Sahyadrica

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...

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...

The mosaic of the central Western Ghats, as viewed from Hassan, Karnataka Tea plantations, shola rainforests, and montane grasslands. That morning wasn’t any different. That gurgling stream, that timid click of the dancing frog, that flute-like song of the Indian Scimitar Babbler, that pressure-whistle of the invisible-under-the-canopy White-bellied Blue Flycatcher, and that low monotonous, shy greeting of the Malabar Trogon, underneath the dark canopy of the Ironwoods, Palaquiums, Syzygiums and Dipterocarps, the facies of the medium-altitude rainforest of the central Western Ghats, all of them together in a chorus refreshing mind-body-soul, would be punctuated by a long-drawn drone of the didgeridoo, making those of us raking the leaf-litter halt our time-specific chore for a moment. It was Day Three of the fourteen-day survey. That drone was another sound of the forest carrying another tune, primeval and raw, created by the damp, cold air of the rainforest understory reverberating ...