The people fighting to save Aarey don’t matter to a majority of us. We don’t know their names or think of them on days when they aren’t mentioned in newspapers or on television. When they are arrested for frivolous reasons, we don’t bat our eyelids. We treat them as a distraction, a small part of the daily news cycle, undermining the massive role they play in making sure we have access to something beautiful and bigger than all of us.

Aarey forest occupies around 600 acres, at least according to Wikipedia which presumably doesn’t track the illegal activity of Bombay’s real estate barons. It is home to many tribes, a few hundred species of flora and fauna, and endangered animals that one simply doesn’t encounter in most of the world’s cities. That it is right in our backyard is something that ought to be celebrated but, given the apathy we are long accustomed to, this wondrous piece of Bombay is dismissed with callousness that borders on the criminal. We don’t care about whether it exists or not, because we believe it doesn’t affect us.