Striking down trees to beautify a city!

How do you beautify a city? When a city has already lost much of its charm, much of its aesthetic appeal, do you go after what remains of that charm and strike it down and inform citizens that you are indulging in that insensitivity because you love your city?
The truth is unassailable. You do not make a city beautiful by cutting down trees. And no matter how much you reassure people that new trees will replace the trees that are being brought down and so add glamour to a city which has mutated into an urban slum, no one buys that argument.
There is something disturbing about attitudes which look upon trees as the enemy. When, therefore, the trees on Satmasjid Road in the nation's capital fall prey to the whims of the Dhaka South City Corporation, one cannot but raise one's voice in loud protest. And when there is the other side of the picture, a better picture, one proffered by the Dhaka North City Corporation, you know the degree to which the DSCC has slipped.
The DNCC has taken up plans to have as many as 200,000 trees planted within its areas in the next two years. The DSCC would have done credit to itself by emulating the DNCC. Indeed, through a demonstration of judicious leadership, the DSCC could have gone a step ahead of the DNCC by promising to have 300,000 trees planted within its parameters.
Time was when Dhaka was noted for its greenery. It was an age when homes were properly homes, with large courtyards populated by gardens and fruit trees of wide-ranging varieties. It was a time when the air was pure, when the breeze was an elixir for citizens. Every locality was a delight to walk in; and every family was proud to own or inhabit a place which was a tribute to nature. Children played in the courtyard. Adults sat around wicker tables over tea and discussed the world.
This was Dhaka in the 1960s and through much of the 1970s. And then commercialism, crass in its very nature, crept in. Parents who had struggled hard to build those homes exuding comfort passed from the scene. When their children took over, those homes went into the hands of builders. And soon those homes vanished, those courtyards with the gardens and the fruit trees disappeared. Modernity in all its ugliness rushed in, to give us carbuncles in the form of flats and apartments and condominiums.
Observe Dhaka today. The trees you sat under or took shelter under from the sun or rain do not exist anymore. Manik Mia Avenue once was noted for its forest of trees. A time came when, in inexplicable imitation of cities in foreign lands, all those trees were condemned to an ignominious death simply because the road needed to be widened. There are new trees on that avenue today, but that old charm of the old trees felled by governmental fiat has not come back for us to savour.
The population of the nation's capital today stands at 25,000,000. That is mind-boggling. Worse, and predictably, all that pressure of people living in Dhaka or regularly making their way to it has thrown up casualties. In the old days, in the Mouchak area, woodlands where families took strolls in the evening were an attraction for all. Those woodlands are all gone and looking at all the business establishments there it becomes difficult for you, you who remembers those trees, to pinpoint the exact spot where all that green used to be.
Every city marrying the old with the new --- Delhi, Lahore, London, Paris, to name a few --- goes out of its way to ensure that nature is not tampered with. In Dhaka, though, we have played by a different set of rules. Our children have no parks to play in, our adults do not find a spot in their localities where they can breathe in something of the breeze, our young men and women drawn to romance have no opportunity to sit and converse in the shade of a tree.
Our urban administrators have down the years offered a multiplicity of Dhaka-friendly plans. That was wonderful, except that in almost every instance those plans have not moved into implementation mode. Open spaces have been commandeered by powerful and influential people. In certain cases, the administration itself has gone cheerfully into the business of reclaiming open fields --- because housing had become a priority. The little neighbourhood shops nestled among pristine nature have been pushed out, with supermarkets taking their place.
It is an obituary we dedicate to nature when we cut down trees, chop off the flower plants and have homes mutate into apartment complexes. The water bodies, the lakes which once defined Dhaka were its beauty. Today those water bodies are a memory; those lakes have been shrinking thanks to human predatory instincts. And yet we are told ad nauseam that everything is being done to enhance the beauty of a city gasping for breath.
Nature is being murdered beyond Dhaka as well, with fields which once gave us rice and vegetables and jute being cleared to have officers' living quarters, business establishments, colleges and universities come up. In a land limited to around 56,000 square miles, it is a sin for the proponents of development to swallow fields and streams and trees and so desecrate the sanctity of tradition.
Trees hold the soil in their grip, giving it the strength it needs. Beneath the soil, the roots of trees reach out to one another and so communicate in the matter of transferring energy to one another. Above the soil, trees are a weapon against creeping climate change. When they are cut down --- and nothing is done about eliciting public opinion on the issue --- it is an initial step into a reduction of the nature into deserts.
The beauty of a city, indeed of a village, of a country in our part of the world lies in the ubiquity of trees. Beauty is not to be had in the proliferation of eating places or stores displaying the newest fashions or flats holding nuclear families out of touch with other nuclear families.
It is through measures to conserve nature, to roll back through an expansion of a landscape of trees the heat which burns human bodies and leaves lives sizzling that a city acquires grace.
This nation is in need of laws that will prohibit a violation of nature. Any move, by individuals or groups of individuals or city corporations or governmental bodies, to cut down trees anywhere in the country must be considered a violation of the law and so must legally be proceeded against.
We cannot leave nature at the mercy of individuals whose understanding of aesthetics is badly flawed. We cannot have this country turn into a graveyard of nature.

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