Good Djinns

City of Djinns - William Dalrymple

I treasure an old copy of William Dalrymple's "City of Djinns" that I have in my possession. It belonged to my mother. A voracious reader and history teacher, she chose to mark her copy of that wonderful love letter to Delhi with a bindi on the cover, the red dot often worn by Indian women symbolizing the third eye, open only for those with great wisdom and internal energy. In times when I miss her energy, departed from my universe for more than 4 years now, I draw comfort from glancing through a random page within the book. Whether it opens out to the Nigambodh Ghat or New Delhi sections of the book is immaterial. To me and to anyone else who has ever understood how history weaves, both of those and all the Delhis in between will remain Delhi.

Maa was a city-raised Calcutta girl with a soft spot for all fellow creatures, human and non-human. Rescuing kite-string embroiled crows, insisting on non-lethal mouse traps, stern reprimands to our miniature Dachshund (Putputti) when she would fetch moles from our garden in Kolkata - those were her kind of interactions with Nature. She was vehemently opposed to the concept of Nature that is red in tooth and claw, often scolding me for spending too much time watching the 'violence' of a lion hunt on a Discovery Channel documentary and reminding me that 'exposure' to such images can only desensitize the mind. I can only imagine how strongly she would have reacted to that first sweeping order of the Supreme Court on the mass removal of street dogs from Delhi and its use of cowboy language such as "...when it's time to shoot, shoot".

As for me, I am one of them. The kind that MUST pet and talk gibberish to every friendly dog everywhere, street or otherwise and peek into "Beware of Dog" signed houses just to glance at the pre-announced canine resident. I identify with dogs - identify with their diverse personalities, their toxic optimism for life and their relentlessly dumb sniffy curiosity. There is hardly a time after chicken at a roadside eatery that I won't carry the bones in my pajama pocket in hopes of meeting a canine wanderer and I know each house in my neighbourhood only by the name of the dog that lives there, not the family name. I agree with stand-up comedian Ricky Gervais when he says "I do not believe in God but I believe in dog." A lot like my Dad was, I am obsessed with dogs including my two adoptees at home. And a lot like Baba, my love for dogs is very different from how my Maa loved dogs.

This is because I understand why some people are terrified of dogs and can partially understand that fear too. As someone not fond of dogs once said, to him dogs looked like "a fireburst of emotions armed with lots of teeth". The ominous growl that my own dog lets loose when he thinks I am moving his filled food plate is proof enough that there is enough of the wolf in there amidst the buffoonery and cuteness. On morning walks with my dogs, I watch their alliances and rivalries with other dogs wax and wane, a canine Game of Thrones if you will. I am well aware of their irrational dislikes (the clip-clop of horses, society's exploited rag-pickers and the rumble of distant autorickshaws amongst others). As much as it makes my blood boil, the timid queries of "Kaatega toh nahin? (He won't bite, right?" when my happy mutts are just walking down the road (leashed!) probably have its roots in some long-ago acquired trauma or a brainwashed worldview that all dogs can do and will do is bite you without rhyme or reason.

My aim is NOT to make a case for those irresponsible citizens who dump buckets of waste food in neighbourhoods outside their own fostering gangs of semi-wild dogs while they themselves disappear into gated colonies having earned their punya (good karma). They are wrong. My aim is NOT to make light of the horrors that delivery boys, early morning service providers, children of street-dwellers and senior citizens have faced due to (a) bad dog ownership or (b) aggressive dog packs. Such incidents have no place in civil society and every effective step needed to be taken must be. As someone with long personal experience of dealing with the canine universe and a veteran of two dog bites myself, the only deposition I am making is that certain draconian measures to address the 'dog problem' seem to me more about picking soft targets and defenceless scapegoats (scapedogs?) as opposed to handling the larger societal issues that the 'dog problem' is bringing to the fore.

