Nature paints wonderful patterns filled with glittering colours on the evening sky. An enchanting artwork dominated by a citrus orange covers the monsoon evenings of Coimbatore and this spectacle – sometimes shaded with pink – is a ‘must not be missed’ spectrum.
As the light is reflected through the glasses in the windows, lighting the rooms and canvassing the streets, a subtle artistic feeling is born in each heart. The artistic mind that appreciates a job well done by nature, to which even a thousand Picassos would be lesser, oozes out acceptance of the natural world and appreciation of its wondrous strokes.
It is obvious that a brush that paints a colour spills out the same when it is shaken. But hey, what is nature if you are able to predict its next move? ‘Flabbergasted’ is the word and feeling that awes people as it does daily when nature’s brush that had just painted the sky orange, spills out green coloured spots with wings that rest on the fields of the outskirts of the city.
As the sun goes down, hundreds of Rose-ringed Parakeets (psittacula krameri) with feathers of green, strongly-stroked by nature’s brush, flock above agricultural fields adding essence to the spectacle.
The dance of the grown crops caressed by the evening breeze forms a rhythmic pattern along with the flight of the frugivorous birds (birds that predominantly feed on fruits). A bird so closely associated with humans and ironically their fortune for many years, settles on the crops for a special ceremony.
The sorghum plants have attained the efflorescence stage oozing out strong smell and attracting the birds and the birds that are naturally frugivorous start to take out the grains one by one. One might call it looting; as the birds in hundreds feed on the fortune of the farmer, in a rather beautiful opera.
It is looting yes, but even the farmers melt down from being losers to the birds to appreciators of the whole concert, which has light, music and dance and most importantly, life. “They do not take much. It’s just a little portion that needs to be offered if you want to witness an awesome occasion in your backyard,” the lady in the farm in her seventies was not talking rubbish. It was simply awesome!
This is a very common sight in most part of the district close to the Western Ghats, especially during the harvest season. Not just the Rose-ringed Parakeets, plenty of birds including munias and sparrows join the ceremony as the sun gears for another setting. It is not just the setting of the sun, but a setting overall to the dance of life.