So, I think you all know me, so I don’t need to introduce myself. I am the director of the Scottish Center of Tagore Studies, which is well represented today. We call it affectionately “ScoTs” with a capital “S” and a capital “T.” We’re trying to celebrate the Togolese Gettis Festival as close to Patrick Geddes’ birthday as possible, which is the 2nd of October, a date he shares with another friend of his, Mahatma Gandhi.

Scots was established in November 2011 at Edinburgh Napier University, and in September 2020, it was registered as an autonomous charitable trust and is run by a board of illustrious trustees with generous funding from the National Lottery Open Fund of Creative Scotland, and with support from the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh, and the Center for Creative Practice at Edinburgh Napier University.

Scots, I hope you have heard this, has organized the Tagore-Geddes Festival, a unique festival to be held over this weekend, as the Lord Provost and the Consul General have already said. We hope you will enjoy all the events in this city, where the work of Patrick Geddes, the conservation architect and town planner, is so evident. We celebrate a rare friendship between him and Rabindranath Tagore, India’s national poet, whose songs today are the national anthems of two countries, India and Bangladesh, and inspired that of Sri Lanka. He was the first non-Westerner to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913 and remains the only South Asian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature to date.

I think we need to address that now and break it down. Both Geddes and Tagore were visionaries, nation builders, peace warriors, educationists, and environmentalists. It is in this last capacity that we wish to bring to you their message, which is both relevant and urgent. Both friends introduced tree planting as a ceremonial way to show how life on Earth can only be sustained by trees. Forests, as we know, not only capture carbon dioxide but also release the oxygen all creatures need to breathe, live, and survive. They are our future.

Today, forests cover only 30% of the Earth’s surface, and since 1990, we have lost around a billion acres of forest land. It is through a creative, expressive dance form called “Srijonshil nitto” that we are newly introducing to Scotland, through which we will bring to you the message of the forest: where tribes live and make their homes, where creatures thrive, and where nature in all its biodiversity endures, making this a living, breathing planet.

Yet, every day, forests are being cleared for mining, industrial farming, commercial logging, drilling, and more construction, which we need to urgently stop. I would like this planet to thrive. I have my grandson here and other children, and let us leave a planet for them to grow up in, to enjoy, and to be prosperous in. The forests are teeming with life, with every green leaf embodying life and hope. Deep in the forest dwell birds, animals, insects, and flowers that symbolize love and beauty—a vibrant ecosystem that needs our respect and protection.

When city dwellers venture into the forest, which you will see in the two films you will watch tomorrow, they meet tribes who take just what they need and give back what is necessary to retain their habitat. They are not our enemies. However, urbanites like us only see a backward people whose simple lifestyle does not necessarily earn their respect. Yet, the forest dwellers are the wise ones who have, till now, kept our forests for us.

So, through our dance drama, we celebrate the beauty of the forest, symbolized by the Polish flower, the flame of the forest. It’s a word you have come across, but didn’t know you had heard of. The Battle of Plassey—it’s actually Polashi—where battles were fought, but red flowers bloomed.

So, we will take you deep into the forest in two classic feature films tomorrow: Satyajit Ray’s Aranyer Din Ratri: Days and Nights in the Forest,” and Gautam Kosh’s response “In the Forest.” Again, this will be at George Square, 50 George Square. Please come if you can; there will be refreshments there, and you will witness not just the urban-rural encounter in these films, but the urban-rural divide, which can only be bridged by what Rabindranath called the unity of all things. Patrick Edis saw this unity evident in the shimmering, delicate, trembling leaves that encapsulate life and hope for all of us. I will end with this reading of two sections of a poem I wrote, titled “Deforestation”:

When you walk—and this is the forest speaking—when you walk beneath my boughs, they make a canopy above your gaze so intricate that the sky appears in glimpses. And if you invade my domain, you will find your steps impeded by the foliage that flourishes between the stalwart trunks of my populace—this earth’s rich heritage. You can feel the deep silence of my presence, which embraces your every alert sense. This is where the leopards lurk, the deer stand still or leap away. Here, I have the fox’s den, the pheasant’s call, the rhino’s horn, and the bison herds. Between my bark, birds of every hue send sharp signals to all prey, who slink away amidst my intense density, where monkeys chatter and squirrels scatter nuts, fruits, and blossoms that vie in shape and color to attract and capture the insect life that is enraptured by the habitat I provide.

But you have set a tidal wave that sweeps under the forest glade, pushing my trees back to the edges of life’s brink. You have cleared me to plant cash crops. You have cleared me to graze cattle. You have cleared me to cultivate. You have cleared me to build your homes, your roads, your factories, and fires to paper walls to write your tales, to feed your staggering race that overfills this planet’s face. You have set in motion soil erosion. You have let landslides and mudslides crush my roots that keep the earth’s soil porous. Now removed, they cause floods that flash. I hold carbon dioxide; I release your precious oxygen. You slash at your very lungs with every tree you crash for gain, as the air above turns heavy with greenhouse gases and spells death.

Every day, you calmly clear 20 football-sized plots of virgin forest, and today, 12 million hectares disappear every year. This is a war you now wage with cutting-edge technology: bulldozers that neatly raze, road graders, and log skidders that bear the earth’s surface. Till, in a hundred years from now, my forests will exist no more, replaced by a silence more terrifying than war.