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Abstract
The concise poeticexpression of the poem, ‘The Striders’ by A. K. Ramanujan, persists through its imagist-minimalist form, to observe our much ignored natural habitat. The obscure figure of an insect, a water-strider, is depicted to have an existential self which is manifested by its conscious choice to be an indispensable part of nature. By applyingFélix Guattari’s idea of ‘ecosophy’ and deriving from it ‘an ecosophical reading practice’, Ramanujan’s poem reveals the crucial interdependence between human and the natural world, and presents the correlation between social, mental, and environmental ecologies at work. In this way, the crisis of a generalized passivity could be traced on the part of the masses which are insensitive to constant flux of nature and who represent increasing homogenization of our thinking minds. This paper attempts to demonstrate that the two stanza units of the text, when read ecosophically, signifying the ‘essence’ of the strider’s conduct, allow us to substantiate potential immanent singularities on the individual and collective levels.