Sahyadrica

These are three very disorderly, disjointed, disproportional thoughts that haunted me much before this year began – since the end of the last year to be exact. That year, I rambled away after coherently trying to make sense of the world as a flower-collector saw. While time has taken us a year ahead since, space has brought us back to where we think time ends and starts anew. Come to think of it, I was out of place and time, and over the hill and out of my mind. At this junction, I revisit that time and that mindset with little sense of what it was – or is – all about. Picture One Part One: What Makes Me Inept At an interview many years ago, I was lambasted by a probably well-meaning but perhaps ultra-inquisitive interviewer when I uttered ‘natural resource’ in some human context. The gullible me scampered to defend myself, but I’ve always wondered why is it wrong to call something a resource. If an ecologist can use the term ‘resource partitioning’ relating to species interaction,...

If there is one animal I am fully uncomfortable around – or truly scared of – whichever way you infer it, it is none other than a wild bear. Having said that, I have had the liberty of lying very close to a fresh, odourless, dung of a Black Bear ( Ursus americanus ) in the temperates, always wondering if the bear was still around, or had simply trailed away on his daily trot as I was lulled to sleep by some outworldly forces. I do not know until this day if I really slept through it as I waited in the hide, or was my body innately reacting by feigning death to the presence, or the unknown absence, of the bear in the vicinity. But no bear sniffed me that day, I believe, however my imaginations opened the doorway to vivid dreams, exciting but downright scary. On the other hand, I observed that even man undergoes thanatosis, just as the little beetle you scared the hell out of, when you grabbed him off its perch. That was three years ago, and only a year before I had had the ...