A maverick man with a mission

Nilratan Halder | Published: April 09, 2021 19:52:07

By profession he is a mason but surely he has a noble mission. His mission is to get spikes out of trees. He is Abdul Wahid Sardar from Jashore town whose love for trees has gone beyond his personal considerations. He has been planting trees on roadsides from the year 2006 at his own expense. This even brought him the prestigious Bangabandhu National Agriculture Award in 2017; but one small incident in 2018 has transformed his life forever. He was resting under a tree reclining against its trunk. But he was startled with a rude awakening when an iron spike pricked his back.
The moment this happened, he realized in his heart of hearts that trees also feel excruciating pain when nails and spikes are driven in their trunks or branches. If those hurt human bodies so do they trees which cannot express their pain and suffering or if they do, their language is different ---unreadable to humans. Since then the man embarked on removing nails and spikes people hammer into trees for hoisting billboards, advertisement posters printed on papers or clothes across roads and for various other purposes.
It was on July 4, 2018 that Wahid finally began his mission of pulling out nails and spikes from a number of mahogany trees at the Jashore Town Hall. What began as a one-man campaign on that day still remains so but by this time he has covered as many as nine districts. He travels on an old bicycle with a sack in which he carries his clothes and the implements comprising shovels of varying sizes and a few planks.
His mission has brought him to the capital and he was utterly shocked to find that Dhaka University area and the adjacent area where the country's administrative centre is located are not free from the cruelty to trees. The man who could not continue his study beyond the primary school had high hopes that the learned and powerful people would be sensitive to the woes and pains of the green life. Instead, he saw a huge concentration of nails and spikes on tree trunks. Since then he has become quite disillusioned about the academic education.
A Bangla contemporary has reported that even at this time of corona rampage, his mission has taken Wahid to Narayanganj where he felt a little relieved to see that he could extract less than a kilogram of nails and spikes from about 400 trees in two days, which amount is the lowest compared to the eight districts where he had to his credit pulling out 13 maunds of those deadly materials from as many as 27,000 trees. His daily haul elsewhere was between 2.50 to 3.00 kilograms. He has expressed his happiness over the less spikiness of the port town.
Wahid has taken lessons from Nature and since his childhood he fell in love with birds, animals and trees. His love for trees is so unbounded that he took the lone man's mission of redeeming the sin of his species sitting at the top of all species but mindlessly destroying Nature and inflicting cruelty to trees that keep the natural environment healthy. He reasons that driving a nail into the stem of a tree causes it to bleed. The sap that oozes out is nothing but its blood. In the same way if a nail is inserted into a tree and gets rusted, it causes cancer just like human body develops the destructive disease.
Wahid is not the famed botanist-scientist in one mould, Jagadish Chandra Basu but his depth of love for tree is unfathomable. What he has been accomplishing is extraordinary in terms of the 61-year tree lover's campaign. Unfortunately, he has no one beside him to carry on his mission. If people felt like he does, trees could be spared of spiking. There is a need for supporting this man for what he is doing. The nation can learn a lesson from this man who will only be vindicated and amply rewarded if his mission can be turned into a social movement through mass participation in freeing trees of nails and spikes and on refraining from inserting any more into tree trunks.
[Note: Pls use a picture of the man if available. If not, get a picture of trees with billboards hanging from trees with the help of nails and spikes]