Sahyadrica

When the summer is at its peak, the trees of central India burst into a green flame – it is a calm flame – soothing on the eyes, cooling to the body, kind to the soul. It is a flame of life that sparks like fire – literally and figuratively – and lingers on. Every new leaf looks peculiar. The leaves of Sal are a waxen green, of Harra a silvery velvet, of Mahua are particularly interesting – some are lush green with a down of golden hairs, some are a red of a dying flame; of mango are a dark maroon, and those of Kusum the brightest crimson – and they all, in a matter of few weeks, turn to a play of light and dark shades of green. It is still the hottest part of summer when everything is still or buzzing shyly in the shade. A lady passes through the barren field on the edge of the Sal forests one summer evening. The tigers make their hunt; the stags don a bouquet of leaves. But life seems to be in a diapause. As the season ages, especially towards the beginning of June, some ...

It is hard for a person to put the human experience in perspective. A person will describe his experiences as a human experience, so will a community, and the experiences between two people and two communities will differ immensely. And they will differ between two cultures by leaps and bounds. To put it in a perspective, the human experience is a collective wisdom of not one but many individuals, communities, and cultures, with every bit from here-and-there. If someone asked you to put the human experience into words, your account will be different than mine, than more-or-less anyone’s – it will be heavily biased on a side you identify yourself with, whether that side is religious, spiritual, natural or philosophical. To get a fair view of the human experience, the perceiver needs to be a non-human. No intelligence has taken birth – or has been found – that can put human experience in a perspective. Yet some can, and we can more-or-less interpret it from them. A dog itself would...