If you live in India, November mellows you. Bone-rattling chill has not yet set in, at least in the plains. The sun is clear; the breeze is cool. Hard edges soften; frozen cores thaw. There is a pleasant bite in the air. The sense of self that gets us through the days is contingent on the flow of seasons and as fragile. It is as sensitive to the cycles as cherry blossoms are to the cool and incipient chill.

In Shillong, in Gangktok, in the Nilgiris, in Lachen and Lachung of Sikkim, in Shimla, Manali and Dalhousie, in Srinagar, in Tawang, among others the cherry blossoms bloom. They embody the between-ness of life and death, or life and death bleeding into each other. Cherry blossoms have that liminality. You can never imagine something so lovely, like the children in Gaza could ever die but they do. You’re ambushed by their beauty and pained by their ephemerality. 

Professor Dinabandhu Sahoo’s idea of heaven is seeing cherry blossoms flower in profusion. He is the head of the department of botany at the University of Delhi. He was a former director of the Institute of Bioresources and Sustainable Development, a national Institute of Department of Biotechnology, Government of India, Imphal, Manipur. He is the man behind cherry blossom festivals being celebrated across northeast India. (The Shillong Cherry Blossom Festival was held on Nov 16-17.)

During his visits to Japan, he saw how cherry blossoms seeped into different aspects of people’s lives. “Their whole life actually revolves around cherry blossoms in Japan, and lots of people come from different parts of the world to see that cherry blossom festivals and in the U.S. also,” Sahoo says.

“I was so happy, seeing their beauty, their colour.”

That prompted him to start cherry blossom festivals in India. When he was touring Shillong, back in 2014, for a TED talk, he saw “a beautiful pink flower from my hotel window”. He thought it looked like cherry blossom, and when he checked the tree it confirmed his suspicions. In his later travels in Meghalaya and Manipur and other places of the Northeast, he found those trees at many places. Later on, everything fell in place for a festival in Meghalaya. Since then, cherry blossom festivals have expanded to other states of the northeast. Japanese delegations flew in to witness the celebrations.

Sahoo studied phenology of cherry blossoms. In Japan and the US, the cherry blossom festivals are generally held in March and April because that’s the flowering season there. But in India, cherry blossom flowers in November. “So that's the contrast we have,” Sahoo tells Hot Rock.

Sahoo tirelessly worked to bring the joy and peace he felt in seeing masses and masses of blossoms in Japan to Indians. The festival was conceived with the flower at the centre. Everything—music, dance, and food—revolves around the flower. 

India has cherry blossom, also called “sakura”, species native to the country. “So the sakura in Japan is a different species than the one we have in India,” Sahoo says.

The sakura in Japan flowers in March and April; in India it flowers in November. They last for about 15 days in November and need  temperature between 2-5C.

Japan just recorded its earliest cherry blossom bloom in 1,200 years, says a report. It has Yasuyuki Aono, a researcher at Osaka Prefecture University, saying: “Sakura blooms are very temperature sensitive. Flowering and full bloom could be earlier or later depending on the temperature alone. The temperature was low in the 1820s, but it has risen by about 3.5C to this day.”

In India, people would cut down these trees because they attract insects and caterpillars. However, Sahoo is ushering in a change. He has so far planted 60,000 cherry blossom trees, through an initiative called “Grow a tree”. He entrusts the care of the tree to local communities. Sahoo says cherry blossoms have boosted local economies as well as tourism.

On climate and cherry blossoms, Sahoo says that Japan has a cherry blossom calendar. They predict the flowering season, and then forecast it well in advance so that people can to participate in cherry blossom festivals. Japan’s meteorological agency announces the blooming forecast and from mid-March to early May, blooming starts in Shikoku and Kyushu islands and then proceeding to Tokyo and then onto Japan’s main island of Honshu.

They can do it because they have mastered these techniques over  hundreds of years, Sahoo says.

“My purpose of starting the festival here is for peace and prosperity,” Sahoo says. “Not only in northeast but the entire Himalayan region.”

Sahoo again talks of the beauty of the flowers. “I keep looking these trees, and it gives me peace. It gives me happiness. It heals.”

Sahoo says cherry blossom festivals will let people around the world know India too has its cool climate in winter, not the hellish heat always. 

Explaining the link between the flower and climate change, Sahoo says “Rise in the temperatures affects the fruiting and flowering in general for the plants.” The impact is on productivity. We also see apple productivity coming down due to warming.

Since cherry blossom grows in colder temperature, if it doesn't flower at a particular time, if the flowering is delayed, then you know it is very warm and that’s why the cherry blossom flower is not flowering, Sahoo explains.

Sharing his experiences of conducting the festivals, he says people were not aware of it at first. But in the last five ears, news spread.

“For me, the idea is to make it a people’s movement, to make it a people’s festival rather than a typical, bureaucratic government festival,” Sahoo says.

“It’s the people’s flower,” he says.

Sahoo plans to expand the festival to Kashmir, Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh. These are places where he has found cherry blossom tress. In these Himalayan states the festival could be in March or April.

The western Himalayas is different than the northeastern Himalayas. The western Himalayas and central Himalayas are snowfall areas whereas the northern belt like Meghalaya, Manipur, Mizoram, Nagaland don’t have snowfall. Their biodiversity and temperature  profiles are not similar. The northeast has low-height hills compared to the high mountains in Uttarakhand, Himachal, and Kashmir.

Sahoo is also working with students in Delhi and other places to grow flowering tree like jacaranda, gulmohar and amaltas.

“The plan is to create future festivals based on the plants and biodiversity because these three trees grow in three different seasons,” Sahoo says.

May a hundred festivals of trees bloom.