There’s a certain scent of mid-monsoon vegetation that awakens the child in me. It’s the smell of wildflowers in rain-washed grass mingling with dawn dew and petrichor. The spoor of animals unseen. The nose-tickle of windblown pollen and fungal spore. The mysterious secretions of myriad creatures that live, love, hunt, and die among this rich green ground cover. One may get high on grass, but this smell is my Nature Fix.

Characteristic of the remembered Bangalore where I spent my boyhood, this is not a homogenous odour. It is an admixture of things living and decayed, native and exotic, homegrown and immigrant. Much like the mosaic and melting pot that this city has always been. This smell laced every childhood memory I have of the outdoors in Bangalore. In the years between boyhood and obscurity, it went away to die a thousand deaths, unmourned and unsung. 

The first death came with the ubiquity of personal transport. We forsook buses crammed with the funk of humanity for quiet, cool, insular cars. Air-conditioning shuts out the synaesthesia of the world outside. With power windows rolled up, we wallow in the safe, comfortable familiarity of our effluvia.

Forgotten are the remembered smells. Wind-blown diesel fumes and sun-dried haystacks. Desiccating cow dung cakes plastered on mud hutment walls. The ash of smouldering coconut woodfires. The inviting waft of country cowsheds, cloying half-chewed cud, and fresh grass trampled under ungulate hooves. This rich and strange redolence has become a thing unfamiliar.

As smartphones usurped our daily lives, this sensory presence became a ghost. A thing that no one believes in but which everyone fears. To keep out even the slightest trace of it, we perfume our homes and our cars — and ourselves. We drown out the odour of our territory-marking with air-fresheners. We stave away that suspicious whiff of nature and wilfully curate a “purified” atmosphere born of imaginary artifices. We distrust the creeping breath of mould and mildew. But not just that. We also suspect the moist, mineral aroma of dusk and the waking whiff of daybreak. If is not branded, boxed, wrapped, canned, or bottled into a homogenised generic, it cannot be trusted. 

What a tragic loss of collective memory this is for our generation!

Florence Williams wrote that “we’re experiencing a mass generational amnesia enabled by urbanisation and digital creep.” Her book, The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, And More Creative, makes for exhilarating, hopeful, and sobering reading.

Because, for many of us, even nature needs fixing.

A well-timed accident

In July, I injured my lower back while exercising. The crippling pain was a harsh reminder of advancing age. When I turned fifty earlier this year, I bragged about how spry I felt. Then this sudden turn of events set me back, wracked with pain and ruing my ill-timed overconfidence. 

It turned out to be a well-timed accident.

This situation wasn’t new to me. In 2018, I spent three weeks in bed following a painful illness. I worked my way out of that by following my Ikigai — which turned out to be watching birds. Since December 2019, I have watched birds every day without a break. For the purpose of keeping a logbook, I made an eBird checklist every day. From this resurrection, I drew succour. It was tempting to get on the forums and hunt out trophies like the odd vagrant or resort to twitching to bag a lifer, but I quieted these inner turbulences as they came to disagree with the meditative calm that I was seeking with bird-watching.

To force the pace and never to be still
Is not the way of those who study birds
Or women. The best poets wait for words.

- Nissim Ezekiel - Poet, Lover, Birdwatcher 

Just as it did during the pandemic, my birding checklist streak continued unbroken. Balcony birding, though meditative, can be a bit of drudgery. It isn’t always exciting, particularly when the burgeoning concrete skyline diminishes the view daily. Yet, I contented myself trying to hear Green Bee-eaters trilling above the growl of traffic on Outer Ring Road. 

Tailorbirds arrived on the dot at dawn, and Ashy Prinias moments later. Red-whiskered Bulbuls repaid my kindness by making house calls. They perched on the balcony grill and introduced me to their new brood. The fledged younglings, sans whiskers and vent patch, eyed me curiously. Their fleshy gapes clung to the edges of their mouths like smidgens of leftover toothpaste. They made soft muttering sounds that could only have been endearments.

Surrounding every serendipitous discovery is a pall of loss. Pockets of wilderness, which I took for granted, have shrunk or vanished entirely. During the pandemic, the legally disputed empty lot next door offered a birdwatching bounty. A few months ago, the new owners cleared it and excavated the smooth earthen slopes of the ditch that hid the nests of the White-throated Kingfishers. Also gone is the Pied Bushchat family that sang me through many a dark time. The developers have drained the accidental wetland that had formed in a trough left by an indolent earthmover. This shallow water body had attracted the occasional Spot-billed Duck and even a Little Grebe. Blown in by the wind, reeds and grasses took root on its fringes. Here, White-breasted Waterhens raised brood after brood.

