Have you ever wondered why we feel scared or become very excited when we hear about forests? Being born and brought up in metropolitan cities like Delhi, most of my understanding about forests comes from school books and they have usually portrayed forests as dangerous places.
Karthika Lakshmi’s So Shall You Reap was one of two prize winning entries in CBT’s Realistic Fiction category in the 20th Competition for Writers of Children’s Books organized in 2019. The story is about an expedition by students from across India to deposit seed samples in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, with narrative conflict introduced through ‘vested interests’ who seek to replace the indigenous seed varieties with genetically modified ones.
Our Wiggly Friends, Earthworms is a small book of 32 pages. The book can be divided into two major parts; the first and the main part of the book provides various details about earthworms while the second part focuses on the role that earthworms play for soil, and introduces the readers to vermiculture (artificial rearing of earthworms).
In our country, there are many huge multipurpose hydroelectricity (hydel) projects. These projects involve construction of dams, resulting in huge swathes of waterbodies called backwaters. These backwaters are not just used for electricity generation but are also a direct source for agricultural irrigation, industrial water supply, freshwater pisciculture and drinking purposes. Additionally, these can contribute indirectly to GDP as they can be turned into sites of tourist attraction.
India is a country blessed with rich biodiversity. It also is a nation developing at a great pace, locking horns with many other powerful global economies. But we need to keep in mind that development too, comes at a price. If development is not holistic and just anthropocentric, it doesn’t take long for the environment to collapse on itself. Unfortunately, most of the world is facing these after-effects of anthropocentric development.
We are not alone in this world. We are surrounded by different kinds of living beings and trees and plants. There is no place near or far from us where these living beings do not exist. A dark corner of the house, a wall, even the bark of trees, are home to many living things. And not only bark, even the leaves of trees are home to many different kinds of life-forms. There are eggs stuck on somewhere, and at other places you have caterpillars chomping on them!