To Be Or Not To Be - "A Green Day"

 

Francis Beacon had once said that to know the nature outside, we need to know the nature within. As a child, the quest to know the nature outside started with the thirst to know the nature within. While the nature within was lost in multiple conflicts of gene, nature, culture, conditioning, hereditarianism, a view outside towards nature got me back to within. It often happened, that when the answers of nature within were not available, I got the same answers in the green fields of West Bengal while travelling to Krishnanagar, Durgapur, Mogra away from Kolkata.

Every journey of mine in a train, away from Kolkata was actually bringing me near to the nature within while being positioned in the larger frame of the nature outside. The journey from Kolkata was therefore not a journey from the refugee homes of the city but was being more close to the nature within and outside.

Each such interaction of the nature within and outside through my travel to the rural villages, towns and suburbs away from Kolkata was like a – “A Green Day”.  The emotions of rage, despair, anguish, hope, anxiety, light would all get mixed up to reach to a tunnel end after a spiritual death through these pathways to the rural society. Urban society was quite synonymous to me as a “A Grey Day”.

However, on some days of monsoon or April stuck by Norwesters, my Grey Days of the City Living would become “A Green Day” when I would plunge to ponds, muds after football matches amidst high storm and rainfall. I could see the muddy color of my despair, feeling of exclusion from the city privileges, elitism being driven away by the muds of the monsoon football grounds of the refugee space and habitation where I grew up.

Often, I would do that in the middle of the football grounds within the TB Hospital Campus of Jadavpur of 80s and early 90s which had the humans and pigs playing together on the football ground amidst the mud. Orwell’s “Animal Farm” was not applicable in those days of my childhood as in that Animal Ground, humans and pigs had no hierarchy. They all would equally enjoy muds, smell of grass, monsoon rains, cuts and bruises of life and body together. Truly, the rage and despair would get converted to “A Green Day” in those days while playing together with pigs on the football ground of the TB Hospital Campus at Jadavpur. Then, one day, after leaving Kolkata and facing the city space of Delhi when I had a cultural realization of the space within me, I found out that the nature within me was – “A Green Day”. Such a Green Day was facing the threat of extinction from the perils of human induced impacts of climate change. I had no other way but to join people who equally had found out “A Green Day” within themselves just like me through nature. I had to fight the threat of extinction from the perils of human induced impacts of climate change to safeguard the nature within me from becoming extinct, and a living fossil. There was no other way but to collaborate with my Co-Editors, Co-Authors of The Book – “A Green Day” published by Hachette India and represented by The Book Bakers. I found out the same nature within and outside in – Mr. Jeevesh Gupta and Mr. Chittaranjan Dubey.

The rage, despair, hope of within expanded and extended its arms and joined hands with many across the world and gradually the chapters of the book “A Green Day” were born with the stewarding guidance and support of the other two co-editors too. The journey of the book “A Green Day” has just begun as it is a journey of a child to protect the nature within to see the nature outside and both are mutually co-existing. This voice will only multiply in future and will counter question every inner voice which often arises from our existential dilemmas of life saying – “Why do we need to protect this nature inside to see the nature outside or vice versa”?

Hence – “A Green Day” is not just merely a book that I was part off starting from the inception to publication but it has been an attempt to create a process of winning the doubt that arises everytime, everyday which often tells us that – “You should give up protecting the nature within and just be with the flow as anyways you might loose it being too little in the larger scheme of things”!

A Green Day is therefore an attempt to represent the voice of all such citizens and individuals who are fighting and conquering such a doubt everyday from waking up till they go to bed to sleep!