Standing on my second-floor balcony, I pause in mid-reflection, screwing my face into a wink as I try to peer through chinks in the tin sheets the developer has erected all around the property. There is nothing to see. As the morning traffic clogs the streets, the rumble of the city reaches fever pitch. At this level of noisiness, hearing a bird sing, or a bird hearing itself sing, is a considerable accomplishment. 

Outdoors — and revelling in the Nature Fix

After six weeks of limited mobility, I mustered the will to get out. And when I did, I took in a big, satisfying lungful of that familiar smell. Walking in the wilderness in what was once the fringes of the city feels like an irony. Because this is now a city devoid of outskirts. The agglomeration of suburbia grows like a cancer, its all-consuming, amoebic appetite engulfing everything that stands in its way.

I have written before about Kalkere State Forest, a patch of wilderness on the edge of Bannerghatta National Park (read about the Indian Nightjar and its baby that we saw here in 2023). It is now fragmented and severed from the mother forest by high-rises, expressways, a metro line, farmland, quarries, and other kinds of encroachment. The authorities have either turned a blind eye to these changing land-use patterns, or have actively colluded in making them happen. 

A spell of early morning rain and strong sunshine afterwards had created the ideal setting for an effusive pageantry of life and light. Spiders were rolling up their webs after a late shift, butterflies and other insects innervated by solar energy were up and about. For once, I consigned birdwatching to the backseat, training my attention instead on the abundance of life in the grasses and shrubbery. 

The press of my foot to the earth springs a hundred affections…

– Walt Whitman, From ‘Leaves of Grass’

As the woodland thrummed with vitality, I got the nature fix that I had been yearning for, and I came away grateful that there’s no greater cure for maladies of the mind and body than a bit of forest bathing. 

Biophilia is the word for this Nature Fix!

Though a germ of thought as old as Aristotle, the term ‘Biophilia’ became popular in the 1970s, thanks to Erich Fromm, a German-American psychoanalyst. Fromm described it as a “passionate love of life and all that is alive,” and he extended this definition to mean love for humanity and nature. Edward O Wilson, one of my favourite biologists, wrote a book about it (titled Biophilia, in 1984), in which he introduced the “Biophilia Hypothesis” as the human urge to affiliate with other forms of life and form connections. 

Fromm and Wilson offer complementary perspectives on biophilia. While Fromm focuses on the environmental and social conditions that affect the individual’s development of biophilia, Wilson defines it in biological terms relating to humanity as a species. And poets, without necessarily naming it thus, have always sung of biophilia — consider Walt Whitman’s Leaves Of Grass, or Theodore Roethke’s Words For The Wind, or the effusive ditties that sprang from the pen of Mary Oliver.

Whatever you may call it — Biophilia or Nature Fix — the fruits of nature-loving are coequal. Being in nature rests the brain, calms the nerves, and promotes an enveloping sense of well-being that has been studied quite exhaustively but yet has been hard to pin down into precise components. Try as you might, you cannot summon up that feeling in its entirety in an artificial environment, or in a virtual one. The multisensory stimuli that evoke responses in human awareness are quite challenging to synthesise in a consistent and predictable way. Despite the big bets placed on them, psychedelic drugs or multiverses bending to the will of generative artificial intelligence can only simulate so much. The whole is infinitely greater than the sum of the parts. 

Not I, nor anyone else can travel that road for you.
You must travel it by yourself.
It is not far. It is within reach.
Perhaps you have been on it since you were born, and did not know.
Perhaps it is everywhere – on water and land.
― Walt Whitman, from Leaves of Grass

I leave you with some of the sights from that Kalkere walk that inspired this meditation on biophilia. Feel free to imagine the sounds and smells. Or, better still, step outdoors!

Tigers and leopards of the garden variety

Tigers and leopards on a morning walk? Well, there are camera trap records of both big cats from the Bannerghatta National Park, but they are hard to come by in the daytime. Instead, we are excited to enjoy the sight of Plain Tigers and Dark Blue Tigers, beautiful migratory butterflies which are unpalatable to birds since they consume the toxic sap of milkweed plants to protect themselves. Bright sunlight draws out the Common Leopard, a butterfly so aptly named that it is quite unmistakable.

Meals come hopping by

Plants with an appetite for flesh

Slow death renews life

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