Recently my 9-year-old daughter asked me what thumbappoo was. She told me that she hadn’t seen the flower and wanted to see it. I told her that it was a tiny white flower, and the plant, thumbachedi (Leucas aspera) with flowers (thumbappoo), was found everywhere in Kerala.
We went out together and searched for it everywhere. Alas! The little plant with long narrow leaves and clusters of flowers in the leaf pits of the stem could be found nowhere. It was then when I realised the plant might have vanished from the landscape of Kerala as the landscape was completely hijacked by the apostles of ‘development’ whose symbol is the earth-mover.
Thumbapoo and thaazhampoo or kaithappoo were the symbols of the simple and pure life we had before we started to bulldoze our hills. We have ‘developed’ by bulldozing our hills, filling our wet lands and destroying our water bodies. As a result of our ‘development’, the children today don’t know what thumbappoo is. It has nearly vanished from Kerala.
Thaazhampoo has already become extinct, it seems. Granite quarrying has shattered not only the peace of almost all rural villages of Kerala but the environmental equilibrium too. The little children started to tremble in their sleep by the tremors of the blasts and by the incessant plying of tipper lorries.
Even in the remote villages, parents could not let their children play outside as there were possibilities of the children being knocked by the tippers.
People started complaining and the government heeded their complaints as they were genuine and issued directions not to issue license to the quarries that shatter the ecology. As a grama panchayat employee, I was happy to see the circular. But within a few weeks we received another circular which said that the denying of licenses to quarries in the name of ecological disaster had been impeding the ‘developmental activities’ of the state and therefore, we should expedite giving license to them!
The interests of the ‘development’ mafia thwarted and violated the people’s right to live peacefully. If the destructive activities that stem from our unsustainable way of living create a climate that destroys the flora and fauna, of course, the time when the humans too are destroyed can’t be far behind.
As Shelley optimistically asked in his Ode to the West Wind (If winter comes, can spring be far behind?); we will be forced to ask, pessimistically: If we destroy everything, can the time when we might be destroyed be far behind?