Opinion HCU protests: What will happen when the last tree is cut?

In the 1970s, and well into the 1980s, you have to understand that in what were then relatively smaller towns like Hyderabad (as opposed to say, Bombay, with its movie-feted skyscrapers), the tallest things you saw when you looked up (apart from adults that is), were not necessarily buildings.

You looked up and you saw hills, rocks, boulders, looming over you. And of course, a sky which was so blue you will not believe it when you watch bits of it now in old 8mm film clips, or attribute it to the trickery of optical reproduction perhaps.

You saw skies. You saw rocks. And, of course, you saw trees, branches, trunks, canopies of leaves shedding shade and shelter and playground props and ghost stories. But it is not like we did not see the city growing in the 1970s or 1980s. Homes were built. New office buildings and shops came up here and there, framed by open spaces. The human world, back then, knew its place, seemingly, well within the lap of nature.

That comparison is timely. On Ugadi, last week, the customary panchanga sravanam (Telugu calendar), the pandita said the name of this year is Vishwaavasu. A name associated with pleasantness, not lacking for anything. A name in its very etymology connoting being at home.

Even as we hope for a happy year, an army of bulldozers let loose on one of the few forests left in the great mega-sprawl of a city that is Hyderabad now. The videos and images of trees falling and peacocks crying, whether AI-imagined or otherwise, screamed through our phones.

O proud Telugu states! A few years ago, you stunned the world’s audiences with a movie like RRR in which hundreds of animals leapt out of their cages to fight back against the colonisers. Today, we have no such hope.

What will happen when the last tree is cut? When the last forest is shredded, eviscerated, and paved over? What will happen to the peacocks, the sparrows, and indeed, even the mighty humans whose internal inequalities and blindness seem harder than the hardest bulldozer blade?

How many students will need to be shoved, caned, or silenced?

Hyderabad Central University. HCU. A universe in its own right.

For a brief moment, 20 years ago, HCU gave me a place in the universe. I co-taught a summer course there for my students from San Francisco. They lived right there on campus and met students from all across India and Asia. We grew to adore its trees and rocks just as everyone today protesting the destruction does.

For a moment, back then, I had hope. Globalisation. Growth. Sure, but in balance. Most of the rock-scapes inside the city, in our old neighbourhoods, were gone. But in the new global-looking outskirts, there was a chance. Nature and the city could co-exist. Governments have come and gone. States have split. Democracy has danced, nicely, indeed, conveniently. GDP. Shopping malls. Airports. Trains. Big wide roads.

But What We Didn’t See was coming too. In some cities, What We Didn’t See became What We Couldn’t Breathe. In others, it became What We Couldn’t Stand On. Pollution. Floods. Suppressed lake beds returning. Buildings collapsing.

What we didn’t see wasn’t invisible to everyone though. Enough of us have been seeing it, weeping for it, screaming for it.

The banyan trees of Chevella (under road). The fragile hillsides of Kerala (under resorts). The night-panther-walk forests of Aarey in Mumbai (under public transportation storage needs). The serene sea-front mountain of Rushikonda in Vizag (under some whim of fine lodging).

Kancha Gachibowli.

Why did it get to this? Could we not have found the balance of economic growth with respect for nature, and the future? Could we not have followed the ideal that we might take from Mother Earth enough for everyone’s “need” but not ravage her for “greed”?

This path of balance, we did not see. We chose not to see. After all, we, or our leaders, aspired to see in the West only the shiny glass buildings, the big wide roads, the sprawl of machine and power. But they did not see that in the West, they have kept their parks, forests, trees, rocks and canyons.

We saw only what we wanted. And chose not to see the destruction at all. It is convenient not to see. If you are powerful. If you have privilege, you can ignore things. I had a bit of privilege once. Not on the scale to stop life and death fates of forests, of course, but the privilege, mostly, of memory. I remember how nature looked, once.

But I looked away sometimes too. It was one place, one kind of place, which I had to pass near my home, and en route to school, I could never look at. I turned away every time until one day, I had to go into such a place and complete my farewells. My father, in 2014. My mother, in 2023.

From Banjara Hills and Jubilee Hills, the seats of old wealth, to Gachibowli, with all its new power and pomp, and on a road down a slope connecting them is one of Hyderabad’s many graveyards. It used to be ordinary. But someone had the kindness to upgrade it. It is an elegant, aesthetic place, the “Great Journey,” they call it.

No one with the power to save or destroy whole forests probably thinks of it when they are busy wielding such powers. But the Mahaprasthanam is there, overlooking the expanse from the Hyderabad of old to the Hyderabad of the future. The rocks may be gone. The trees and the birds may be gone. But that one inexorable place, it stands. It is watching, keeping count of the currency it knows. Of Karma. Paapam. Punyam.

Punarapi Jananam, Punarapi Maranam (Birth again, death again).

The writer is professor of media studies at the University of San Francisco.