Hearing the chirping
of birds at my windowsill, I got up surprised. I was thinking what had brought so
many birds to my window at that early hour. I directed my look towards the window,
but there were no sign of birds. I got up hastily and opened the doors of the window,
and stretched my neck to have a look at the birds. Not a single bird was visible!
Was it a dream or hallucination? I
murmured to myself. Really, I was happy
to have heard the chirping of so many birds at a time, at my windowsill in the early
morning. Because of that chirping sound of birds, my morning seemed different
and blissful. However, it was confusing
and disturbing. After some time, I heard
again the chirping of birds at some other corner of my house, as I was eager to
know, I rushed towards the sound. To my utter surprise and disappointment, it
was a ringtone from a mobile. It was
a live-recorded version. I have heard and read that ringtones are disturbing and
killing birds all over the world. Now a day we do not see sparrows and crows very
often in our surroundings. Once, these were quite common birds, which used to
sit in the verandas, on the compound walls, on the roofs chirping, crowing the
whole day. When crows crowed sitting on the roofs the whole day, it meant some
guests would come that day. Like mail carriers, they brought coded messages
. When I refer to a crow, only the
cartoons of R.K. Laxman, an eminent
cartoonist, come to my mind. He has so beautifully rendered, familiarized and
intimated crows to us that everybody started loving that ugly crow. When R.K.Laxman
visited our college, we requested him to demonstrate and he obliged us by
drawing a couple of drawings, mainly Mr.Citizen
and his famous crow. His speech, full of humor, delighted us.
Nowadays, we are
seeing fewer and fewer birds due to the heavy progress and impact of technology
and global warming. As urban space is expanding, the forest, natural
vegetation, is shrinking day by day. As a result, birds and animal species are
extinguishing rapidly, and wild animals in search of food are entering in to
urban space. We human beings are the cause for this catastrophe. With
intelligent brains and efficient hands, we have created this irreversible malignant
situation. Now, we rarely see birds in our surroundings, who were our daily
visitors once, especially sparrows and crows. Just to invite birds to our
garden, we have placed a big mud pot filled with water, so that birds can come
and drink water. A couple of black birds, with red feather on their heads, come
to our garden everyday in the morning, flutter their wings in the water pot, each
taking its turn. Sometimes, Small birds
in rainy season come here and take shelter in the palm trees. This summer, an announcement was made
through T.V and Radio requesting people to keep small water pots and some
food on their house roofs for birds. Some
people reacted sensibly and positively, and kept some food and water for birds.
Some neglected this as if it were not their concern at all.
In recent years, architecture
has changed significantly. We see all around the world towering buildings
coming up in thousands and thousands, every year. These buildings, mostly, have
glass coverage on all the four sides. It is trendy, inspiring and encouraging for
the one who sit inside the structure and work, because one can have simultaneously
both inside and outside views, and enjoy. Sitting in the glass cubicle, one
can see birds flying high in the sky, the white clouds brushed here and there
with silvery sunlight floating, through the glass panes. This all sounds very
rosy and poetic. Nevertheless, the
distressing point is that thousands and thousands birds die every day, hitting
to the glass panes. Birds fly innocently and blindly in to the glass panes,
thinking it is an extension of the sky, which is just a deceptive
reflection. Hitting to the hard glass,
birds die instantly. Every day birds are dying in thousands. The condition is
worsening day by day. Due to these reasons, many spices of birds have already extinguished.
By destroying nature
and its habitats, can we live in peace? This concrete jungle is definitely
going to suffocate our life and of our next generations too.
Gayatri Desai
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