A Bike ride through Aarey

What happens when your daily social responsibilities get you running late for office (no, no, not the NGO kind but the daily post on social media), you take your bike, I mean Activa, and go to office. 

If you’re a Mumbaikar then you are well aware that getting into a local at peak hours is a next to impossible task unless your are up for the challenge. So not wanting to be crushed in a crowded local, and having no better option, the only thing to do was to ride all the way office, and cutting through Aarey would be an ideal way to save time.

Once again, as Mumbaikars are well aware of, the temperature in BNP, or Borivali National Park, and Aarey is always a few degrees lower than that of the areas that surround it. So as soon as you enter Aarey, you are embraced by this coolness that relaxes you and refreshes the senses. The lushness of the foliage, just after the rains, is soothing balm to the weary eyes. Everywhere that the eyes see you notice small riverlets and streamlets flowing, running, gushing.

The air has this crispness, this freshness, fresher than any place in Mumbai, save BNP. You feel a cool gentle breeze against your skin, as you make your way riding the slopes, the ups and downs, the twist and turns of the road. Or as we runners would call it, a rolling terrain, or is it rolling hills.

The trees on either side of the road seem to be reaching out to each other, meeting over the road,  touching each other so as to create a canopy shielding the road below from the elements of nature. Creating a sort of tunnel like the ones created during the bridal march at weddings.

Sadly these little joys of having a green patch within the city won’t be there for too long as the greed of man and their scrupulous nature wouldn’t have it that way. With the eye on prime property, under the pretext of progress, Aarey is being poached on little by little.

Sadly the generations to come would never know Aarey, would never know that there used to be a green patch within the bustling city. The only way they would know Aarey would be through a footnote in some book or through some newspaper or magazine documenting Aarey’s struggle for survival. 

Till then lets make the most of the beauty that we have been blessed with, to do our best to conserve, protect, fight for it, save it, for a better, greener and cleaner future for the generations to come.