Droughts are sweeping across the globe (Amazon basin, California, Portugal, Ethiopia, Somalia, Maharashtra, Karnataka, New South Wales, and Western Australia, to name a few). Several regions are affected, and the situation only exacerbates each year, thanks to the depressing reminder by drought.gov, GDO etc. Sure, we could blame El Niño, climate change, deforestation or just human smartness in general. Because Humans are great at collaboration when it comes to keeping a production site on a machine server alive. Collective learning? Teamwork? We’ve got it down – for tech.
Although when it comes to biological systems that keep us alive? Crickets.
Traditional and local communities that rely on water for survival, for transportation, for delivering medical care, access to education, are left high and dry. If a tree dies, we just think of planting another one not realizing that takes decades to grow. After all ecosystems don’t have a reboot mechanism like our server machines. Machines get maintenance, upgrades and round-the-clock-care. When do we get that upgrade where we won’t need to depend on water anymore?? Can we use technology effectively without exploitation of natural resources??
Artwork by: Karishma Gangwani
Monsoons are like a fresh breath of air, eagerly awaited by many in different parts of the world, some of which you may or may not have lived in or even experienced (I implore you to). The humidity splits the soil and sends turtles crawling upwards so they can bond, reconnect and reproduce. In the garden of my childhood home, they emerged like ancient philosophers, earning the name “Oogway’s disciples” from my sister. After all, they moved with the same deliberate slowness as Kung Fu Panda’s sage, their bodies both an armor and an anchor.
Despite the burden they carried, I’d find them missing overnight from my masterful makeshift sanctuary, owing to the slow wakefulness of my morning wisdom, only slightly relative to the speed with which they found their escape through my bedroom window.
My bedroom window, a bay overlooking the garden of my childhood home, framed these rituals. I would spend countless hours with my books, knees tucked to chest, sitting inside the cubby space leisurely consuming literature as storms passed by. My books along with a cup of hot chai, piqued my intellect and accompanied me as I enjoyed watching the storms.
But it was also about experiencing the rain rather than simply observing it from a distance. I’d run outside to play in it, jumping into puddles with my sister and neighborhood friends. The scolding that followed was worth it.
There was something about the rain that made me feel alive, more connected to nature, a renewal I have felt every time the refreshing rain has touched my skin.
One of the few joys I shared with my sister and the neighborhood kids.
But turtles don’t live on nostalgia. Their survival depends on these monsoons for only the season’s humidity allows the soil to soften enough for the females to dig and bury their eggs, in hopes of continuing life’s cycle.
Likewise, time has a way of burying things: my sister and I now orbit each other in silence, prisoners of adulthood’s “busyness.”
Turtles with their heavy shells symbolize resilience and patience. Our lives, too, have accumulated in the layers of this patience and resilience - career, bills and the unspoken weight of unsent texts. A complexity we mistake for inevitability, always wondering about shedding it all as if simplicity were something to reclaim.
And yet, the monsoon is still awaited. Eagerly. It still pulls me to windows, to chai, and, to the memory of those turtles. Their shells didn’t make them invincible, just adaptable. The irony lies in their inability to fly like birds. Yet they could disappear – a lesson in small rebellions.
Maybe personal limitations are the doorway to the boundless realm of possibilities. Just as turtles cannot defy gravity, we too, face our own constraints and obstacles, making room for escaping into the cracks we carve for ourselves.
After all, floating on cherry blossoms, even master Oogway couldn’t deny his shell. He only learnt to let it float with him.
Sources:
https://drought.emergency.copernicus.eu/tumbo/gdo/map/
https://www.drought.gov/international
https://www.science.org/doi/epdf/10.1126/science.adm8147