It was a refreshing sight of yellow; though it wasn't a large landscape of yellow, I never got to see a marigold field of this much. And it was a great divertissement from the regular and boring sights of the highways and there's also a patch of mixed colors of an orange and yellow and yet un-bloomed bed of dark orange or red marigold.
It seems it was the dam water that made flourish the marigold. Though the marigold bloomed on both sides of the road, the view towards the backwater (2nd pic above) is scenic, and the blue sky and the sunny day made it glowing. Aside from that, a kind of white wildflowers bloomed in the barren lands, but still, I doubt whether they are wildflowers or a kind of cultivated flowers.
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| Field of white wildflower |
The field of flowers stretched only for a few km on the east bank of the reservoir, and it seems only the land around the dam is fertile, unlike its dry northern part where we drove along before drawing away to Puducherry. This reminds me of the rose fields I saw around Nagalapuram, at the border of Andhra and Tamil Nadu, had Pichatur Dam as its source.
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| The bed of red marigold ready to bloom |
A year completes today, what begins as an identity curfew on the Sunday of March 22, 2020. PM plea with the public of India to cooperate with a 14-hour curfew, and it was a time the covid-19 cases weren't 100, and we didn't realize that it was a trailer and the main picture is waiting for the release. And then came the announcement of a week lockdown, which renewed every two weeks that extended to two to three months, and the lockdown was then extended every month with some relaxation.
Lockdown is a word we aren't familiar with then
but heard only through the news and films where lockdown is implemented during
emergencies or violent outbreaks in an area. And 144 belong to the same
category, which bans people gathering in public more than four at a time. We
never thought we would experience such and had no idea how it would work;
however, the solidarity we had been had no meaning today, with people's
indifferent behavior and gathering at large.
At the end of the year 2020, life was almost
back to normal except for wearing masks and social distancing. The covid-19
cases too drastically came down below 10,000 a day in India; our state Tamil
Nadu also witnessed numbers below 500 a day had let us ease and at the same
time sent an indifference tendency among the people had forgotten that we
hadn't exit pandemic. I could say or see half the population had dismissed
wearing masks and social distancing is like belonging to a distant land.
I believed this number would recede as we
continued to stay on the line with a gradual decline, and since the beginning
of vaccination in January, the belief started to grow stronger. I think this
could have become possible if the state elections haven't interfered during
this period, because it is time for politicians to mobilize the masses, or as
people gather to listen to the campaign, it becomes a camp for the spread of
the virus.
The painful thing here is that the leaders who
are supposed to be role models do not follow the rules and do not instruct the
volunteers to follow. And when seeing the crowd gathering in the campaign sites
without masks and social distancing proves how ignorant and crazy we are and
how we fail at the root cause.
I know the elections aren't the only issue as I
see students and teachers getting covid-19, since the opening of schools for
higher secondary (classes 10th to 12th); it looks certain it's the failure to
follow the safeguard. Already there's a conflict among the public
about how these numbers suddenly go high or sustain at the same and do they
really count or do it for their comfort or need. Anyhow its sudden rise from
the beginning of March worries; though we all hope on the vaccine as the only
weapon against covid 19, nothing could protect us unless we follow the
precaution - the simple handwash, masking, and social distancing.
Compared to March 2020, we’re 10 to 20 times
further affected by covid 19 now. The counting of cases in India is close to
50,000, which is the highest daily record, after months of a gap!
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| House sparrow shot from an upper mountain village near Kodaikanal. |
Until 2015, the sparrows exist in the backyard
of my grandparent's house in the neighborhood. The backyard was cleared to
build a home for my grandfather's comfort when he was ill, but it wasn't their
intention to drive away sparrows, and of course, no one intends of destroying a
habitation when bringing changes in lives. And it happens beyond our
consciousness and needs.
I remember how sparrows used to build their
nest in front of the grandpa’s tea shop, using the hay stored for feeding cows
and buffaloes; despite the activities of people who come to have tea, the
sparrows lived peacefully and reproduced. Sometimes they build their nest in
the cowshed and the gaps of the planks of the tiled roof.
As a society, everyone is responsible for the
extinction of the sparrow, and it is the responsibility of the same community
to protect the sparrows that remain here and there. Not only sparrows, but we
also need to protect all kinds of birds on the brink of extinction. World
Sparrow Day is the day designed to move this activity forward and raise
awareness of the house sparrows. It is an international initiative by the
Nature Forever Society of India in collaboration with the Eco-Sys Action
Foundation (France) and numerous other national and international organizations
across the world.
Linking this post with SATURDAY CRITTERS
The tree lost many of its branches to the
prune, and I wasn't happy looking at the sight of a part of the tree fall. Though
the tree slowly gets back to shape, the lost side facing the road would take a
few more seasons to rebuild its lost limbs. The tree continues to bloom seems
to produce more mangoes in the coming days and what you see in the photos were
shot last week.
