ET | Why we should disconnect from digital devices and reconnect with Mother Nature

Almost every morning, from November to February, we can expect magic to happen outside our bedroom window in Koramangala, a leafy suburb in Bengaluru. A male Asian paradise flycatcher, with twin white ribbons in his tail, alights on the lagerstroemia tree branch, chirps out its arrival, and swings into a preening routine. Occasionally diving delicately and deftly into the pool beyond, he then returns to clean his feathers, black head ducking and turning, feathers shivering and satin tail dancing. This bird can lure the husband away from his desk, no matter how urgent the email. Yes, magic does manifest in this season.

Such enchantment might be the gateway to a new reconnect. People want to disconnect from digital devices, but we need something to connect back to. We are so connected to our machines and so disconnected from our people.

A few generations ago, most of our ancestors were in professions relating to the soil, or to the trade of things grown in the soil. Their senses had to be sharp to assess the real world around them — the hiss of a snake, the sawing of a leopard, the screech of a raptor. If you didn’t sense these, you could lose crops, or cattle or worse. You had to know how the wind turns, or the tide; how the rain falls, or if the earth would be scorched.

Few readers would be able to tune in to nature any more. Our ancient instincts are dulled, though other skills have been honed. So, if we want to journey back to the future, to recover what we have lost, we need to start like babies.

Escape into Nature
We need to see everything with fresh eyes. Personally, I started on birding when I was in a postpartum low. Pacing the terrace of my parent’s Pune house in the mornings, to get some exercise and fresh air, while the babies were with the grandparents, I inadvertently started noticing splashes of colour flitting between the trees. The colours had names like coppersmith barbet and purple-rumped sunbird and ashy prinia.

Slowly but surely, the birds whistled and screeched and chirped me out of my shrunken self into the dense tree canopy below and the vast sky above. Soaring Brahminy kites and shikras felt like a stirring hope, the raucous parakeets heralded a bustle outside my own mental life, and I started to emerge again.

Ihave never forgotten that lesson, and to this day, I escape into nature, wherever I can find it, to lose myself, to find myself, to recalibrate, to re-energise, and to feel free. To reconnect. Everyone can do it. It doesn’t cost anything. In most places across the country, if you are still for 10 minutes, you might catch some bird sound or the other. In India, so far, nature is everywhere.

Being, just being in nature is shown to restore attention, and can put you in a flow, beyond time, beyond weariness.

Little by little, observing nonhuman forms of life, we can sharpen our eyesight, hearing, sense of smell. Birdwatchers are known to even feel birds behind their backs. Such are the many possibilities outside the realms of our discovered lives, our rinse and repeat routines. Who knows how such skills might help us in the uncertain times ahead?

“One touch of nature makes the whole world kin,” said William Shakespeare.

Often misquoted, the bard warns us through this line spoken by Ulysses that humans are ever attracted to the new, the shining object, forgetting the gold in the old, and in that we are the same, it is our common failing, our nature. Yet, read another way, it could easily mean that it is only by immersing in nature, in the wild, that we sense our deepest interdependencies, our complex connections. In 2026, read either way, it seems like wise counsel. Let’s reconnect to magic!

First published in The Economic Times