Rewriting Our Earth | Connecting the Climate Crisis to Cultural Studies 💚💚💚

Reading the Rain | A Literary Response to Climate Anxiety

#newspaperinlearning

Why-o-Why is it getting delayed?

4th June 2026

Just this morning I happened to read a news article in today’s The Times of India, that Chennai’s southern suburbs were the hottest in the state yesterday. But respite from the harsh summer heat may be round the corner. Meteorologists said the southwest monsoon, expected to set in over Kerala around 4th June, though unlikely to bring direct rainfall to the city, may bring cloud cover and steady southwesterly winds that could reduce daytime temperatures.

When the monsoon is active over Kerala, Chennai is unlikely to experience harsh summer heat,” said V R Durai, director, Area Cyclone Warning Centre, RMC Chennai. “There is also a possibility of widespread rainfall across the state on Thursday”, says the article.

IMD’s initial forecast was for 26th May. Then it was postponed to 1st June, and now it’s said to hit Kerala on 4th June.

Why this delay? Why this extraordinary heat in India this year?

IMD attributes it to the weak moisture-laden winds blowing in from the Arabian Sea and hence they didn't extend deep enough into the atmosphere to meet the IMD's strict scientific thresholds.

What is the reason for this disruption of the Winds?

The delay in these winds and the subsequent weakness of these winds, is caused by competing weather systems.

Firstly, competing cyclones pulled significant moisture away from the Arabian Sea, disrupting the wind flow that the monsoon heavily relies on to push inland.

Secondly, and most importantly, the emerging El Niño has been a major reason.

What is El Nino?

Simply put, El Nino is an abnormal warming or an unusual warming!

And how is it caused?

The world’s oceans are nature’s huge and blessed sponges that absorb about 90% of the excess heat trapped by greenhouse gases. However, during an El Niño event, the ocean essentially exhales, releasing a massive amount of that stored heat into the atmosphere.

As a result, the weather disruptions caused by El Niño have become harsher on the land and its people.

So how is it connected with global warming?

Global warming is the unusually rapid increase in Earth’s average surface temperature over the past century primarily due to the greenhouse gases released as a result of burning fossil fuels.

For example, burning coal, oil, and natural gas for electricity, transportation, and industrial processes is the single largest contributor to the increase in atmospheric Carbon Dioxide.

Trees naturally absorb Carbon Dioxide. However, sadly at that, when forests are destroyed, and reforestation doesn’t happen at all, that carbon is released back into the atmosphere, and the planet loses its natural mechanism for sequestering carbon.

In short, if El Nino is the spark, global warming is the extra fuel that makes the resulting fire burn much hotter!

So how do we, as practitioners of literature, tackle this crisis through a literary and cultural studies framework?

An article in today’s The Hindu by Soma Basu, provides a part-literary solution to tackle this crisis of alarming proportions.

The article titled, “Reading for a warming world: books that rethink nature, development and survival”, foregrounds literature as a way to rethink our relationship with nature, by an analysis of book reviews to process the concept of “climate anxiety.”

As heatwaves intensify and climate anxiety grows, a new set of books critiques the belief in technological fixes, highlights projects that risk ecological damage, and reimagines forests as spaces shaped by power, conflict and care, urging readers to rethink their relationship with nature and development.

The severe heatwave this year has pushed temperatures beyond normal highs across some regions. The warming caused by human activity is not surprising as scientists have warned about it for decades.

What is more concerning is the lack of adequate collective action to address this crisis.

Some powerful books deepen our understanding of sustainability. Ghosts on Peepal Trees: My Journey From Folk Tales to Forests (Ebury Press, to be released on June 5) is the memoir of environmentalist Peepal Baba alias Swami Prem Parivartan.

The book evokes memories of shade and green spaces, clean rivers, forests and natural resources, singing birds, and fertile soil. It shows how these landscapes teach coexistence and help us understand the architecture of forests, the politics of ecosystem management, the economics of the environment, and even ecotheology. It urges us “to listen to the Earth and believe in our ability to care about the natural world.”

