Dheeraj Kalgutkar

  There are always a dozen ways to look at things. Some of those ways lead to change that is beneficial to larger people and some to inaction and continued benefit of few. The ongoing project or rather ghastly movement to cut as many trees as possible, to clear as much forest land as possible remains one such thing which is being looked at and discussed in very many ways. But from most discussions, one key angle and detail is getting missed out or perhaps overlooked by the very people who surely have a stake in status quo. The political movement that most loudly claims Hindu reverence for nature has itself overseen or defended many of these projects.  Hasdeo Arand is one of India’s largest contiguous forest regions, where the Narendra Modi government has marked 95,000 plus trees for chopping. Many have already been chopped along with 800 hectares of forest being diverted for mining activities that will benefit his friend and donor Gautam Adani, in whose plane Mr Modi campaigne...

They will tell you They wanna disappear Far away from the madness of this world Away from hate, failures, breakups, heartbreaks They wanna walk into wilderness Into open fields and clear streams Jungles where elephants make sounds And deers run from roaring lions Into trees that grow supporting one another A world that exists onto itself Where seeds fall down and come to life when it pours from the skies But you know what? That’s not disappearing You want to be found You are longing to be discovered You are crying to meet thyself and you will But disappear you will not You will vanish only when death embraces you When you will become one with thin air That would be disappearance… Thanks for reading above poem. Do Share if you liked what you just read. It means a lot to me and helps other people to discover it :)

Before and after of a hill that is part of many photo-shoots and regional movies. There are many such… Nobel laureate Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore when visited Karwar, a coastal town in south Indian state of Karnataka in 1882, dedicated a chapter in his memoirs to this town. But that was in the past. The town known mostly for its long stretched sun kissed beaches, old Portuguese remnants, Maratha past, sea food, mangrove islands and lot more has gone under the hammer of ‘development’ for some time now and remains very less about anything that would inspire another Tagore. We all are very much aware how development of any city has its own drawbacks – people get displaced, vegetation gets destroyed and lot more happens that we all have got used to for now. And most of us agree it’s fine when pros weigh down the cons of any such development plan. But consider this now. There is a plan (as you read this the work is already under progress on ground) for widening of National Highw...