A Grey Tit bird less than 13 cm in length is hardly visible, that too when covered in thick foliage. It was its bird song that alerted me towards it. It was a pair. One flew away sensing my presence, although I was about 50 meters away. For some reason this pair of Tit make their flights during the late morning unlike many other birds, who use the golden hour of the morning for all their movements between trees.
It was after its pair moved away, this bird went in to its ceaseless bird song.
As I stayed watching this sight and hearing the bird song, I felt its sudden solitariness. The bird song conveyed anguish.
The sigh of anguish is all round us with the COVID pandemic now on a wild spread. Whether it is for a hospital bed or for oxygen or for vaccine, or daily livelihood, the cry of anguish is in the air in different parts of India.
What comforts us is the diverse humanitarian responses to this. Th latest being the auto rickshaw drivers in Delhi providing free oxygen to patients while they travel to hospital for treatment.
It is dark hour for health care in India. A response from every quarter is desperately needed!
A small bird hidden in the foliage could only make so much of noise! It was feeble and heard because I was alert to hearing bird songs in the mornings!
My fear is that the voice of thousands in need is drowned amidst the preoccupations of all sorts that entrap the political leaders. How else this shortage of oxygen could have happened as the risk of increase in infection rate during the second wave of COVID was predicted in last October!
I do not think that India was ever politically divided the way we are now at any time in the past since the Emergency period in the seventies. When winning election somehow, has become the focus of political parties, they are less moved by the hidden sufferings of people.
We belong to a political tradition in India, which was rooted in a perspective of Mahatma Gandhi on being a 'suffering leader'! Every time there was a crisis, Mahatma Gandhi went into a season of fasting and prayer. His resolve to lead people into civil freedom movement was born out of self induced experience of deprivation and denial!
Since Gandhi's time, leaders live affluently detached from the realities that ordinary people face in their lives. The political leaders are success seekers and not servants of people! That is what leaves me anguished!
The tree was a shelter to the Tit amidst its solitariness. Is that a symbol of hope of a sheltering God ever present with us in this most difficult time!
M.C.Mathew(text and photo)
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