The balcony of my 5^th floor apartment opens up to a huge tree which over the years has been supporting a thriving ecosystem of a variety of birds and other life forms. Early in the morning, its branches offer some much-needed respite to a noisy bunch of parrots who avail a few minutes of rest before embarking on a journey to their next destination. Then there are the red vented bulbuls and the humming-bird lookalikes who also visit my balcony garden either to drink the nectar from the flowers or to pluck some twigs and blades of grass for building their nests. And throughout the day, apart from the regular crows, sparrows and pigeons, there are a myriad other blue-, green- and yellow-coloured birds who are constantly flying in and out of the dense foliage. At night, the tree is full of bats and owls. It is also not uncommon to see an occasional monkey or two hanging from its branches.

The tree itself is dynamic in the way it changes its appearance through the seasons. In the monsoons, it is lush green, it sheds its leaves in the autumn and in the summer, it is covered in longish fruits with cottony interiors lodging the seeds which are seen strewn all over the ground after the occasional thunderstorm. The tree thus resembles an entire self-sustainable world not only offering refuge to its inhabitants but also providing shade from the harsh sun or heavy rain to the passersby. It feels like a green oasis in the midst of a place which is otherwise a tech jungle.

The normally buzzing tree becomes silent though whenever there is a period of festivals which are usually celebrated by a continuous bursting of noisy fire crackers. The parrots stop visiting and the multi-coloured birds are nowhere in sight. Even the pigeons who make a beeline for my balcony to have their breakfast of mixed grains along with me, disappear. And when I go down to feed my community dogs – most of them also missing during this period –I instead see new dogs who are mostly disoriented and scared, running helter-skelter to escape from the dreadful racket. On a couple of occasions, I have seen dogs with collars and even a leash indicating that they were pet dogs who had run away from their homes. I frequently come across dead birds and fallen nests with broken eggs in it along the road.

On the one hand, humankind is engaged in all kinds of revelries to celebrate something that is deemed to be holy, positive, an advent of good and the end of evil; while on the other side, the same humankind is engaged in actually destroying the lives of other innocent kinds. It’s not just the animals that are affected. If you happen to step out on to the road at night or early in the morning, it seems like you are stepping into a war zone – there is filth, dirt and destruction all around with nobody taking ownership to clean up after them. This job is unfortunately left to the sanitation workers who usually carry away all the toxic garbage with their bare hands. It is difficult to fathom how much of air & noise pollution and how much of non-degradable waste we are actually generating for a few moments of pleasure and how much of it will find its way to landfills and the oceans.

It’s a universal problem not just restricted to festivals. The ongoing wars are causing a lot of destruction on a much bigger scale. The selfish nature of humans with the tendency of building homes, organizations and countries around them with little or no concern about the rest of the world is eventually setting us up for a bleak future – if at all we have one, that is. In our personal lives, we celebrate without giving a thought to the waste we are generating, the harm that we are causing to our planet. If you extend this philosophy to the organizations that we work for, we fight tooth & nail for our own wellbeing sometimes at the cost of the needs of and service to our customers. And on a global level, we are just bothered about safeguarding the interests of our own individual countries with little or no regard to the planet when we declare war against each other.

When I first saw the story of Prasiddhi Singh and other young entrepreneurs like her in the #oneforchange documentary on National Geographic, I realized how serious they are about tackling climate change, to what extent they are fighting (a lone battle at times) to save our planet and how each and every little action of ours could take us one step closer to ensure that the earth as we know it doesn’t undergo an irreversible transformation for the worse rendering it uninhabitable for the generations to come. But every time I see noxious material being burnt or exploded under the name of revelry, every time someone places self before service under the guise of wellbeing and every time yet another country goes to war, my heart sinks a little and I know that we are actually taking one step closer to the end.