s around area. Not sure who is getting this done. Whole park is redone with some fancy way by spending lot of money. Most shocking thing is that the area around the park is getting filled with concrete. Earlier its was just soil with grass, weeds and trees are planted in between.

When they first started cleaning the road side area (supposed to be footpath), and I could notice the rich soil with lot of organic manure and I was so tempted to get some for my terrace garden. And I made few trips with my bike to get few bags of rich soil.

Few days back when I was on my way back to home, and I saw this terrible scene, people are covering the whole footpath with concrete. They must have covered the whole area now. I was totally disappointed and feeling helpless.

Now there is no way plants will grow and there was a little chance to rain water to get into earth which is closed now. Millions of small creatures which are part of our life cycle are dead under the concrete. I’m sure, we are just going opposite direction to nature. Is this what is development means?

The world used to be simple. You merely noticed in passing that you got wet by brushing against the drops of dew while meandering through the meadow. But from the time people undertook to explain this one drop of dew scientifically, they trapped themselves in the endless hell of the intellect.

Water molecules are made up of atoms of hydrogen and oxygen. People once thought that the smallest particles in the world were atoms, but then they found out that there was a nucleus inside the atom. Now they have discovered that within the nucleus there are even tinier particle. Among these nuclear particles, there are hundreds of different varieties and no one knows where the examination of this minute world will end.

It is said that the way electrons orbit at ultrahigh speeds within the atom is exactly like the flight of comets within the galaxy. To the atomic physicist the world of elementary particles is a world as vast as the universe itself. Yet, it has been shown that in addition to the immediate galaxy in which we live there are countless other galaxies. In the eyes of the cosmologist, then, our entire galaxy becomes infinitesimally small.

The fact is that people who think a drop of water is simple or that a rock is fixed and inert are happy, ignorant fools, and the scientists who know that the drop of water is a great universe and the rock is an active world of elementary particles streaming about like rockets, are clever fools. Looked at simply, this world is real and at hand. Seen as complex, the world becomes frighteningly abstract and distant.

The scientists who rejoiced when rocks were brought back from the moon have less grasp of the moon than the children who sing out, “How old are you, Mr. Moon?” Basho (A famous Japanese haiku poet (1644-1694).) could apprehend the wonder of nature by watching the reflection of the full moon in the tranquillity of a pond. All the scientists did when they went off into space and stomped around in their space boots was to tarnish a bit of the moon’s splendour for millions of lovers and children on the earth.

Lines form The book One-Straw Revolution, by Masanobu Fukuoka, 1978