Thursday, March 12, 2009

How Do You Kill a Tree?

Trees do not die so easily. An excuse however can sentence them to death in the city - too much leaf litter in the road and driveway, road widening, flyovers, roots in the foundation, vastu problems for a shop, parking space or just the bill board visibility. You can kill a tree. Plan murder. Like the human spirit the tree too can be brought down notch by notch.
First you chop off all the branches and leaves confining the tree to a single trunk. Like a human spirit 's freedom and rights is reduced to one notion, that of just survival. An identity that that is just embodied . You then hack away at the trunk little by little till you bring the upright spirit down to its knees on the ground. Yet the tree is not dead. Even the worst mutilation cannot destroy the tree or human spirit. It just with draws inside its deep roots into the sanctity of earth, drawing life from the link to the earth. Mere human hands cannot break this down, so we call in the technology. The earth- movers come. THEY reach deep into the earth's surface and disembowel the roots. "JAD SE UKAD PHEKNA" ( uproot and throw)
The tree root stands on the tar gasping at the sky as its being dries up root tip by root tip. And the earth that covered it is blown way as dust. The tree never reaches back to the earth again. On asphalt and tar it just awaits its fiery end. Exposed, its privacy laid bare to the harshness of glare, the human spirit loses all connectedness to its nourishment, hope blows away and the spirit dies.
Every time a tree dies a bit of the human spirit dies, ringing in the death of humankind itself.

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