It is a fact that every city today is a story of concretisation, forgotten rivers, and vanished greens. In his latest book, Island on Edge: The Great Nicobar Crisis (2026, Westland), Pankaj Sekhsaria lifts the veil off the ₹82,000 crore mega infrastructure development project planned for the Great Nicobar Island cautioning how it will irreversibly damage not only the fragile biodiversity of the region, but also the culture of indigenous communities and their languages.

The project, which includes the clearing of 130 sq. km of pristine tropical evergreen forest, is one of the many continued betrayals of the island. That is why, the author says, he has compiled this collection of research-based, data-driven articles to help readers understand the legal, ethical, and on-ground realities of Great Nicobar.

Echoing Peepal Baba’s concerns about the “strange arrogance attached to development projects”, Sekhsaria critiques the pitfalls of building an airport, transshipment terminal, power plant, and new township on the island. Both authors point to actions detrimental to the environment and to culture. Instead of aligning with climate sensitivity, such development initiatives heavily deplete nature’s ecological balance.

India’s Forests: Revisiting Nature and History (Vintage Books, 2026), co-edited by Mahesh Rangarajan and Arupjyoti Saikia, is a reappraisal of forests as living contested spaces across the country. The authors refer to forests shaped by power, culture, and society, and redefined through conflict, negotiation, and care, and why they mean different things to different people.

The book is an interesting critique and also a tribute to Ramachandra Guha’s 1989 study of colonial and post-colonial forestry, The Unquiet Woods, that establishes the centrality of forests in our lives.

The ten essays cover a wide range of forest-related issues, tracing the history of forest management from the past to the present while looking ahead to more just and sustainable uses of natural resources.

The more forests belong to communities, the greater their protection will be. Afforestation is no longer a luxury or merely a government policy; it is a matter of survival and a way of making amends with nature. The future can be secured only if everyone participates in healing the soil and, in turn, the climate.

The article teaches us the important fact that the urgent need of the hour is to have a re-look at our curricula, to include books that rethink our relationship with nature, development and the environment, which can thereby help us to rewire and rewrite our relationship with the earth.

A Literary Tribute to Beautiful Avian Love ❤️

The Romance of the Ashy Woodswallows

What if Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, Eliot, Rushdie and Arundhati Roy had come along with me in the boat to watch and to admire the Ashy Woodswallows? 😊

#intothewildwithrufus #birding

I’ve always admired birds in love. Yes! Ever since my childhood days, we’ve had pets galore at home – that included jumbo – our lovely labrador, our cute cockatiels known for their lovely mimicry skills, a lovely rolly-polly parakeet (aptly named Polly) that sang along with me, 😊African love birds, and what not. Back then as kids, after school hours, we would rush back home as quick as possible, and after our evening cuppa, first thing we did was to huddle up towards our blessed feathered friends, and what’s more… we used to take our turns playing with them and feeding them with their favourite fruits and nuts in the process. 

And in all these avian encounters with our feathered friends, one thing I’ve quite admired in the bird kingdom is their capacity for genuine, constant and spotless love for each other.

We literary beings call it the language of love amongst our avian beings!

So it was, that, I chanced upon this lovely pair of Ashy Woodswallows whilst on our boat ride on the Bhadra river.

First, I spotted a lone Ashy Woodswallow, sitting all alone. Then, its mate came and sat quietly near it. No noise. No clinking. No jingling. No clatter. No chatter.

How beautifully has Tagore penned it in his Gitanjali (Song No. 7)

“Their jingling would drown thy whispers”

Tagore here so beautifully makes use of the “jingling of the ornament” as a metaphor for one’s ego, material wealth, and worldly distractions, and hence, he says that, if a person (in love) wears these worldly “jewellery” pieces, (ego) the noise and jingling they make will overpower and drown out the quiet, gentle whispers of pure unalloyed love between them.

As eminent critic Scupin Richard says –

When Love is in, Ego is out!

When Ego is in, Love is out!

Says Tagore -

My song has put off her adornments.

She has no pride of dress and decoration.