For starters, the burgeoning street dog population is a direct result of notoriously corrupt Animal Birth Control (ABC) programme non-implementation and extreme mismanagement of garbage by our municipalities, both of which can go hand-in-hand to dramatically reduce the number of dogs on our streets. Clean cities and a natural reduction in canine populations - win-win couldn't have a better example. Add to that the simple fact that it would be the friendlier dogs which are likely to be caught up in any sweeping catch and imprison forever judgement implementation (now thankfully overruled). The wilder dogs on the other hand would turn ever more aggressive and reticent compounding the issue. The logistical nightmare or practical feasibility of housing and sustaining the results of a "Catch 'em all" drive I am not even getting into.

Then there is the slightly thornier issue of "Community dogs" where I have had disagreements with some fellow pet-dog owners. Are community dogs even a thing, they ask? Aren't all dogs supposed to be attached to a human and/or human family who take FULL responsibility? If Singapore can get rid of its street dogs, shouldn't we aim to too? We are not Singapore, I tell them. In certain matters, I hope we will never be. I deeply regret that they grew up without the animal joy of knowing a 'community dog' in their own neighbourhoods. In our country lined with difficult days and half-born dreams, those happy faces, those familiar wags waiting for you OUTSIDE your home - free spirits that like you but do not bind you, bring the neighbourhood together like only dogs can. Yes, those dogs do ride on harsh fate but in the right neighbourhood, there is always shelter from rain and in return, for many unable to afford the privilege of keeping a dog a canine balm for pain.

They disturb your beauty sleep, you say, barking at random hours at things unseen? Tens of thousands of years together but beyond their basic motivations, we only know their universe as we would know a djinn's. For all we know, they may be barking at fellow djinns, spirits of uncertain provenance and intentions from a time before we had the security of four walls and concrete jungles. An age-old partnership based on trust, space and mutual understanding that you can now happily jettison but they cannot. 

Not all of the dogs came into the cave next to the crackling fire of your ancestors as they were torn between the call of the wild and the urge of gratitude to the leftover feeders snoring inside. In Delhi, they now have acquired names like Sheru, Laddoo, Rani and Tommy but to them we all owe them a debt going back to a time when history was not yet history or even prehistory, we the Yudhishtirs, Tomars, Tughlaqs, and Supreme Court judges of this mega-metropolis. As the blood moon rises tonight in Delhi and the eclipse takes over, think of all the complaints we make these days of having 'lost connection with nature'. Can we afford to be so relentless in our march to so-called progress that we sweep away even this most basic of bindings to where we began? Can we concretize our hearts against these very good djinns?

Good Djinns

[https://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2025/09/good-djinns.html]

Gentle

In typical Times of India fashion, this is an attempt to get away with the fluff. At a time when a 20% drop in the elephant population of India is likely to be reported soon, their focus is on Hollywood adaptations of elephants. We all know that Los Angeles, California is the original habitat of the Asian elephant and any stories emanating from there are likely to be the most authentic (NOT).

12-Aug-2024, World Elephant Day, ToI

Without taking away the importance of a Colonel Haathi or a Dumbo, particularly for an urban audience used to such 'cutification', the occasion presented the perfect opportunity to talk about the living breathing animals which are being choked for space by human activities and transportation structures. Friendly and wise they are but in the real world, any challenge to their sense of security and privacy leads to tragic consequences for both animals and humans when the elephants show their not-so-gentle side. 

Too much darkness for the Delhi Times, you say? I counter to say that there is a reason why Hollywood has made so many elephant characters despite being continents away from any actual wild elephant. These creatures are no less celebrities than the starlets that they choose to pack their Page 3 section with. The individuals whims, fancies and tantrums of elephants are packed with anecdotes much more interesting than the gym-look of a has-been. Where the juicy gossip and 'personal challenges' of tinsel town have such a strong viewership, a column or two on the surprisingly human like attributes of our planet sharers can go a long way in humanizing them the right way - flawed but well within their rights to be so.

