John Keats in his poem ‘The Human Seasons’ beautifies the spring as youth the time of passionate, energetic and vibrating in which he compared the four seasons of the year to man’s life at different stages and he compared summer to the ripe period of manhood. The poem ‘spring’ written by Gerard Manley Hopkins has captured his joy in this season, as nothing is so beautiful as Spring—the awakening and fertility in both animal and plant life. The weeds and grasses sprout long leaves forth fruit trees begin to blossom and fruitfulness of the earth reminds him of the Garden of Eden, spring, which he also compared to the time of innocence in the minds of young girls and boys. Spring indeed is a season fills emotion in the mind of peoples by the nature of beauty that attracts them. The poets who love of nature thus beautified with his words of gentle and harmony of his deep appreciation of the beauty that he finds around him impels him to give utterance to it in the most expressive language, which is itself often of imperishable beauty.
Spring brings summer, and these two seasons influenced the city /urban dwellers is through the heat and shower, the hotness, and warm discern the times that they know the seasons coming is in refer to the year but not much affect and experience the nature as compared to that of rural countryside. This very season followed by summer is also a worse part of times for peoples resided in rural countryside as many are struggling ‘tooth and nail’ to cross this virulent times every year. This beautiful greenery nature comes along as thorns as many lives go in to graveyard during these seasons due to some chronic diseases or different season’s related problems. Peoples in rural native forget the blooming beauty of nature; instead burden of sorrow brings disappoint and mourn in their minds.
Once they were roaming through mountains, uplands, hills, plains, forests, rivers, streams, seashores, riverbanks etc. in search of food for their livelihood—connecting with neighbors in processing business. But with the dawning of spring, routes are closed—neighbors stopped visit and they hesitate to go through the place once they had gone; The roads once they were travelling are spreading by weeds and grasses and mudslide puddle over the roads once there were meandering ‘to and fro’ is becoming silent than the sounds of nature; River streams once they were crossing over is no longer a road of cross intersection than can looking the rushing streams at far in one side. Spider webs blocks their road once the spring is arrived and even small insects tries to hunt them.
Rural dweller faces trial and tribulations that lead a very hard life fighting against the ravages of nature and weather. They spend their times in extremely hard working—working from early morning, even before daybreak till late in the evening, sometimes even after the sun has set incessantly all day long. They rarely care for the day’s heat or the rains and face all the climatic hardships. I saw some mothers delivered baby when they were in the field, sometimes on their way home from work. This is due to poverty—at stake laboring—mothers had undertaken even at the time when she must be in special care.
Nevertheless, in spite of such a hard life and working hard, they spend all their life in utter poverty is mainly due to the reason that is dependent solely upon monsoons. The rural farmers’ fate is always at the mercy of the quality and quantity of rains. Sometimes, untimely or early rains damage the crops and drought, flood or famines give havoc in their already tough life.
Amidst farmers while in hardship struggling for food—diseases, sorrow, suffering, hunger and death are in regular visits especially during these height of tensions which they often falls ill and dies uncared for. Death rates are doubles during these seasons than that of happening in autumn and winter as they fall in to the prey of mortal call. Among the rural populations—mothers, children and aged old fragile are in high vulnerable that encountering with different diseases of both infectious and non-infectious of which some diseases are curable if care and treatment is taking at earlier stages. However, non-availability of doctors, medicines and rural community inability to pay for promotive and curative medical services also leads to poor health. It was lamenting for me when I witnessed the death of brother and sister from same house in two days at springtime. In the following summertime, there’d been witnessed of another tragedy of mournful happened in the same village that two brothers passed away within an hour, which was deeply depressed and melancholy. Many lives are lost during these very seasons. Therefore, the onset of spring is something significant that they have been marked as entrance to the house of death. If there were medical services during the times of pandemic, epidemic or any endemic, of course, many would have survived from it. It is unfortunate for rural dwellers happenings such tragedy in the absence of medical while they were unable to meet the cost of transporting charges and to pay to doctors or other workers, diagnostic tests and drugs at city. Instead, they look for an alternative chance to cure through rituals of primitive practices.
The status of health and nutrition of rural population is on the aggregate far from satisfactory and the mortality indices are much worse for the rural population as compared to the urban. The deficiency of staple food is the primary form of malnutrition that is aggravated by the extra burden of disease and it is more severe in the under-nourished that lead to much greater death among them. Poverty leads to sickness by depriving individuals of their needs of adequate nutrition and shelter and by exposing them to hazards of poor sanitary conditions and established that the prevalence and distribution of disease is influenced by socio-economic factors. Parents hardly get time to care for children who are also suffering from malnutrition, eventually surrender to death. Grannies and granddads usually bid farewell to their family, near and dear ones, as they know certain as that if they may not able to live beyond this monsoon!
City dwellers may not imagine the bitter hardships gotten by rural peoples for they have conveniently being availed all medicines and hospitals that can cure irrespective of times, seasons or diseases if illness is not his fate of death. Medical interventions is importunely be momentous by accessing of health care services, connecting of roads and adequate sanitizing at the rural level to overcome from the factors that led to death of rural populations. This is something strange, but in fact, somewhere else in the country the fascinated beauty seasons turns susceptible to last leg.
(The view expressed in this article is writer’s lamentation for en-wave loss of lives in rural countryside when there were no medical services.)
