Every time that I go back and look at this photo, I am filled with feelings that I find really hard to describe. It’s painfully beautiful, this sight of tress and grass. Beautiful because each time I think of green I am reminded of home. My home in the hills. The foothills of Himalayas, hills of Kumaon, in the forests of Oaks, Deodars, and Pine. My home in Ranikhet, roughly translated to ‘The Queen’s Meadow’. Green reminds me of the fields I ran on, the grass I fell on, the trees hid behind when I played hide and seek with my friends, and the narrow trail that I ran on each day to reach school as the last bell for morning assembly rang.
Perhaps, my love for green trees, the clear blue sky, the sunlight sieving through the canopy to paint everything in a golden hue and those cute little sparrows that would rest themselves on electric wires in the market or make their nests in shops is a consequence of being raised in a place that was blessed with all this.
But, do we really need to have lived somewhere to realise the beauty that nature holds? Isn’t it supposed to be intrinsic to us? I guess ‘supposed’ is the keyword here. For there are many things that are ‘supposed’ to be a certain way, and yet here we are- selling the very planet to later build an apartment facing the sea, or a green park in the society we live in. To want infinite growth from a finite planet.
This is why I find this photo painful. Because the culture that we live in, the system that we are a part of, has capital assigned all that is present in this picture. Because I don’t know if I will see these trees again when I return to the spot where I first captured them.