[https://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2024/11/gentle.html]

Starstruck: Notes from the Last Frontier

Everyone was smiling. And I mean everyone. The trainers, the audience and the dogs. This wasn’t a performance. This was happiness on loop. At the dog kennels of Denali National Park lived government employees universally loved. With their grey and blue eyes, they jumped up and down in excitement to be chosen for the demonstration, to be yoked to the sled and make their way forward. For many in the audience, this was the whole reason why they were here in Alaska. This reads like hyperbole but when you are euphoric, all things do seem to be beyond reproach. The Park Rangers told their wards’ stories, of stocking up remote guard cabins and checking on winter visitors accompanied by a whole lot of teeth and fur. Of their impeccable intelligence and vastly varying personalities and of how only how they could do what was needed. Pulling puppies were tied alongside their mothers just to run along, not there for the load but there for the fun. The level of fandom was such that it didn’t even matter that it was summer and in the absence of snow, a sandy circuit was established for that purpose. Sled dogs did their thing and us groupies/stans/superfans let our cheers ring.

[http://bit.ly/15-alaska]

[Part of the Series: Notes from the Last Frontier]

Killer. Cute.

Life's not easy and that is not changing anytime soon. Under-equipped, overwhelmed, ill-prepared - we lurch from one incident to another in the fictitious hope that one of these days, things will settle down.

Alternatively, we have a mouse. The southern grasshopper mouse to be precise. Operational in the Sonoran Desert of North America, where daytime temperatures hover around 48 degree centigrade, this furry evolutionary experiment seems, at first, a bit like a post-lunch doodle by its creators, with teeth designed to chew grains and shaped like a substitute Teletubby.

As this National Geographic video short reveals, appearances deceive and this little creature waggles its tiny fist at anyone who dare classify it as cute. It means business and it does business, a fully operational carnivore as many a fatally venomous Arizona bark scorpions may have found to their surprise.

So the next time life seems like a trackless wasteland disproportionately at odds with the resources and talent available, remember that somewhere out there, in a terribly dry desert of North America, a grain eating fluffy ping-pong ball snacks on scorpions and howls at the moon.

[https://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2019/06/killer-cute.html]

Quiver

“Is anyone up?”, I query despite knowing full well the answer would be. There is WhatsApp silence and the doors of the other rooms in the guesthouse stay locked. I am relieved. Now, no one can denounce me, yet again, for wandering off on my own ‘without even asking’. A WhatsApp group message may not sound like an ideal way to get folks up and about but knowing my company well enough - years of 12-hour days cooped up together in office cubicles help you do that - I am sure that if they are not responding to my message, they are offline in the way only sleep can cause them to be.

As it happens, we are quite far away from our air-conditioned 9-to-9 jails in Calcutta. While they may want to enjoy their vacation by sleeping in, I have other plans. It’s not like that I frequently get a chance to observe the grey of a new day spread over the compound of a forest bungalow and hear the murmur of the Kameng river in the distance. It’s early May and this is still in the plains but hints of the hills beyond ride in on the breeze. I shiver just a little as I squeeze through the half-chained gate and set out for the riverbank.

This walk to the river is already 10 hours too late. Our group of seven had just stepped out for a night walk yesterday when the gatekeeper at the guesthouse played spoilsport, calling out from behind us to return – elephants were active in the area, he said. Yeah right, we thought. At the border of Assam and Arunachal, in the town of Bhalukpong where this PWD guesthouse was located, we had crossed a crush of humanity in its commercial area, only a few hundred metres before the guesthouse. The only elephants here, we assumed, were the ones that government staff made up to keep footloose city tourists indoors. Grudgingly, we had come back inside the compound and immersed ourselves in the quiet pleasures of a quiet evening in.

But that was yesterday… today is a new day. A couple of leaps take me off the concrete certainty of the PWD babu’s holiday home. The sun still appears to be a little indecisive about getting out of bed as I wind a couple of loops down to the level of the very first channel. Boulder size pebbles, smoothened by millions of years of action, help me hop, skip and jump over the consistent but low levels of water there. Here the first bits of riverine grasslands begin, with scrub and grass closing in on the sandy walking path with occasional tweets of unnamed, unseen birds floating through the soundscape. I feel terribly happy and could sing for joy but for my utter lack of skill in that department.

