As I tread my path My shadow falls.
The earth never Shores it up.
Why stuff your notebook With useless words? Set them free,
Let them mingle with the dust (Our Santiniketan 62).

Another 22 April, another Earth day, and alas, another urge to stuff the notebook with useless words! The www.earthday.org/history earmarks the twenty second day of April to be the ‘largest secular day of protest in the world’. No denying this! We wonder, however, how we can just shut our eyes to myriad such protests in the interest of the earth. Each single gesture that has hitherto taken the earth to be the greatest priority is a harbinger for Earth day. From the Sanskrit madhu naktam uto aso madhumat pãrthiva raja , through George Gamow’s ‘You are more than the Earth, though you’re/ such a dot’, to the recently concluded COP29’s key pledge for ‘investing in a liveable planet for all’ – everywhere the basic concern is earth.

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Rabindranath Tagore owes his conscience, consciousness and disillusionment to none but mother earth in the poem ‘Prithibi’, written on 16 October 1935. Around 1910, Tagore is writing the Santiniketan series of essays, and there, too, he underlines how he sees no distinction between his own self and the larger nonhuman around. Ingratitude, for him, is the most unforgivable, especially if it is meted out to nature. As a theme, ingratitude has massively recurred in ‘Kunti O Nishadi’, a short-story by Mahasweta Devi, in which Kunti, the mother of the........

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