Sahyadrica

There are countless ways of expressing the bond we share with the world around us. Not only visual, but also sensual – even silence is a medium of expression. I’ve been using words and photographs as a way to express what I see and feel for quite some time now, but there are countless – metaphorically – instances when I was witnessing a miracle of nature when the silence engulfed me and I was at loss for words, and those moments, although I cherish them for what they were, will never translate into something that I could write, or photograph. I spent the last week by the beach trying to make sense of the world through the medium of numbers and figures – I was a part of a PRiMER course of Gubbi Labs here to learn statistics, mapping, scientific reasoning, and expressing – and at the end of the day I buried my feet in the sand watching the sun set over the horizon and dolphins leaping from the waves. Words swelled into my head like a hightide every time I walked on the beach, but ...

There’s never been a time in history when a wild vertebrate did not kill a man or man did not kill a wild vertebrate. Not once for the last 15 million years since early humanoids roamed the planet. In fact, man killed more wild vertebrates than they killed us, and that is perhaps evident in us becoming the most successful species in spite of lacking claws and fangs. Man has always been against the wild, always the rebel, always the one to straighten things out, to mend and to tame. If it did not suit him, he destroyed it, and if he liked it, he finished it off. And then we drifted off, slowly, from all things wild. Today, we believe that money plants ( Epipremnum aureum ) bring us wealth, but we don’t know that that inconspicuous little fly, lovingly called a tiger fly ( Coenosia sp.), is sitting on its leaf to prey upon the other tiny insects that feed on this plant, and we bug-spray the plant, killing everything with it. That’s wildlife right there. We just wiped it out of exi...