Acclimatize

Picture this: Years after you have graduated, you are back in a college where you are undergoing a 3.5-month residential training programme. As you open the window of your dorm room, you see a white-cheeked barbet protecting its young ones. As you step out in the morning, you hear a chorus of birds calling out to one another.

If you want, you can walk barefoot and feel the soil under your feet. If you want, you can play with dried leaves scattered on the ground. If you want, you can simply pause and breathe in clean air.

A college like this is not just an imagination - it exists. Welcome to the Bhoomi College campus, in Bangalore. 

I have been walking barefoot, crushing dry leaves under my feet, taking slow strolls through an organic farm where spiders and ants go about their quiet work, spotting two greater coucals walking past, tracing snake trails on soft sand, listening to whiskered bulbuls singing in the mornings and evenings, and watching purple sunbirds sip nectar from flowering trees.

For a place as incredible as Bhoomi, I was, at first, blind to its beauty. It took time for me to adjust—to truly arrive. Living in Delhi, I had grown used to constant sensory overload: traffic noise, the mingling scents of street food on busy roads, and the endless stream of information from scrolling through YouTube. Stepping into Bhoomi felt like stepping into another world. Life here moves to the rhythm of nature.

You wake up at 6 and begin your day immersed in the outdoors, taking slow walks and noticing the small details of the natural world—like a caterpillar wandering on a rock far from a tree. The next day, it becomes a pupa. And then, you find yourself returning each day, quietly waiting for the butterfly to emerge and unfurl its wings.

By 8 AM, you are served a simple vegetarian meal inspired by South Indian cuisine. You may use a spoon, or eat with your hands. Afterwards, you wash your own plate—not with soap and a scrub, but with coconut husk, ash, and a natural bio-cleanser. The grey water is then filtered and returned to nourish the adjacent organic farm.

Classes take place in a large hall called Ananda, where you sit on the floor alongside people of different ages, languages, and cultural backgrounds, exchanging ideas about education and nature. By afternoon, conversations spill outdoors—to stone tables under trees, where learning continues over shared meals.

In the evenings, you find yourself spending time with trees. A large banyan, with its low-hanging branches, invites you to climb, to rest, to simply be. You can lie back on a branch and watch the sky slowly turn into sunset.

It took me time to acclimatize to this rhythm of life at Bhoomi. But when I did, my days began to fill—with the calls of bulbuls and barbets, flashes of sunbirds, the faint scent of soil, cool breezes, and the quiet joy of walking barefoot on the earth.

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Shared by Mansi Lodhi, Teach for Nature Fellow, Delhi