Basking in this mental sunshine, as its real counterpart slowly starts highlighting the silhouettes of distant hills, I come across another shallow channel of water. It is a sort of younger brother to the one I have crossed a minute ago and in my euphoric state, I stage to Carl Lewis across it. It is then that I spot something not insignificant plopped at the geometric centre of the path beyond.

Speculation is a tremendous waste of time but I like to imagine that the Asian elephant was named Elephas maximus as a bit of inside joke. Not that the animal’s size is insignificant, quite the opposite in fact, but what could have also been the origin of its name is what I see on the trail ahead - the unmistakable gooey bowling balls pinned with bits of turf that scream maximus! Nothing else can manufacture that amount of poop.

By its fresh moist gleam, it is easy to tell that being called off our night walk yesterday was one of the kinder interventions of destiny. It seems that there are indeed elephants here and only a few hours ago, one of them has ambled along the same route I am headed down, onward to the banks of the Kameng.

The scrub around me is now alive with possibilities. Emotions of decidedly opposite natures duke it out within me – the thrill of knowing that wild elephants ignore the ruckus of nearby Bhalukpong town to come here for a quick slurp of water and fearful visions of those very same elephants tip-toeing (as wildlife books describe their elephantine style of walking to be) into my present path. For once, curiosity trumps panic as I can now clearly hear the rush of the main body of water of the Kameng ahead of me. I proceed ahead but with more than a modicum of caution.

The sun reaches the Kameng at the same time as I. In the golden reflection of its clearly long jump proof expanse, it is evident that the elephant/elephants have long retreated into the night whose darkness affords them the cover they need to make forays as “intruders” into areas which were for long theirs. Being the species responsible for why elephants are no longer welcome to wander their own homes, I take off my mud caked footwear to sit and ponder - on a suitable rock, dangling my feet into the rippling river.

Soon I realize that I am not alone. Squinting into the sun and following the curve of the river eastwards, I find a silhouette making its meandering way towards me - fellow homo sapiens like me but of the child variant. As it comes closer, it resolves into a boy, all of 10. He appears to stepping in and out of the edge of the water with a sieve in his hand, as if panning the water for gold.

I go closer to examine what he is up to. It’s silver actually. Using balls of dough as bait, he is scooping up tiny fish from the river which he tosses into a water filled dalda container.

“What are you doing?”

“Can’t you see… catching fish”, is the no-nonsense reply complemented by a severe frown.

I want to let him be, this serious boy with serious responsibilities. Yet something makes me inadvertently ask another question - even more obvious and quite non-sequitur - which I regret even as it rolls off my tongue.

“That huge pile of tatti… near the naala before the river… whose is it?”

I brace myself for yet another withering reply from his severe tongue, but it never comes. Instead I see his eyes light up, his mask of duty fall off and a smile restore the 10 year old into him. With a quiver that seems to shake up his entire being and radiate through his voice with delight, he says “Haathi!”

[https://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2019/05/quiver.html]

Quiet Please

08-June-2015, Dammannakatte, Nagarhole National Park

The first evening safari had begun auspiciously enough.

The narcissist

A purple rumped sunbird had decided to check out its rival hiding inside the rear-view mirror of our safari canter and we were all enthralled. The green head, yellow body and purple rump of this outrageously coloured bird & its antics brought a smile to everyone's faces and a hope of even better things to come. The canter hadn't even started its engine yet.

In a few minutes, it did and just as it was about to roll out of the booking office area, three gentlemen, one of them with a professional TV camera came running up to the bus. The guide opened the bus door to let them in and they occupied the front most seats which were kept empty so far.

As soon as we started towards the Park entrance, the guide turned around to say that maintaining silence helped in better spotting of the animals and in keeping them undisturbed. One of the 3 gentlemen who had boarded last, turned around and repeated to everyone "Quiet please!"

