Written by Leila Badyari and Khushi Arora

‘Where is Hiraman?’

“Growing up, my father would take me to the zoo. And mind you, I didn’t go for the tigers or cheetahs. I went to see a bird, a parrot named Hiraman. He could talk. He’d get excited when we came near, hopping, squawking, making all kinds of noises. Then one day, we went and he wasn’t there. The zookeeper told us he had died. I stopped going after that. Years later, while birdwatching in Jaipur’s Dol Ka Badh forest, I spotted an Alexandrine Parakeet. Do you know what it’s called in Hindi? Hiraman.”

That memory has never left Shaurya Goyal, a mechatronics engineer by training, who once built robots for a living. Today, even as he continues to work with machines and systems, it’s the natural world that stirs him most.

Years later, Shaurya would spot another Hiraman, not in a cage, but in the wild, in a stretch of green at the city’s edge. The Alexandrine Parakeet, long missing from much of Jaipur, was still alive and singing in the ‘Dol Ka Badh’ forest.

A childhood love for nature was now rooted in fierce purpose. Shaurya had found his forest.

From circuits to canopies

Shaurya’s journey isn’t the one you’d expect. A tech innovator by education and profession, he has spent years immersed in the world of machines and automation — a space he continues to work in passionately. But side by side with that fascination was something softer: an unshakeable reverence for the natural world.

“I’ve always been drawn to nature, to things that grow, decay, heal. Forests work like systems too. They’re complex, beautifully coded.”

So when news broke that Dol Ka Badh, one of Jaipur’s last remaining green lungs, was being dug up to make way for new infrastructure, Shaurya couldn’t stay away. What began as heartbreak quickly became resistance.

One night, around 1:30 am, he got a call. A massive peepal tree, sacred to the ecosystem and estimated to be several hundred years old, was being cut.

“That tree had nine stems. Each one is as thick as a bicycle is long. If you placed a Fortuner car around them, it would barely fit. By the time we reached, they had only managed to remove one root and even that root was as thick as the trunk of most trees. It weighed nearly 20 kilos.”

They stopped the cutting that night. But it was only one incident in a much larger pattern of encroachment and quiet destruction.

“If you look at it daily, you don’t notice. But over 15–20 years, you see the damage — like a man slowly balding. Dol Ka Badh is balding because of infrastructure development.”

The forest that still holds breath

Most people, when they think of a forest, imagine trees. But Dol Ka Badh holds a far deeper, richer world — one still breathing, barely, under pressure.

Komal Srivastava, a birder and wildlife photographer, has spent years walking its paths. Her work has documented over 80 species of birds here. “Every visit brings something new. Sometimes it’s a species that shouldn’t even be here, but somehow, it has made its home.”

Among the most precious is the Alexandrine Parakeet, now near-threatened across India. “These birds are trapped and sold because they mimic human voices. That’s why you don’t see them in cities anymore,” she says. “But here, they have survived.”

Cuckoos fly in from southern India each summer to breed. Bee-eaters dig tiny burrows in the soil. Golden Orioles flash between the trees. Even the rare Rose Finch has been spotted here.

© The Better India