Category: Nature

WHAT IF….


... we have forgotten to slow down?

I came to Langkawi expecting to see another beautiful place. I found that the sea was beautiful. So was the Rainforest, so were the beaches.

The white beaches beckon
The Rainforest chalets

But after a while, I stopped looking at the beauty and began noticing something else.

The pace. The trees did not seem to be in a hurry to grow. The waves did not seem anxious about reaching the shore. The clouds moved without consulting a clock. Even the boats seemed to understand that there was nowhere more important to be.

And as I watched, I wondered when we had forgotten this simple rhythm. We hurry to work. Hurry to meetings. Hurry to finish. Hurry to achieve. And then, having spent years rushing towards the future, we discover that the present has quietly passed us by.

Perhaps the problem is not that we don’t have enough time. Perhaps we have forgotten how to inhabit the time we have. Standing by the sea, I found myself asking: What if slowing down is not falling behind? What if it is actually a way of moving forward—with greater awareness of where we are going?

Perhaps we don’t always need another destination. Sometimes we simply need to stop long enough to notice the journey.

….notice the journey

I closed my notebook and watched the waves return to the shore. They had been doing it for thousands of years. Unhurried. Unconcerned. And somehow, always on time.

— Rudra Bose, the Last Writer of Kolkata

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How Close Is the Future?


Two newspaper stories caught my attention today.

The first was from Nepal: devastating floods, homes swept away, lives lost, roads and bridges disappearing beneath an angry torrent of water.

Death and destruction

The second was almost deceptively ordinary. Across parts of Europe and Japan, persistent heatwaves are becoming so severe that something once unthinkable is changing: formal office wear is giving way to shorts, T-shirts and sneakers. What was once considered casual is becoming necessary simply to cope with the heat.

Heat waves across Europe and Japan

At first, the two stories seem to have little in common. One is about water. The other is about heat. But perhaps they are telling us the same story. The climate is changing. And slowly, almost imperceptibly, the boundaries of what we consider “normal” are changing with it.

When I wrote 2056: The Year of Water and Fire, I deliberately placed the catastrophic events some thirty years into the future. Even while writing it, I wondered whether I was being too dramatic—or perhaps, paradoxically, not dramatic enough.

Today, I find myself wondering something else. Could the future I imagined be closer than I thought? We tend to imagine climate catastrophe as something spectacular and distant: a great cyclone, a flooded city, an apocalyptic landscape sometime in the middle of the century. But perhaps climate change does not announce itself that way. Perhaps it arrives quietly. A few more unbearable nights. A flood where there wasn’t one before. A river changing its course. A crop failing. A species disappearing. An office worker deciding that trousers are simply too hot to wear. And then, one day, much like that frog in the slowly heating water, we realise that something we considered extraordinary has quietly become normal.

That is what unsettles me most. The danger is not merely that the planet is becoming warmer or that extreme weather is becoming more destructive. It is that to survive, we need to gradually become accustomed to the extraordinary. We need to adapt our clothes, our buildings. And we need to adapt our working hours, our expectations. And perhaps, without realising it, we have begun to adapt our definition of what constitutes a crisis.

In 2056, I imagined a Sundarbans battered by rising waters and increasingly violent storms. Yet the story is not ultimately about destruction. It is about resilience—of people, of technology, and perhaps most importantly, of nature itself. But resilience should never become an excuse for complacency. The fact that human beings can adapt does not mean that we should keep testing the limits of that adaptation.

The future is not a date on a calendar. It is being assembled quietly, day by day, in the choices we make—and in the warnings we choose to notice. Perhaps the most frightening question is no longer “What will the world look like in 2056?” Perhaps it is: “How much of 2056 have we already begun to live?”

In musing….. Shakti Ghosal

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What If ……….


We Have Misunderstood Our Place in the World?

I spent the morning watching the animals move across the Kenyan savannah. There were wildebeest everywhere. Zebras moved among them almost casually. An elephant and its cub stood beneath a tree. In the distance, the landscape seemed to stretch endlessly, without walls, roads or buildings to interrupt it. For a while, I simply watched.

A space with no boundaries

There was something strangely humbling about seeing so many creatures occupy the same landscape without any apparent need to possess it. They did not own the land. They did not draw boundaries across it. They did not put up signs announcing that a particular piece of earth belonged to them. They simply lived there.

The Savannah co-existence

And then a thought occurred to me. What if we have misunderstood our place in the world?

For centuries, we have measured human progress by our ability to control nature. We cut down forests and called it development. We dammed rivers and called it progress. We covered open land with concrete and called it urbanisation. We moved mountains, redirected water, altered landscapes and exterminated species after species, making them disappear. And while doing so, we often congratulated ourselves on our ingenuity and intelligence.

The great migration through Mara

But somewhere along the way, we perhaps began to confuse our ability to control something with the right to own it. The savannah seemed to offer me a different philosophy. The animals did not appear to be conquering the land. They were part of it. The elephant did not need to dominate the tree beneath which it stood. The zebra did not need to fence off its patch of grass. The wildebeest did not need a title deed to the earth beneath its feet. They belonged to the landscape without claiming it. Perhaps that is what we have forgotten. We speak endlessly about what we will leave behind. Be it buildings, businesses, fortunes, roads or institutions.  We would strive to leave our names on plaques and our photographs on walls. But perhaps there is another kind of legacy…….

The Zebra did not need to fence off its grass….

What we choose not to destroy. The forest we would leave standing. The river and the waterbody we would allow to remain clean. The animal(s) whose habitat we would protect. The open space we chose not to convert into concrete. The silence we did not fill.

The silence we did not fill….

Standing there in Kenya, I began to wonder whether civilisation should really be measured by how much of nature we can bend to our will. Or how much of nature we chose to leave as it is. Perhaps the more difficult measure is how much power we possess—and how much restraint we exercise. Because restraint requires something that conquest does not. It requires us to recognise that we are not the center of everything.  The realisation that the earth existed before us, the wild existed before our cities, our borders and our ambitions. And, if we are wise enough, much of it will continue to exist after we are gone.

Will this exist after we are gone?

Perhaps we are not the owners of this world after all. Perhaps we are merely its temporary custodians. We arrived without asking permission. We will leave without taking anything with us. Between those two moments lies the brief privilege of being of who we are and our presence here.

We remain privileged to have been here…….

And so I find myself asking a different question. Not simply, what will we build while we are here? But, what will remain because we were here? I closed my notebook. The animals continued moving across the savannah. They had not heard my question. Perhaps they did not need to. They seemed to know the answer already.

— Rudra Bose, the Last Writer of Kolkata

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