Passion brings out the best in people

I finally managed to do an activity for an environmental cause that I have been meaning to do for quite a few years now - the Turtle Walk! This is an activity that has been happening in Chennai for over 2 decades now and it is carried out to save a species of turtle called the Olive Ridley, from extinction. These turtles regularly nest in the beaches of Chennai between the months of January & April and their numbers are dwindling because of the environmental deterioration and the perils of unprecedented development of our cities and towns to satisfy the human needs.

We organized this Turtle Walk in coordination with the Students Sea Turtle Conservation Network [SSTCN] for my office and it was sure a unique experience, though an exhausting one, especially if you are as out of shape as I am :) The Turtle Walk is basically a walk that starts from the Neelangarai Beach and ends in Elliots beach which is a 7 km stretch. Volunteers walk the beach to find Olive Ridley eggs and when they find them they collect and take them to a hatchery at the end of the walk. Also, at the end of the walk, the babies emerging from the eggs are safely directed back into the sea. This is an important exercise as many of these babies don't get to the sea because of the many powerful lights on the beaches nowadays, which they tend to follow. This activity is carried out by the volunteers of SSTCN every day from Jan to April, while volunteers are invited to join them on weekends. Read more about the efforts of this network on http://sstcn.org/. There is also a lot of campaigns for saving these turtles which have been in the news lately, with NGOs like Greenpeace fighting for their cause.

The whole exercise started as something that was exciting and for a good cause, but as soon as I heard the story behind SSTCN things changed. And, it grew into complete admiration as we got to the half-way mark in our 7 km walk. I was totally out with exhaustion and was about to give up. Then, Arun & Akila, who are the coordinators of this network and have been doing this for over a decade now, told me how some of the students who are part of their network have been doing this since they were in standard VI. Some of them are now graduating from colleges! There are a couple of students who actually walk the beach everyday in these 4 months, even when they have exams to give the next day! I was throughly amazed and ashamed all at once. Amazed at how passion drives people to reach for the stars and ashamed at how little I've done for any social cause.

Though I sound disheartened with myself, the bottom line of this post is to highlight and make all of us think and understand how, if we are passionate about something, we tend to go the extra mile to get it. So, lets all make a promise to ourselves today - to find where our passion lies and then go after it! Good luck with all your efforts:-)