Sahyadrica

Dunglagepu the tallest. It’s not like I discovered mountains or spirituality that I write this. It’s that I discovered that a place is 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...

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...

  Returning to the roots, the book sits along one of the many rivers it journeys with, Banjar On February 1, 2025, Our Roots Run Wild, a book of the history of the highlands of Central India, was published by The Alcove Publishers of New Delhi. Released at a small non-event at the New Delhi World Book Fair where I felt too embarrassed to talk or sign the book, it marked the day the book became available as paperback and e-book, primarily on Amazon India. This is a short three-part series on the writing journey of this book that I let consume me. In 2016, I started writing a longform essay hoping to publish it as a booklet of my experiences working in Madhya Pradesh, particularly in the region of Balaghat, Mandla, and Seoni districts. Working on the issues deemed important for wildlife conservation – particularly of large wild mammals – had put me in touch with the grassroots quite intimately. I worked not only for but also with the local communities, the Baiga folk, in particular...

We're not scaremongering This is really happening, happening --Idioteque, Kid A, Radiohead, 2002 The once-in-a-few-generations calamity of pandemics has become all too frequent. Zoonotic – species jumping – pandemics are more recurrent in the last few decades irrespective of their origin in domestic or wild animals – or labs. The generation under 35 itself has seen or been through more than three pandemics – the H1N1 flu, the swine flu, and covid-19, in addition to outbreaks of Ebola, Nipah, and avian influenza that is still considered to be a highly infectious disease. We’ve witnessed a lot in a span of a year; from revitalisation of nature to our increasing intolerance towards wildlife, from a 17% drop in atmospheric CO 2 levels and two rare cyclonic events followed one after another up the warming Arabian Sea, from protests against the recent farm law amendments to protests against mining operations in areas of rich cultural and natural heritage, from flooding in the plains t...

I. That blue ripple in the tarpaulin pulled taut in the cool breeze the first farmer pulls up his sleeves, two bamboo poles and a few jute strings hold his shop, his business, his offerings; one morning among many centuries. The tilted-goats, the hunched-dogs, the burly-bulls the dupatta-women, the dyed-men, their mouthfuls I stand in the distance, watching this timeless commotion watching dealers deal, buyers buy – those customs. The shirtless boy bringing chai on naked feet the eyeless hand touching the paper cup to lips eyes caught up with money stashed ‘neath the feet. A bajār treasury is capped by the light, that taut blue tarpaulin that dust settling upon the skin. I watch with attention at this ancient system in this timeless happening, I see one figurine exhaling tobacco clouds, ballerina of the crowds he moves to the center, that corner, then back again he heeds the serenades, the auctioneers, the marketmen his handfuls multiplying in plastic gr...

It does not take long for a murmuring river to turn into a raging cascade, yet it is no match to the prowess of the tall terraces of northern Western Ghats. The rapids are strong to make crossing the river difficult, but not enough to complete the journey to the foot of the mountain. It falls, only to rise in countless little fractions of its former self as mist, dancing to the tune of the winds orchestrated by the mountains themselves. It is only when the waters rage on, fueled by the south-west monsoons, do they spill down the amber facades of the Ghats, touching their feet as they reform their ancestral channels. Walking the leopard's path, with an inverted waterfall to the left, and other two forming Kalu river downhill The range officer pointed to a high precipice from where a river came crashing down, and he said, that’s where we’re headed. Under a shroud of torrential rains, we could glimpse at the full glory of the fall whenever the clouds dispersed. To the right of...