Gardens, flowers and trees

At Srinagar we went to see the gardens. We had strolled round two of them and were proceeding towards a third one, Shahi Chashma. On the way two tourists were talking among themselves.

“What beautiful gardens!”

“Yes “

“Old gardens. Who built them? The British?”

“No, the Moghul kings.”


“Ah, that’s it. Can we see any built by our Government?”

There was a silence of sadness.

They were two individuals from a distant part of the country; they were not rich, they were not scholars, they were just two ordinary citizens. What they spoke was a thing of common knowledge, but the sad silence at the end was eloquent.

What is the record of our national government during the past almost four decades of its existence in this direction? How many new gardens and parks have been built by it? How many have been destroyed or allowed to languish? We have no statistics about it. But are statistics needed?
To speak of environment and ecology and denudation of forests and the need of reforestation is currently in vogue today. Important as it is, that is not what came to my mind when I heard the two persons. It was in the heart that I was touched. The Moghul kings built those gardens not out of environmental reasonings, but out of their love for them. The gardens were built in those days by kings and nobles and aristocrats and later by local assemblies. For their pomp and splendour? Maybe, but the public had free access to them, and indisputably there was love in the heart for flowers and trees and flowing water that prompted the creation of these places of beauty in harmony with Nature.

There was love in the heart, there was an aristocracy of feeling and imagination that could perceive and enjoy the aristocracy of Nature that could be in tune with the manifestation and message of Nature.

It is the feeling of the absence today of this consciousness and of the need of awakening of this consciousness, of the psychic love for Nature’s beauty that got aroused in the silence.

(Shyam Sunder Jhunjhunwala, From the Editor’s Desk- ‘Some Socio- Spiritual Perspectives’, Sri Aurobindo Action, Pondicherry.)