As the gate lifted to let the vehicle in, this aforementioned gentleman Mr. Quiet-Please immediately set about ignoring his own instructions. With a vengeance. As it happened to be, Mr. Quiet-Please was the producer of a Malayali TV news show and was committed to shooting video of their trip into the National Park… with a running commentary!

Could tolerate Mr. Quiet-Please only briefly

The guide tried, I tried, a visibly irritated co-passenger tried but none of us could do anything to make this 'dedicated' team trying to get their ‘takes' to keep the peace. The forest, freshly revived from the first rains, was green and beautiful, but was particularly grumpy about revealing itself. Aside from a fleeing Malabar giant squirrel and really distant (luckily for the animals) elephants bathing in the Kabini river, we spotted absolutely nothing in the entire safari.

Mr. Quiet-Please was now, after all being central to all the problems, making protesting noises about how he felt cheated out of the money that he had paid for the safari.

“There is nothing in this forest!”, he said, as he and his team disembarked at the booking office.

The follow-up safari, the second of the evening had some seats empty so I had already booked myself into the next. The same drill again as the guide told all passengers to maintain silence.

The big difference on this trip? The passengers actually obeyed.

And what a difference it made! Even entering the forest was an adventure when human voices were silenced. The buzz of the insects, the calls of the birds, the drip drop of raindrops – all audio enhancements which we had missed on the preceding safari. The jungle felt so much more mysterious, almost holy, and the atmosphere thick with anticipation.

There it was! The reason I had wanted to come to the banks of the Kabini in the first place. In full view of our safari canter, the master of the night… a massive male leopard. He stalked by in front of the vehicle.

Rewards Program

Apart from an initial involuntary squeal of surprise from the back of the canter, our entire crew of watchers remained particularly silent. As a reward, the leopard decided to give us even more of a memorable experience. He circled our canter thrice within 20 feet or so and then clambered up & down neighbouring trees making the leopard’s typical sawing call.

We humans held our silence, only the sound of our thrilled breathing was to be heard. It got to the point that we had to let the leopard be and move on. For him, we didn’t seem to exist and we wanted to keep it that way.

The silent attitude was to pay further dividends. Further ahead, we arrived within seconds of a pack of dhole having hunted a chital down and were privy to a hurried feeding by them. One by one, each of the senior dogs took turns to keep an out for other predators in the area while the others fed. With a group of like-minded and rule abiding people, the jungle was indeed a gracious host.

Fresh action for the noiseless

It’s sad when due to the behaviour of a handful of boorish people, a wilderness as splendid as Nagarhole gets a thumbs down from Mr. I-visited-a-jungle-one-time-and-I-was-bored. Sure, not every safari is guaranteed spectacular animal sightings but that’s the way of the jungle and the charm of the jungle.

But from my back to back safari experiences of the same place, I can surely vouch for the value of silence. There is everything in this forest but for that you really need to be quiet please.

Good things come to those who wait...

... in relative silence

[http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.in/2017/11/quiet-please.html]

DD Prakriti : The right kind of Swadeshi

Nain Singh Rawat as Doodled today

At long last, the front page of a newspaper, for those of us who still read it in hard copy, carried some positive news. The sporadic sport victories do qualify as good news too but they don't count as policy decisions or announcements which would have a real impact on our immediate world.

Today's Indian Express carried news of an upcoming Doordarshan (DD) channel dedicated to the intricate and magnificent natural world. The Prakriti channel, Hindi for nature/environment, would focus on India specific nature documentaries and Indian content creators for the same. 

Yes, it may seem hard to imagine that a stodgy government department or panel will come up with something interesting but someone up there has made an interesting decision all the same. In the national parks that I have visited, I have been astonished by the sheer hard work and capability of individuals, who are not toasted or celebrated by the masses, but are doing extraordinary work alright in preserving what we have and making casual interlopers like me care about their mission too. 