Ornaments would mar our union; they would come between thee and me;

their jingling would drown thy whispers.

My poet's vanity dies in shame before thy sight.

Indeed, I could sense a similar unspoken poetry in the way these birds expressed their emotion, nay devotion towards each other unmindful of anyone around them.

These shared rhythms of love gently remind us that, it’s not about falling in love, but rising in love that really matters! 😊

This blissful scene prompted me to make a wild hypothetical guesswork on ‘what if’ great sages of literature down the ages – they are some of my favourites too - had travelled along with me in the boat to River Tern Island, and witnessed this celestial sight and written some spontaneous evocative impressions on the lovely scene?

First, let’s take Shakespeare - 😊

Well, probably Shakespeare would have seen their silent courtship as a towering lighthouse built on a marriage of true minds!

Milton? 😊

Probably Milton would have seen in their union a ‘paradise unrefined’, a blissful, raw Eden on the Euphrates oops Bhadra river.

John Keats? 

John Keats would have sensed a ‘Grecian Urn’ish sensibility to his perspective and called it a quiet sonnet… oops a silent sanctuary built entirely of love and love only! 😊

Eliot?

Probably Eliot woulda probably observed them through the lens of time and the chaotic everyday life of the modern world and felt their love as the still point of the turning world. 😊

Salman Rushdie? 

Well, Rushdie woulda looked upon them through the lens of migration, as two migrating souls who chose to have that blessed stillness over chaos!

Chinua Achebe? 

Well, as we all know, Chinua Achebe was well-known for invoking his tribe’s ancestors quite a lot in his proverbs to explain profound human truths. So I guess he woulda gone on philosophical mode and said,

They simply sat together in the solemn dignity of the ancestors in the obi of a shared silence! 😊

Finally, to Arundhati Roy? 

Arundhati woulda probably viewed the Ashy Woodswallows through a lens of profound, heartbreaking fragility, and said,

They both were the ultimate Gods of Small Things, belonging only, and entirely, to each other!

I guess the legendary Tagore was right to a tee in his observations on stripping away the noisy jingling of the modern world! (which Pico Iyer would call, “the clangor of the world”).

And the moment one strip out the noise, what remains is the pure unalloyed eloquent and ecstatic silence of love!

PS: You may want to read more on Pico Iyer’s essay on ‘The Eloquent Sounds of Silence’ on our past post from 12 years ago, HERE, on our blog.

On the "Sweet & Romantic" River Terns of Bhadra 💚💚💚

The Best “Bridal Gift” | A Day Out with the River Terns of Bhadra

1st June 2026 | #intothewildwithrufus 

The Gulls and the Terns are my top-favourite birds among the birds from the aquatic kingdom! Interestingly they are close cousins too. 😊

I remember having posted a snapshot of a rare and beautiful seagull that we had spotted in Kodiakarai, Point Calimere, Tamil Nadu around eight months ago! You may want to look up the snapshots in our past post, dated 19 October 2025, HERE, during our Kodiakarai Bird Camping!

Although the Terns and the Gulls are close cousins, sharing the same family, they greatly differ in their glide. While the terns are known for their erratic flight patterns (video link attached), the gulls are graceful gliders.

Added, the terns are also called ‘sea-swallows’ – as they sport a forked tail like the swallows, while the gulls are called air pirates, because of their klepto-skill 😉 in stealing food that other animals have already caught or gathered.

What pretty beauties they are! Indeed a beautiful sight to behold!

Well, I am posting here below, a lot of snapshots that I had taken during our boat-ride to the sandbar.

But dear gentle reader… I request you to first read through this exciting note on the behaviour of the River Terns, which will make your viewing experience more engaging and rewarding!

From The Book of Indian Birds by Salim Ali

Yes! The visuals we had this morning were so stunning, that it was like, we were reading a chapter straight out of Salim Ali’s Book of Indian Birds. Indeed, Salim Ali’s description of the River Tern is so picturesque and highly evocative.

