Nityanand Jayaraman visit

Al Qamar students were thrilled to have environmental activist  Nityanand Jayaraman come speak.  Here's a blogpost by one of the students who participated in the interaction:

Today, we talked about something we know in happening to something we have, But don't care about.

It is something not everyone has. Water. Our Beach. Our land.

We have 3 rivers in Chennai. Cooum, Kosasthaliyar, Adyar. And 4 estuaries. 3 from the river and one near the Kovalam boating house, flowing from Kovalam. This is all fresh water meeting the sea. And we want fresh water to drink, bath, brush, pretty much live. When we put bore wells take water from the ground,  or pollute the water, we are changing a major resource of our life.

 Look at Chennai, when we say wild things in nature, we think of Amazon Rainforest or the Niagara Falls. We don’t realize there is one wild thing near us which a lot of people haven't seen in their life. Bay of Bengal. It is crazy in there and how the fishes live, the pollution it intakes.

A lot of parts which have now been “developed” are on what used be a lake or an Eri.  What I am trying to say is, Chennai, most of the times has too much water or too little water. When we build houses or buildings on waterbodies, the water should fill up somewhere right?

According to Nityanand Uncle, there is a great relationship between the Earth and the sky. When we tend to come in between them, we are breaking the bond. They will do what ever they can to meet. So when the Waterford is now covered with “developed" stuff., the rain wants to fall on Earth. And it will. And that’s how our houses and buildings get flooded.

 What does flood mean? Something has reached it's maximum capacity and can’t take in anymore, it will tend to flow out. When we develop, we are changing the capacity of the water bodies with cement, roads, houses and much more. So you can’t blame nature if it's doing its job and WE come in the way.

What is  development really. It means to make something better, right? Better for people to live in and having enough resources. We should really change that people in that sentence and change it to living things. So when are developing India, are all living things and Earth getting what they need?’ Let’s take our cleaning drives for instance. They clean India right, but we really  are taking dumps from one place  and dumping it someplace else, that’s not cleaning, that’s moving. That place will still be trashed, still stink. Right? And we really need to think about what we do and really CLEAN India.

By Shahana Shameer, Grade 7