Your Friday prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is “loan/lone.” Use them any way you’d like. Bonus points if you use both. Have fun!
The word ‘lone’ takes me back to those long-ago days when I read Westerns. I loved them and read them by the dozen. Fortunately, my libraries had them. Dusty Fog and Sudden were my favourites. They were always presented as lone horsemen. They were so quick with their pistols that I found it fascinating to imagine the firearms being drawn out and fired at the target in the blinking of an eye 
. I don’t know when I stopped reading them.
Books of different genres interest us at different stages of our life. I don’t enjoy thrillers anymore. But some books are for life. And some others pull us into their worlds and we either become a part of their life or remain mute spectators. Recently I listened to two Kannada audio books, Gruhbhanga and Anveshana by S L Byrappa. Listening to them I went into that world and the characters became real people. It was a wonderful experience.
In Gruhabhanga, the main character, Nanjamma, her brother-in-law and her son Vishwanatha walk for miles from their village to the nearest railway station and later after getting off the rail they walk to Sringeri. The temple to Goddess Sharada at this town is a very holy place for us. The author has described the forests through which they walk to reach the temple. There was so much greenery and Nanjamma had never seen such tall trees in her life. In her village there were only bushes and small trees. When I read about the dense forests existing about a century ago, I was in despair thinking about forests destroyed in the name of development. Concrete jungles are coming up in the place of green, live jungles. However, I am reminded by the Mahabharata and S L Byrappa’s Parva that even millennia ago the Panadavas destroyed forests to build Indraprastha. It is fascinating that trees have always grown back. But what if they do not? Long back in a science-fiction short story, the author had written about a time when trees were rare on earth 
. Science fiction speculations are coming true.
We read about the effects of climate change everywhere. Temperatures are soaring in places where the weather has always been pleasant. The weather in our place is very hot and humid. We are all waiting for the Southwest Monsoon. It normally sets over Kerala in the first week of June. But last year it rained for just two months when it should have rained for at least four months. When I think of all this, I remember reading a quote long back. It was about us not inheriting this planet from our forefathers but borrowing it as a loan from our children.
And I keep wondering what we are leaving behind for the generations to follow.
