A Mother on comeback trail…

By Sumeet Naik

It is a stark irony of our times that while paeans of gratitude are being sung to mothers all over the world on every Mother’s Day, the Mother of all Mothers remains not only unsung but keeps bleeding thanks to the unending greed of its offspring.

The world has turned topsy-turvy in the last few months and as you leaf through this, Mother Nature is mutating and reconfiguring faster than our minds can anticipate in our locked down discretion. Far too resilient and blessed with a self-mitigating mechanism, Mother Nature has devolved upon itself to take a corrective course right on the nose of the very species that considers it to be its repository.

The absurdity of this all is staring in our face and how! The entire human might is today confined to its safe confines even as man-made boundaries have become redundant and of little consequence. The humanity is brought to its knees by a tiny, unsparing virus in its relentless onslaught and has reduced it to being a mute spectator as Mother Nature pays back in kind. All it can do now is to keep its sanity and unity together in this desperate battle for survival clueless as to what the future forebodes. Human prestige and pride has seldom taken this kind of beating. The much-vaunted human supremacy lies bruised, thrown by the wayside by a minute entity, which is out to settle scores with a vengeance. Mother Nature has hired its own assassins.

The pandemic has a grim and ominous message for all of us. Do not take Mother Nature for granted and tinker with its primeval existence. It reserves the right to reboot and reset when its faculties stretch beyond its endurance. The indications are there to see. Even as humanity grapples with this global hazard, it has already donned its protective gear with an unequivocal message to humans: You are not the sole owners of this eco-system the other co-habitants are no less stakeholders.

A good mother both nurtures and chastises. Betrayed and demeaned by its own children, it is still giving them another chance to mend their ways. The onus is now on us to take this chance and atone for the sins of the past. It should sober us that this is not a change of our own sweet will but we were compelled to fall in line. The takeaways are many. We are now programmed to live frugally with bare minimum, shake our lethargy and walk to fetch essentials, revert to board games that are more fun and less harmful than mobiles that are physically and mentally consuming. Enjoy the sheer pleasure of mirth and laughter with your near and dear ones to the background music of birds chirping away and flitting around you and the heavenly bliss of the Oxygen-deprived ambience!

Mother Nature’s tutorials have begun, and for once, humans will have to acquiesce to be its probationers. Time to grab this Motherly affection and fall into its lap! For the planet, this is history in the making. However, it also comes with a strong reminder: Those who do not learn from it are condemned to repeat it.

(Writer was former News Editor with The Free Press Journal (Mumbai) and currently a columnist)