Having personally seen what the brilliance of such men and women can accomplish, encumbered by red tape and realities though they may be, I am keeping my fingers crossed and hoping for great things from DD Prakriti.

Now this long wait for a local channel like this is something that had puzzled me. We did not lack in natural wealth, fast receding though it may currently be. We did not lack in wonderfully talented nature writers, researchers and local characters either. So why would only the BBC, National Geographic and Discovery make stories about our wilds and not anyone local?

It's not that I don't love the quality work that the foreign content producers have done. In fact, I have been raised on a steady diet of their wonderful programming about the forests of India and those of the rest of the world. It's just that for once I had hoped to hear the Himalayas addressed as the local Hee-ma-layas, instead of the clipped British Him-a-la-yas in every darn documentary.

Wandering about zoos in North America where I made it a point to visit the local zoo of every major city that I visited, I was amazed that most of the animals that interested me were found in or around my own country half a world away. Zoos, admittedly, are not the best place for any wild animal but the irony of seeing animals who were almost my neighbours being protected and discussed by countries thousands of miles away was not lost on me.

Sure, Indians are for the most part a practical sort of people to whom bumbling through jungles to study nature's menagerie seems like a colossal waste of time and a lot of the scientifically relevant information of our own natural wealth comes from books and studies by them so-called 'foreigners'. A lot of work still needs to be done to make the majority of us actually care for and understand the natural world but it's not like we didn't know anything at all. 

We knew better than to go about destroying jungles just for curiosity's sake or to try and control nature. For a country as populated and resource-hungry as India, it is a monumental achievement and a testament to our culture of tolerance in every sphere of life that we have co-existed with our natural surroundings even to this extent. Human beings do not have a very good reputation for putting up with competition from other species, and though with every passing day that relationship is strained and pushed further to the brink, we have managed a lot better than the developed world.

As spectacular and well preserved as the pockets of wild landscapes of the US are, in my travels through them, it was hard not to note that the systematic elimination of natural residents like pumas, grizzlies and wolves from domains once roamed by them, still beautiful but devoid of their animal soul. What happened to the native humans who had a relatively sustainable co-existence with their natural world is a tragic tale I won't even touch.

Development is the theme song for India of today but thanks to the efforts of foreign channels like Discovery, National Geographic and BBC, it would be fair to say that wildlife does have a fair hold on the mental landscape of a number of Indians. Developing local versions of their famed programming is a nativist initiative alright but one of the right variety and one that we are in dire need of. 

Having a local person well versed in the charms of nature explain to a larger, mostly non-urban audience of what exactly is so charming, would connect in a manner which was not possible before to inspire a lot of positivity and possibilities.

In what seems to be a completely unrelated but relevant co-incidence, the Google Doodle today celebrates the 187th birth anniversary of Nain Singh Rawat, whose name I must confess I had never heard of. What's most interesting about him is that he was the first to exactly pinpoint Lhasa on a map all those years ago in what was then the semi-mythical kingdom of Tibet.

There's no denying that Indians had set off on many a adventure before throughout our long history - for example when they sailed off to conquer vast swathes of distant lands in south east Asia or as missionaries walked to exotic lands to spread the wise words of the Buddha. But in my own brain-washed mind, the word explorer always conjures up images of a Westerner in a khaki suit so it is wonderful to learn of a native role model, a Swadeshi explorer for all practical purposes.

Nain Singh Rawat fits the more cliched image of a seeker in what was still the golden age of exploration (or exploitation, also a perfectly valid description), map and compass in hand, linking the modern world to an ancient one, forever changing both and launching a million more adventure stories. His example becomes all the more relevant when we aspire to capture in a modern and scientific way, what is truly Indian heritage, much older and much more 'native' than any human culture could ever hope to be.

[http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.in/2017/10/dd-prakriti-right-kind-of-swadeshi.html]

The Tinder Life: Rohit Sharma v/s Black Bears

It was a conversation that I could not believe I was having.

