Catch them Young

School uniforms have always made for amazing pictures. I remember staring at hours at my dad’s yellowing class picture. Photographs from childhood wearing uniforms will always be cherished no matter how embarrassing or stupid they look.

This particular one will remain my favourite uniform picture. The picture of two sweatered hands patting tight the mud around a Texus sapling. The bark of this tree is found to be a rich source of Texol, a chemical used in cancer chemotherapy.

I will plant trees all my life. That has been decided. But I can only plant a certain number of trees in my entire life span. Let’s call it X. Now if I tell 200 people why it is important to plant trees, 150 will laugh it off but I’ll still have 50 who understand. If these 50 plants trees too, the number of trees becomes 50X! For this vision, I have only Anish K Menon to thank.

CATCH THEM YOUNG | Let them plant a tree near their school. Tell them that it is now their duty to take care of it, water it and to see that no harm comes anywhere near it. They will watch it grow and maybe (this is the BIG maybe we bank upon) they will want to plant more of them.

Project 35 Trees attempts to do exactly this. In the last one month, we met and planted trees with students from schools in Daman, Silvassa, Baroda, Indore, Jaipur, Delhi, Gurgaon, Amritsar, Jammu, Chandigarh and Manali. As I write this, I must be preparing for the session here in Dehradoon.

It will be difficult to measure the effectiveness of what Project 35 Trees has done. It is easy to assume that students will click pictures and send them to us but I would rather have them watering the saplings.