The frogs’ song

Come night the concert of the frogs would begin. For nearly 10 minutes there would be a sonata by a bull frog. After some intermission a chorus would follow with all frogs participating. The sequence would go on and on during the entire night. It was a wonderful feast of music provided by nature in its sense of abundance.

In the 50’s we used to get rains in October every year without fail. Once the north east monsoon got set in there would be frequent rains.

I was around 7 to 8 years of age and our family had moved to a newly constructed house in a place which was just then developing. We had a big pond at the back of our house. The pond was dry throughout the year but got filled up during the monsoon.

We used to sit in the front porch during evenings. The first visitor a tiny frog would hop in. During the course of the evening many more frogs of various hues and sizes visited us. We were advised to leave these alone. visitation by swarms of insects also occurred every evening. But with frogs, spiders and lizards sharing the habitation the insect population was always under control.

The pond at the back of our house was full of water for 3 months in a year, but we never had mosquitoes with so much stagnant water close by. The frogs not only kept the population of mosquitoes under control but helped in controlling vector borne diseases comfortably.

There was no protected water supply to houses in our neighbourhood. We had a well in the garden and we used a rope and pulley to haul up water. We did not have electricity but used a kerosene lantern. Apart from the frogs the house sparrows, visited our home during nesting time.
The Cooum River was full of water and was not polluted in those days. The other river was Adayar with its beautiful sand banks and sparkling water. There was also the Buckingham canal which was used to bring merchandise by canoes from inland to the sea. All the waterways were in good usable condition.

The wonder was that there was very less mosquito nuisance in the 50’s, with so many stagnant water sources in Chennai. The main reason was creatures like frogs were able to control the population of mosquitoes and insects.

The first victim when Chennai entered the modern age was the Cooum river. With influx of bulging population, it became a sewage canal. The Buckingham canal lost its use in the 60’s with sprouting of slums on its banks. The death knell came in 1997 after MRTS a suburban train route was built. The Adayar River also got polluted over a period.

Chennai today is a concrete jungle. Gone are the lungs of the city; the green spaces. Gone are the days of the frogs. Apart from burgeoning human population, millions of Mosquitoes are also breeding in stagnant water trapped around the Metro rail stations built on the Buckingham canal, and also in the stagnant waters of Cooum and Adayar Rivers.

The gainers seem to be the mosquito repellent and mosquito coil manufacturers who are doing a roaring business.
Nobody seems to have realized the reason for the war of mosquitoes on humans. It is the subtle but forceful retaliation of nature on the Chennai people for having destroyed the wonderful green cover they had once and showing scant respect to nature.

“Can we ever hear frogs’ song again?” seems to be a mute question. The possibility seems to be bleak as the building and road construction activities are going on a full swing. People can term these activities as progressive but Nature will surely fight back in the near future.

The 2004 tsunami still remains green in most of the minds of the people of Chennai.