Whenever I’ve had some identity crisis or thought of how miniscule we are when compared to the enormity of things, life, nature, the planet, the solar system, and galaxies far and near, I’ve always concluded that the point of everything is just Nothing. The powerful brain that we have been bestowed with, has been working incessantly for thousands of years to make life easier for us as a human race. How brilliantly we have evolved from walking on our feet to doing space travel as a recreational sport. In the process, we have created and labelled so many elements: society, culture, languages, science, technology, philosophy, and a thousand other things that were beyond the understanding of our ancestors or any other living being.
Are we proud of it? Oh! Definitely, we are.
Aren’t we proud of how medicine can save unnecessary deaths and diseases, how science and technology can aid us to build the simplest of solutions for countless, enormous problems and how languages and communication have made the world a smaller place. Life has become easy now because we don’t have to live in caves, light fires, and hunt for every meal! But isn’t our chest swollen a little too much with pride? Isn’t it that somewhere we take all of this for granted? Isn’t this knowledge that we claim to be ours, built on the efforts of every single person that lived before us? Isn’t this ease coming at a cost? A cost to the planet?
Maybe, we humans were meant to exist like other life forms: struggle for limited resources, evolve, adapt, live every moment, and coexist peacefully. Or may be not — we were meant to have brains and use them. In any case, we have somewhere forgotten that things that we take away from the planet were not solely to be used by humans. The trees, forests, water in lakes, seas, and oceans is not just ours — everything needs to be shared, and every living being has a right to live. I think all of us know this. We just need a little bit of push to awaken ourselves about it, and our historians have been kind enough and made it easy for us, as always.
Thus, in 1970, a group of people started a campaign called the Earth Day to give that little extra push to others. Their mission is to broaden, diversify, and mobilize people towards environmental issues. As a result, 22nd April of every year is celebrated as Earth day. Today, 200 million people across 141 countries participate in some way or the other and pledge to be conscious of how their actions are affecting the planet.
At Artoo, we’ve also joined the big campaign in a small way. Everyday we read and hear about so many things that affect the planet, and the dos and don’ts. So, we thought why not just take a step back and think about what kind of people we are and how do we see ourselves doing things that matter to us. Earth day, of course, was a great day to kick start the thinking!
We started off with simple exercises to loosen ourselves and imagined ourselves as the favourite living or non-living thing that we felt associated with. Some of us were a bull, stone, rain, star, dog and all sorts of things which we wanted to be. We walked, ran, laughed, and screamed while personifying the the living or non-living thing. It was fun to see everyone interact with each other in their element.
Later, we enacted stories and instances, which were etched in some of our childhood memories. The twist was to re-enact the story for the narrator and help him relive his moment, which was followed by songs and dance to celebrate the joyous moments that come by.
In addition, we lit candles to acknowledge not only what the planet has given us but also how brilliantly we have evolved and shaped things to call this place our home.
All in all, it was an evening about fun, frolic, singing, dancing, opening up, letting loose, understanding, acknowledging, and most importantly taking a stand about nurturing and caring for mother nature.
About the author:
Akanksha Srivastava | Firefighter