India, March 23 -- I was struck by this sentence in your book: "We don't realize how much we miss being close to nature until we are thrown into its midst". What does missing this closeness do to a person, physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually?

When I was five or six, my grandfather told me how we could see the beach from our house in Bombay (now Mumbai). In no time, all that land was reclaimed till there were only rows of streets and other houses between us and the sea. That has stayed with me today after nearly five decades. Even though that house does not exist anymore, I keep imagining how it would be to watch the sea from the window of that house.

Most of us who live in cities, work with our heads down, wrapped in concr...