A lone bird appears up in the sky and steadies to a standstill for what seems to be a long time. He then lowers his head -- as if searching for a landing ground in the sprawling lake below. He then begins a slow, deliberate slide down on the invisible wind chute, a picture of quiet grace.

 

The lake is almost fully covered by innumerable lotuses and their leaf spreads that float so lightly on the water. On one leaf, the bird lands -- very lightly, as if he has no weight. Under his little feet, the leaf trembles a little and then steadies, but indolently cradling the bird in an easy elan. Certain stillness, certain silence engulfs the vast lake -- nudged only by the flutter of the bird’s wings. On the lotus leaf, the bird stays put for a while before taking to wings once again to land on another leaf in another corner of the lake’s expanse on this tranquil morn. He -- the protagonist bird -- is not alone. He is in the company of countless birds who are in a brief stopover after a journey of thousands of miles of their end-of-the-season trans-continental flight. The current locale is the wonderfully scenic Gorewada Lake in Nagpur.

 

Factually, however, the Indian landscape is dotted by thousands of such locations that host migratory birds every year, offering them not just a stopover but also a nourishing stay that spruces them up for the next leg of their long flights halfway across the globe. Gorewada, in this instance, is a place whose appeal the humans may not sense. No matter its geographical spread, the lake offers a tranquil surrounding round the year -- the water mirroring the skies and also offering colourful, wonderful, blissful spectacle of thousands of flowers peeping out of the water, dancing lightly on the breeze, smiling -- and inviting smiles on the face of anybody and everybody who has time and inclination to stand and stare. Even when the annual migratory guests are not there, the Gorewada Lake has its own bird population -- very local, of course, but equally colourful, equally cheerful, equally inviting.

 

True, many of them are pretty shrill when they speak or call. But in that vast, wet openness, the shrill whistle does not hurt. In fact, it charms no end, and invites a meditative mood that is becoming so rare in the noisy and chaotic urban hustle and bustle. For the record, Gorewada is a cluster of lake and jungle -- to which has got added of late a zoo and a jungle safari. But once one is in the vicinity of the lake, one does not want to move away. So magnetic is its appeal, so authentic in attraction.

 

Tranquil. Cool. Open. Inviting. It has all attributes of a tapovan to which sages often got drawn for quietitude, for quintessential detachment. Was it not at Walden Pond that transcendentalist thinker Henry David Thoreau felt a sense of liberation -- that resulted in his seminal work through which he declared his “independence” -- from the worldly clutches?! The tranquility at Gorewada lakeside is of that quality -- giving one a sense of independence -- wrenching out of which becomes very difficult. Thoreau called his stay at the intellectual sanctuary around Walden Pond a “social experiment of spiritual self-discovery”. But the 1854 book -- titled Walden; or, Life in the Woods is not a memoir, so to say (as many described). It is actually a journey within Thoreau’s inner being. Gorewada’s tranquility has that potency -- to make one feel ‘free’ enough to launch an inward journey of self-discovery.

 

True, the birds do give one a sense of the ephemeralness of life and its vagaries. But the birds also give clue to life’s potential to be happy, to be cheerful -- even though one may be deeply lost in search of self. That search gets a fine and lilting support from the rippled water that hosts thousands of lotuses almost year-round. At Gorewada, one does realise, of course, that the vast Indian landscape has literally countless thousands of such lake sites that can offer a great sense of tranquil singularity with the Divine. However, a sensitive mind also shudders with an apprehension that some day, some urban developmentalist of the political brand may cast his or her evil eye on such lakes and try to turn them into tourist attractions—complete with unwelcome restaurants and urban noise accompanied by commercial greed (that has already destroyed many a spot like Gorewada across the country).

 

One then wonders if one is doing the right thing to bring to the public domain the pictures of the tranquil beauty of Gorewada! But beyond all those mental oscillations is another thought -- may my brethren know how they belong to a land that is so exquisitely beautiful and enriched by an intrinsic spiritual calm and bliss that only one’s inner being can sense. ■