Opinion In Good Faith | Let’s listen to the birds, the trees and the Aravallis
The Aravallis are old. Old enough to know better than to expect gratitude. Older than the Himalayas, older than our arguments. The low hills with no interest in grandeur. That, perhaps, is their biggest mistake.
An aerial view of the Aravalli hills surrounded by dense human settlements in Haryana (Express Photo: Tashi Tobgyal) As lonely as a tree, someone recently remarked during a conversation. But is a tree — rooted, breathing, hosting entire worlds – lonely, I wondered. And if it is not lonely, then are we? Or. is loneliness a modern myth?
There are growing scientific theories and philosophical explorations on shared consciousness. The concept is not entirely new. It has existed in religions and indigenous cultures for centuries. The non-dualism of Advaita Vedanta speaks of shared consciousness in its purest form, and individuality as maya. Buddhism emphasises interbeing and sunyata. Wahdat al-Wujud (Unity of Being) is one of the core ideas of sufism.
I distrust anything that sounds too cosmic, too New Age, too eager to comfort. Shared consciousness? Universal fields binding all beings? I am tempted to roll my eyes and ask for peer-reviewed journals.
But once in a while it does make sense. The recent debate on the Aravalli hills – on whether low hills are dispensable – made me question my scepticism.
The Aravallis around Udaipur have been an extension of who I am. I grew up in their lap: The weekly family outing to their streams, the summers spent in their forests. These hills raised me as much as any adult did.
My family’s sense of physical and emotional well-being rose and fell in parallel with the hills. As the hills declined with exploding population and development, so did something else: Water levels, wildlife, weather predictability. My father fought for their preservation for decades.
The Aravallis are old. Old enough to know better than to expect gratitude. Older than the Himalayas, older than our arguments. The low hills with no interest in grandeur. That, perhaps, is their biggest mistake. Existence, in the new world order, must justify itself constantly. The bigger the scale of a building or statue, the greater the declaration of pride.
The low Aravallis stand apart from this attitude. They have been ecological shock absorbers for a civilisation that has been riding without brakes. What makes the Aravallis especially tragic is that they were never asking for reverence. No temples on every peak. No pilgrimage circuits. Just the courtesy of being left alone.
We are told that development and ecology can coexist. They can on paper. To understand why this is such a fragile lie, take one single tree. A tree is not one life. It is a full-fledged republic. On its trunk, creepers climb with breathless ambition. They cling, twine, and slowly tighten their grip, whispering sweet nothings about “mutual support”. In time, the tree can barely breathe. This is called “strategic partnership”.
Then there are parasites like fungi, insects, and borers. They don’t even pretend affection. They hollow the tree from inside until one day it collapses during an unremarkable storm. Sometimes, like institutions. Sometimes, like you and me.
A tree also shelters birds. These are your opinion-makers. They fight loudly for branch-space, conduct dawn-to-dusk debates, and occasionally forget why they started shouting in the first place.
Lower down, ants march in disciplined lines, carrying crumbs 10 times their size. Nobody interviews them. Nobody tweets about them. These are your workers. Your farmers. Your municipal sweepers. Your delivery executives cycling through heat waves while the rest of us argue about nationalism from air-conditioned rooms.
A single tree sees more regimes and has a longer memory than WhatsApp forwards.
So how many worlds exist in the Aravallis? Thousands? Millions? Each hillock hosting overlapping republics: Some noisy, some ancient, some newly arrived. Leopard corridors crossing human boundaries. Aquifers remembering rain from decades ago. Countless bushes, shrubs, rocks, streams, animals and trees sharing their consciousness.
Loneliness, I think now, is a symptom of disconnection we actively manufacture. What if we feel increasingly isolated because we are actively severing links with land, with non-human life, with memory, and place?
The Aravallis were never low. They are custodians. And like all custodians, they are noticed only when something breaks.
The tree was never lonely. We were. And in treating parts of our living world as dispensable, we are not asserting power, only announcing how profoundly alone we have chosen to be.
Tehsin is a Colombo-based author and environmentalist
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