My Column: Have We Pushed Nature To Unleash Its Fury?

Delicate, sensitive yet all enduring and reliable, we have really pushed the earth's tolerance to a limit where it may no longer be able to bear the weight of the human race.

Over the course of my lifetime, I have travelled to several countries and cities, visited five continents and crossed the International Date Line and the equator. So what have I seen and noticed?

During most of these visits, I was a part of some delegation or the other, so my views were often based on snippets seen on the side of the show. Clearly, citizens of some countries are well off and some badly off.
In some places the poverty was so wretched that one was driven to think that beggars on the streets of Mumbai were better off while in some countries, the entire population seemed to be better off than the richest Indians. 

Manmade constructions have never impressed me, they are the same all over - large office or residential blocks with well laid out pavements, modern cars, flyovers and well-dressed men and women running from one place to another. In Europe (and colonies of the Europeans), one finds occasional stone architecture of some elegance and a sense of proportion; statues of some local hero and awkward architecture a few centuries old preserved as nostalgia. 

Modern architecture in general is unappetising, artless and heartless. It is clearly designed to pack people inside, not to be viewed from outside. An occasional clever idea of partially removed walls or façades made of glass or a splash of paint is about all that architects of today do to distinguish themselves. Even when there is scope for creativity, it is rare to see. 

The only man-made structure that has impressed me is the Taj Mahal of Agra. There is nothing like it. It is not the largest, nor the whitest nor the tallest. But aesthetically, it is unmatched in its elegance. I believe one would be poorer if one died before seeing the Taj!

In general, I have found people proud of their heritage and dissatisfied with the present regime, but confident that better times will come. An occasional war memorial of recent wars can also be found. All nations try to impress their young about the history and achievements of the past generations and try to generate enthusiasm about the present with promises of great things to come in future. 

Then, most urban sites in the world are the same. The more they like to be different, the more they are the same. So are the people. Giggly infants with chubby cheeks to noisy mischievous children and self-righteous people mixed with petty greed and small irritants abound all around. 

The only difference is the way the rich and powerful rise to power and how they rule the population. From hoodwinking democracies to crass and crude autocracies, the difference is largely of kind rather than type. In countries with small populations where personal contacts are likely to cover large stretches of population, the governments tend to be more sensitive and considerate. But such countries, with a limited resource base, are dependant on foreign connections. 

Large nations tend to be more manipulative of the emotions of their populations and less sensitive to subtle pains of the people in what they call national interest. Such nations call upon their history and heritage to ask people to be more patient and more supportive of their government. People of small nations tend to be more sensitive to visitors while those from large nations pass on their government’s insensitivity to the visitors, unless your hosts can manage a troop of hospitality managers. The human race may be genetically uniform, but in governance and in the attitude of people, one does come across a larger variety.

On the other hand, natural elegance is a class apart. Even in mountains, there are the sharp edges of the Yellow Mountains of China, the great flowing slopes of the mountains of Austria to the well-manicured mountains of Switzerland. Against this are the mountain ridges of Kashmir and the gentle green blanket of the mountains of south India. The barren harshness of Vindhyas and staggering fearsomeness of the mountains of Nepal. The unflinching ice lines of mountain ranges and the large mountain plateau of Iran (as seen from the air) - the mountains alone boggle my imagination and make me feel humbled. 

Then there are the rivers - large majestic ones like the Mississippi to the great gentle river beds of the Ganga. The little streams of the rivers in the Western Ghats that go from being small rivulets to small streams gobbled up by the great Arabian Sea in no time at all. 

Then there are large lakes like the one in Kyrgyzstan that are said to have formed from the tears of a girl whose loved one had been taken away from her, to the great lake of Lonar that must have been formed against a gigantic, noisy event when a meteor dug up the earth. Its acidic manner of preserving dead trees like the skeleton dug up from the deep past, all leave an impression behind.     

But in most cases, the feature that is common, is human greed, arrogance and insensitivity to this great architecture called the planet earth. Delicate, sensitive yet all enduring and reliable, we have really pushed its tolerance to a limit where it may no longer be able to bear the weight of the human race. From digging mines and unnatural plantations and large scale cross transplantation of plants, there is no sin and no crime that humans have not committed. 

From atom bombs to artificial accumulation of dispersed radioactive material, from building dams and drowning or starving other animals of nature, we have done it all. In some cases, Nature has fought back with diseases and built-in decaying mechanisms in our bodies as well as the large scale release of energy in cyclones - the nature’s fight against us is polite with only an occasional ferocity (like a person who rarely gets angry, but when he or she does, the ferocity of the anger is unbearable).

In this race, the odds are that nature will win, unless we can civilise ourselves very quickly and reach a compromise that honours and respects nature. But this seems unlikely. Considering what we have done to the earth all over and are about to do to other planets, it may not be a bad idea for nature to get rid of us.  It will allow nature to undo the damage wrought by humans who have reorganised nature in a manner that is clearly not to its advantage. 

In the past, nature has shown what it is capable of doing, from destroying the entire race of dinosaurs to other overbearing life forms. Nature has simply too many tools. Like a human body, it can increase its temperature or go into deep freeze. It can apply life-form changing diseases, break up the habitat by cyclones, volcanos, flooding and breaking continent, and I am not even talking about a rock from outer space. We don’t appreciate its powers and the ferocity it can muster.

I am sure that an occasional Taj Mahal notwithstanding, the planet will be much better off without us and much prettier and much more in harmony. But then, who will be there to appreciate it?