Sahyadrica

Where the mountains will hide your sorrow And the rivers guide your spirit The river that flows by the town I live in has many lives, many avatars, many names, many stories, many legends, many worlds. The town I associate with has its own legend, of great gods fighting over the love of two, spilling blood into the river, giving it the name the City of Blood. So goes the story, one of the many, as the river traverses from the high reaches of the Himalaya, gushing down the plains is a vast braided expanse, a river taking a hundred forms, no, a hundred-thousand. But it is not this river that carried me here. It was another, much smaller, much lesser known. This river I speak of is yet to speak to me, but I’ve learned that without it the air doesn’t move, the ground doesn’t breathe, the rain doesn’t fall, the elephants don’t walk. And indeed, hell hath no fury like its floods. Rivers, small or big, carry stories. They are its memories. The difference lies is how we perceive them. O...

Birds of a Fig: a pair of Great Hornbills and a friend, Yellow-footed Green Pigeon on chilubor gos. It is a spectacle of nature Come summer monsoon winter Naturalists flocking together: Birds of a feather. A tree and a tree make not a forest A bird without bough nests not A deer without shade has no rest Mere eyes cannot express the lost. And if there are no forests standing The birds songless flying The deer kinless wandering What is man but a soulless being It is the essence of nature To express what we feel see hear A naturalist without pen and paper: A bird without feather. Whenever opportunity arises, I explore nature in ways I did not earlier: by letting go of things I wish to see and seeing what others see. It takes some resolve to let go of the urge to see what one intends to see. To reach here, I am just beginning to see things as they present themselves, abstaining from treasure-hunting, the way of the hunter, to living in the moment, the...

Once young, wild, and free. Rama. After an introduction to the status of elephants in central India, focusing on the state of Chhattisgarh , I started collating available statistics to provide a summary of elephant populations, deaths due to man-made reasons, and human fatalities due to elephants, for the country. Much of this data was not actively provided by the Project Elephant, which it ideally should, but gleamed through from the Rajya Sabha Question and Answer session notes. The fact that questions on human-wildlife conflict resulting in animal and human deaths are frequently asked at India’s meeting of the council of states, shows that it is a pressing, political issue. Such information, collected through taxpayer money no less, should be available to the public without waiting for yearly sessions. The elephant in the room is a poster summarizing publicly-available information on wild elephants of India and human-wildlife interactions resulting in deaths. A high-resolution poste...