Sunderlal bahuguna biography of barack

Sundarlal Bahuguna’s first defining contribution, and perhaps his most enduring one, was to the English language.

In the 1970s, he began guiding a forest conservation movement that he called ‘chipko’, which in Hindi meant ‘to stick to’.

The movement’s early name had been angalwaltha, a culturally resonant term in the Garhwali language that meant ‘embrace’. That is what Bahuguna and his followers did—they hugged trees to prevent them from being felled by rampaging loggers in the Himalayan foothills of Uttarakhand.

By the time the world began taking notice of the peaceful agitation, the Hindi word, too, had embraced the Garhwali meaning.

“The Chipko movement has mushroomed throughout India’s forest regions since it was founded a decade ago,” reported the New York Times in 1982. “Chipko means embrace.” And from Chipko evolved the word ‘tree-huggers’—a catchy but derogatory moniker that critics often use to ‘stick it to’ conser