The chick of the River Terns 

Quite early into the morning, by 6.15 am, a few of us, including the renowned Naturalist Mr. Karthikeyan, his wife Ms.Priya, (an ardent Naturalist and Director of The Naturalist School, Bengaluru) and four others, ventured on an exciting boating trip to a beautiful and unique river-island deep into the forests.

For me it was quite a thrilling moment to spot hundreds of River Terns hovering over the sandbars, keeping an eye on their little ones, in the process.

Back in Chennai, for years now, when a few of us - wannabe birders – used to descend at the Pulicat Lake or at the Muttukadu Back waters, we used to get a blessed darshan of these lovely birds, yes! but we have never observed their nesting or hatching behaviour anytime!

That’s why this boat ride assumes great significance for us.

After a long boat ride deep into the Bhadra river, within the Bhadra Tiger Reserve, we were taken near the River Tern Island – where the River Terns were busy into sandbar-nesting!

Well, on an aside, there is a huge difference between sandbars, sandspits and barrier islands.

Sandbars in a river are elevated regions formed naturally by sand, sediment or gravel, exposed only when the water levels are quite low, and are highly temporary.

Sandspits, on the other hand, are long, narrow ridges of sand that extend from the mainland out into open water, and are semi-permanent.

In contrast, barrier islands, are completely detached from the mainland by open water, and they are permanent, with fully developed ecosystems.

We were right on time to witness their systematic and ritualistic breeding process. (the nesting period is from the months of March up until end-May)

A Male River Tern Gracefully Offering the Bridal Gift to his Prospective Bride :-)

It was quite interesting to know that, the fish that the River Terns catch, are used not only as food, but also as a “bridal gift” during their courtship period. Moreover, they do their nesting in vulnerable, shallow scrapes on exposed sandbanks and feed their chicks live, freshly caught fish right from the moment they hatch out.

The male River Tern does a beautiful plunge-dive into the river, to catch a fresh, silvery fish, and instead of eating it, he will carry it back to a prospective partner. 😊

The male then hovers and performs gallant aerial displays with the fish dangling from his bright yellow bill. He then lands next to the female, offering it to her as a “bridal gift.”

If the lady-tern is lucky enough to accept the offering, they then solidify the rituals into nuptials and they become man and wife. 😊

This ritual isn’t just a romantic gesture! It is live-proof that the male is capable of nourishing, caring and providing for their future chicks!

When we looked at the hundreds of chicks that had hatched out of the sandbars, one thing was curiously striking to our eyes. Unlike many birds that build secure, elevated and safe nests, the nest of the River Terns are nothing more than a shallow pit in the bare sand or rock! This makes their ground-nesting strategy a highly risky one, as they also have the added responsibility to actively defend these exposed nests from opportunistic predators like ibises and crows!

Yes, we could spot a couple of ibises subtly warming up towards the exposed nests.

Unlike many that feed semi-digested food for their young, River Terns start live-feeding their chicks with whole, living-fish.

Yet another interesting ritual or rather a quirky ritual that we observed among the River Terns was that, when a parent caught a live-fish, it immediately dipped the catch into the water to “wash” or re-wet it before presenting it to the chick, in order to make it easier for the young bird to swallow the fish.

The chicks remain entirely dependent on this constant aerial supply chain of fresh, live fish from their parents for about six to eight weeks until they perfect their own diving skills.

And even as our boat gently steered away from the island, the sea-swallows oops River Terns and their highly systematic rituals on the sun-baked sands of the Bhadra remain etched in our hearts so much that, to end on Wordsworthian note - 

The music in my heart I bore, long after it was heard no more!

Yes, to us literary beings, they are simply, poetry in flight! 😊

Now for the promised few snapshots - 

PS 1: All photos (c) this blogger’s, but please feel free to use them for any educative, non-commercial purposes 😊

PS 2: You may want to watch that Sweet & Romantic Video of the Male River Tern feeding his Prospective Bride-to-be, and her shy acceptance of the Bridal Gift – the pavapetta fish 😊in this memorable video HERE on our Vlog, taken on 1st June 2026.