By Deepa Nair

Missing the gentle giants

Trivandrum is a growing city.Once upon a time it was just a little town sitting pretty on the coastline of the Arabian sea.Tree-lined avenues,majestic red coloured buildings and an earthy old worldly charm rendered this place with a unique flavour of its own.But today my little town is getting to be a little too big for her boots.She is gradually expanding to swallow her quiet suburbs.She is straining to accomodate an ever increasing number of denizens.Her tree-lined avenues are being felled to make way for development.The gentle giants of yester years are being mercilessly chopped down.The destruction is rampant and heartless.It is mindless devastation on a scale i have never witnessed before.Trees on the Palayam,LMS stretch and in the court premises are being felled day after day.All this is being purportedly done for road widening.Well ,broad,wide roads are indeed a blessing for one and all.But why not make an allowance for the gentle giants also.Chennai is a thriving metropolis ,much much larger than Trivandrum,and yet they have managed to retain the huge old trees.How did they do it?They did it because someone with a little bit of foresight and vision decided that they were going build roads without chopping down the trees.They have succeeded to a certain extent in retaining the green canopy.But in Trivandrum there is an evil malaise that is gradually destroying the beauty of this one timegreen town.We the silent,indifferent,scared people of Trivandrum can do nothing but witness this destruction.We are scared to react for we may suffer at the hands of the perpetrators of this massacre of the innocents.

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