Baba Mayaram is a freelance Hindi journalist from Madhya Pradesh. He grew up in a village in Hoshangabad District and has worked as a journalist in Indore and Raipur. He mainly covers anti development struggles, indigenous people’s lives and struggles, environment and nature watch. He is also a poet of Satpura range of mountains.
Dr. Lokesh Tamgire has worked in Community Health projects in Chhattisgarh and Vidarbha region of Maharashtra at locations which are located in forest regions. He commuted on bicycle through thick forests in these regions. One day he saw a Golden Oriole and was so enchanted that he became a bird watcher. Every morning and evening he went out on his bicycle with his camera and photography and bird identification became a routine for him.
Over the years Dr. Tamgire has made about 150 videos and posted them on YouTube. He also made bird call videos. He has taken part in numerous bird counts in the region and now he is a good amateur ornithologist.
Apart from his medical work, he works with children (including his 3 year old daughter) on environment awareness. He finds bird watching helps children in their development. He takes his daughter on his cycle for his birdwatching trips.
Baba Mayram concludes his article with enumerating the advantages of bird watching. Birds are part of nature and help in pollination, fertilizing the forest and processing some tough seeds in their stomach for their germination. They also help us in insect control in farming.
Bird song has been known to be soothing and ‘bird sound therapy’ is being used in mental health practice.
Altogether bird watching is a happy, healthy and useful hobby. All of us can take part in it by simply installing a small bird bath in a safe corner in our homes and watching them sitting from our chairs!
T Vijayendra (1943 – ) was born in Mysore, grew up in Indore and went to IIT Kharagpur to get a B. Tech. in Electronics (1966). After a year’s stint at the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, Kolkata, he got drawn into the whirlwind times of the late 60s.
Since then, he has always been some kind of political-social activist. His brief for himself is the education of Left-wing cadres and so he almost exclusively publishes in the Left-wing journal Frontier, published from Kolkata. For the last ten years, he has been active in the field of ‘Peak Oil’ and is a founder member of Peak Oil India and Ecologise. Since 2015 he has been involved in Ecologise! Camps and in 2016 he initiated Ecologise Hyderabad. In 2017 he spent a year celebrating the Bicentenary of the Bicycle. Vijayendra has been a ‘dedicated’ cyclist all his life, meaning, he neither took a driving license nor did he ever drive a fossil fuel-based vehicle.
He divides his time between Hyderabad and organic farms at several places in India, watching birds and writing fiction. He has published a book dealing with resource depletion, three books of essays, two collections of short stories, a novella, an autobiography and a children’s science fiction story on the history of the bicycle, apart from booklets on several topics. His booklet, Kabira Khada Bazar Mein: Call for Local Action in the Wake of Global Emergency (2019, https://archive.org/details/kabira-khada-bazaar-mein) has been translated into Kannada, Bengali and Marathi and is the basic text for the emerging Transition Networks in these language regions. His last book ‘Vijutopias’, which has 12 short stories, is an entertaining book full of hope and energy in these dismal times.
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This article is based on “Avsaad Ko Kam Karta Hai Pakshi Sangeet (The bird music reduces depression) by Baba Mayaram“
