Sahyadrica

This article was submitted to the M Krishnan Memorial Nature Writing Award 2017, organised by Madras Naturalists’ Society every year, and won a special mention. It is largely inspired by the writings of M Krishnan (1912-1996) who was an exceptional naturalist and a nature writer who could, with a spell of his words, cast a fresh perspective on what many of us perceive as the most mundane acts of nature, toppling over our outlook and revealing something of a miracle that nature is. I am borrowing an excerpt from a Wikipedia entry under M Krishnan which has a lot to do with this article. In 1967 he asked several university graduates to name two red-flowered trees or an exclusively Indian animal. Nobody passed his test and he wrote: “ is there something radically wrong with the education and culture of our young men and women that they should not know the answers to these reasonable questions, or is it that I have become a monomaniac and am therefore unable to perceive how unf...

A Stink Bug landed on my head and got entangled in my hair. Thinking that it was just a wayward fly, I brushed it off instantly – and out spurted a spray of the stingiest chemical that became stuck to my head and the hand I used to brush it off! Just above me, a murmuration of Chestnut-tailed Starlings fed merrily on the brilliant blossoms of a Palash ( Butea monosperma ) tree, now in its full splendor. I had been sitting here for the past hour observing birds that came to feed on it. It was my alternative to a nice afternoon siesta on the quietest time of the week – Sunday – when all the human voices retract to the recesses of civilization. To call it quiet in the real sense would be unfair – only someone oblivious to the sounds of the birds will interpret it so. It was my sixth day of sitting under this tree. I had decided to spend an hour every day, divided into morning and late afternoon hours, sitting under this tree and pretending to be a part of it. Initially, although the...