Sahyadrica

Dunglagepu the tallest. It’s not like I discovered mountains or spirituality that I write this. It’s that I discovered that places are to be greeted as an individual. I met one on a short trip to the base of the higher Himalaya where the night-time cold had just about dropped to zero. The days were warm, hot even on a climb of a few hundred meters, and mornings and evenings cold. On a clear day, a few cottony clouds clung to the snowless mountains – the winter snow had not begun – the sunshine nourishing my skin. Meeting a place by happenstance is increasingly rare in this world. A place which simply accepts you, talks to you, and leaves a lasting impression that quite, even if subtly, changes you – how I have yearned to meet if not search for one. Writing about meeting one is tough. It is always overwhelming to describe somebody, a place is perhaps the most complex persona to describe, be it a garden, a grove, or a landscape. An autumn in the mountains. Some places ought to be as th...

Harvester Ants, Trichomyrmex  sp., rush in and out of their underground nest carrying grass seeds and husks. If there’s a bustle in your hedgerow, don’t be alarmed now It’s just a spring clean for the May Queen Part I: Ants It is no exaggeration when one says that ants are the ultimate animals shaping the world. But no one says it openly or publicly. The very few who write are read by the fewer few who really read only about ants and all things ants do. And ants do everything a man or an elephant does. So, between making a statement calling ants ultimate and having no one to attest to, I’m left only with my fascination for ants to try to back up the bold claim. Anyone who likes any particular organism calls it the ultimate – of course the redwoods are ultimate, the tiger is ultimate, the elephant – ultimate, the woodpecker, the king cobra, so on. Ants are not merely ultimate in that sense. They’re not big or colourful or, in vertebratalist sense, individualistic and intelligent...

  Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve, 2018. Part I In the last few years, we have celebrated the success of doubling tiger population, leopard population, rhino population, and vulture population nationally as well as regionally. This success is hard-earned. In case of the rhino and vulture populations, both saw significant declines due to man – poaching and habitat loss in case of the rhino, and the NSAID-drug in case of the vultures. The longest recovery has been spearheaded for the tiger than any other species in India – and it has seen its successes, if not without localized setbacks where populations declined or were locally extirpated. Regionally, too, the successes have been worth celebrating, the hard-ground barasingha found in Madhya Pradesh has not only increased in numbers to levels now considered safer than they were a decade ago, but also expanded through reintroductions to historically-occupied sites. There are report after reports celebrating a revival of wildlife in Indi...

With my Northeastern buddy the Horay-bellied Himalayan Squirrel relishing Arunachali oranges. On July 7, 2013, a week after moving to Kanha, I journaled my observation on nature and human-nature interactions in Central India. My first ever memory is of an effervescent girl gently smacking a cow about to feed on someone’s backyard garden. With her brother in one arm, dressed in old school uniform, the barefooted girl led a line of cattle into the forest for grazing. This memory is as fresh as if it occurred only yesterday. She compelled me to look at myself, insecure and closed to the world – her world – shoed, full-sleeved, afraid of ants and mosquitoes, whatnot. That year, malaria, a millennia-old scourge of Central India, especially the hill regions, was particularly bad. Amidst this, from my cocoon, I romanticized the forest village life to my unadjusted unaccustomed infant eyes, and I imprinted on her, whom I ultimately followed, like cattle in a line, to see without rose-tinted gl...

  A Backhoe Loader (a capitalist arm) feeding a Cattle Egret? As this JCB reclaimed a coastal floodplain for development, the egret waited to snack on disturbed insects. It is cliché when we say the only constant in the world is change. It is a paradoxical fact, always at the back of our minds when talking about what was, what is, and what will be. That history influences the present is as much a part of this phrase as the present influencing the future. When we talk about environment preservation, biodiversity conservation, and wildlife protection – all a part of the broader environmentalism – we often look back to find reasons for the present and make predictions for the future. Even a walk in the wilderness makes us wonder what it was like in the past but also what it would be in the future. Environmentalism is as much a science as it is a movement. Some mark the dawn in the west, with the Silent Spring published in 1962. In India, one of the most well-known grassroots movemen...