PRERNA SINGH BINDRA

is the author of The Vanishing, India’s Wildlife Crisis. She lives in NCR.

Trees feel lonely, love society, can be bullies, nurse an ailing neighbour and even have conversations, warning each other of danger and such like through a fungal network, or the ‘wood wide web! It is with such startling revelations that I began 2017, reading Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees. Wohlleben’s language is chatty and the book has become an unlikely international best seller -- telling of our yearning to be reconnected with nature. It’s been a ‘tree year’, with my second — and strong–recommendation being Sumana Roy’s How I became a Tree. This beautifully crafted collection of essays is impossible to classify. One imagines Roy among trees, watching, understanding, absorbing, and then assimilating her relation and empathy to trees through her own self. It is at once botany and science, philosophy and poetry, and a deeply personal memoir. This book is a work of art, it’s meditative, staying with you much after the last leaf… err… page is turned. Another important book this year was Jairam Ramesh’s Indira Gandhi: A Life in Nature, because it shows the importance of political leadership in environment at a time when the country is suffering the consequences of Climate Change, pollution, deforestation and extinction. It chronicles Indira Gandhi’s contribution to saving our natural and cultural heritage. All three books are special because they led to a reimagining of my own sense of self.