Environment must be seen as part of family: Gulzar

Award-winning poet Gulzar feels personification of the ailing environment will help people foster an intimate kinship with nature and enable them to take better care of it.

“If you look around your environment, you’ll see you’re related to it. If you give it a human persona you will see how the environment becomes a part of your family as much as we are a part of its family,” said the 81-year-old lyricist who has written extensively on nature and its innate ties with mankind.

During conversation with former diplomat turned politician Pawan K. Verma at the Jaipur Literature Festival, Gulzar recited nine poems on nature, its relation with human beings and the growing disconnect between the two.

Citing the “cruelty of burying living wells”, the poet expressed concern over the gradually disappearing ties between man and nature and cautioned against mindless development. “Humans are looking to make life simple at every juncture. They don’t realise on what they are losing in achieving this easy life. You look back sometimes at how things are today and wonder what is happening. The relationship and love which humans had with nature is disappearing,” he said. In a poem, titled The Forest, from Green Poems, he writes, “When I pass through the forest I feel my ancestors are around me...” In another one, he talks about his pain over cutting of a mango tree with which he traces his growing up. In a dejected voice, he says that he doesn’t have courage to go the place where the tree with whom he has had a long association, is being cut in the name of development.

Gulzar also made evident his disappointment at the growing infrastructure and diminishing space in metropolitan cities by reciting Ek makaan upar uthne ki bahut koshish main hain from his latest anthology of poetry.

On Monday, which is the last day of the festival, Shatrughan Sinha is coming to launch his biography Anything But Khamosh. Despite being a working day one can bet it’s going to be a stampede as the majority of literature festival goers comprises of those who come for a glimpse of Bollywood stars, lyricist and filmmakers.