Friday, May 11, 2012

The Tree of Life


I took the picture of this magnificent tree in the garden of a century-old hospital in South Bombay. I don't know the botanical name of the tree but I'm pretty certain it's older than the two-storey heritage hospital it looms over. The tree is home to all kinds of birds, such as owls, crows, kites, sparrows, koyals (the long-tailed cuckoo), mynas (the Asian starling) and many others, which "come home" to roost every evening just as the sun sets over the Arabian Sea. The tree has been a quiet chronicler of health and sickness, of life and death, for a hundred years. If only the tree could talk...

Footnote: In case you're wondering which camera I used, it was my Nokia cellphone with a 2 megapixel camera.

Photo Copyright: Prashant C. Trikannad

6 comments:

  1. That's a tree with character. You could tell a story about it - if the tree can't talk, speak for it :)

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  2. 150 years ago a single tree called Lone Tree grew along the Oregon Trail near where I grew up on the western plains; it was a meeting place for native tribes. A nearby white settlement called itself Lone Tree, and the writer Wright Morris took the name for the Nebraska town in his fiction. You can still travel in the Sandhills, which are covered with grass, and find places where there's not the sight of a tree in any direction.

    I thought of all this looking at your tree, which would caught my eye with wonderment as it did yours.

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  3. I love trees. I respect them. Hate to see all the trees being cut down here.

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  4. HKatz, maybe I will! You could weave all kinds of stories around the tree. There are lots of fruit bearing trees around it too.

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  5. Ron, thanks for that very interesting story about the Lone Tree. People take the trees in their cities and towns for granted and often fail to notice their absence even after they are gone. Hopefully, the global debate over climate change will bring them back.

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  6. Charles, your fine sentiment about trees reminds me of Dogmatix, the pet dog belonging to Obelix (from Asterix comics), who "cries out" every time he sees a felled tree. Fortunately, Druid Getafix, famous for his potions, merely tosses one of his magical seeds into the open earth and up she grows again. We really need those instant tree growing seeds.

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