| Sunday, 06 April 2025 |
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Good morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%],
What a week, huh?
I don’t think my senses have managed to step back from fight-or-flight mode one bit. It’s surreal to watch America speed-run through a combo of hara-kiri (on itself) and kamikaze (on everyone else) each day.
We’re headed back to an era of global instability, trade wars, and geopolitical conflict. What makes me most sad is the prospect of the poorer and weaker (countries, economies, people) paying the price because the powerful and rich see everything as a zero-sum game. I can’t imagine what the next few decades will look like when people read history books in the 2040s and 2050s.
Ironically, a different sort of cacophony and chaos has helped soothe my senses through the week—the cacophony of spring!
The peepal tree adjoining our backyard is laden with red figs. Starting even before dawn, much of the day is filled with the cries of ecstatic birds of all kinds, tweeting, chirping, cooing, and whistling as they eat the ripe fruit. I still haven’t seen the hornbill pair from last year, but I did see a Golden Oriole.
Once the birds fly off, the bees come in. The water apple tree in our backyard is in full bloom, laden with thousands of blossoms, each one comprised of dozens of thread-like stamens. I’m thankful to see a healthy population of both large and small bees.
Finally, as the evening sets in, it’s the turn of the bats. They swoop in noisily from all sides, screeching and hissing. These ones are fairly large, with wingspans as wide as 5 feet. I gather they are “Indian Flying Foxes”. Not only are they noisy, they are also quite bumbly, flying through the branches with gay abandon, hanging on a branch here, eating some figs there, accidentally breaking off an entire twig there. You can hear the fruits plop and twigs crackle as they keep landing on our backyard.
The “aftermath” of this mayhem can be seen on the ground the next day. It’s covered with fallen flowers, figs, twigs, and buds.
It’s quite something, really. Like I said earlier, nature’s cacophony cancelling out man’s (no, I do not mean human), if only for a while.
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