Dileep and Ishwar, at most in their early 20s, had been until then hardy mountain youth without whose help I would not have made it to this enchanted nook of the forest.

A merry channel of water coming down from the snows of Rakhundi Top met up with the thunderous Tirthan River here. A little wooden bridge crossed the glacial channel coming from Rakhundi and led to our little graffiti spattered hut. Chaloccha, as this point was called, was in the depths of the forest visited by very few humans.

Even so, amongst those very few humans, an insatiable urge existed to leave their names scrawled on the walls for everyone who came after them. To acknowledge the bitter truth that Raja Hindustani was here before them.

Sorry but Raja Hindustani beat you to it

As the rains came down in the afternoon, stuck in our hut, the conversation between the 4 of us turned to… just about anything as any good adda should be. Basant, Dileep and Ishwar – guide, cook and porter respectively – had disappeared on me soon after getting here, emerging from the forests with green & narrow bamboo shoots a little while later. What’s the deal, I asked?

In answer, a fire was brought to life with the assistance of Basant’s gleaming axe, a long dead deodar tree and eager to incite sholi (the local word for tinder). In it were roasted the green bamboo shoots to golden shade of brown, which were then bent in all manners possible and rubbed vigorously with a cloth. One end of the sticks was trimmed just so that they were blunt cones. Voila! We had our walking sticks to be used for our steep uphill climb to Nara Thach the next morning.

Across the Tirthan from where we stood were the dense forests of the Khorli Poyi mountain which housed many a beauty and many a terror. It was prime habitat for one of the rarest and most beautiful birds in the world, the Western Tragopan but also not prime choice for local guides, when it came to selecting a forest route. You see, the forests were particularly dense on this part of the mountain and as it happened, they were also particularly popular with large proud animals known as Himalayan black bears.

Now black bears are omnivores with the majority of their diet being vegetarian so they don’t actively hunt for meat. They also actively avoid any sort of interaction with humans. But a surprised bear or God forbid a mother bear protecting her cubs can cause severe & fatal damage to the human unfortunate enough to surprise it. To emphasise his point, Dileep proceeded then to do an enactment of how a bear relentlessly claws at you standing on its two feet. It was funny when a human acted it out but I am pretty sure it would not be half as fun when an angry 200 kilo animal did the same with its 5-inch claws.

The Western tragopan - Pic: http://www.greathimalayannationalpark.org

Life in the mountains was tough, said Dileep. He told me about the time he had to carry a person on his back for about 20 kilometres up and down these steep and slippery paths. Halfway through a forest trek, one of his fellow villagers had fallen ill and he had to be taken to the nearest hospital.

I struggled to come up with something relatable in my life and failed to. Given the urban Bengali’s fascination with all manner of real and fake illnesses, back home I had about 4 doctors to choose from within 300 metres of my first sneeze. Everything about this place seemed so different.

Then Dileep asked me where I was from.

“Kolkata” I said. “Oh, Kolkata!” he laughed “It was amazing how you guys dismissed Bangalore for 49 this season. What a lame batting performance, especially from the big 3 of the Royal Challengers!”

I did a double take. Then a triple take. And a quadruple take, almost tumbling over into the Tirthan itself. Here we were in the middle of a National Park whose gates took 10 kilometres of hiking to get to, with no motorable roads and no cell phone signal around for at least another 20 kilometres all around. Yet out of nowhere, in the middle of pristine nature and most definitely a leopard or two in the general area popped up the Indian Premier League (IPL).

Old oaks, old stories

The IPL, that much advertised, much maligned and much moneyed annual domestic cricket T20 tournament was undeniably popular. Here I was… getting further proof. I shouldn’t have been that surprised though. The multiple dish antennas, the Airtels and DishTVs and TataSkys, that sprouted from the rooftops of the houses that I had seen during my preparatory treks to GHNP bordering villages earlier were not merely ornamental in purpose. The people needed entertainment and if they chose to watch IPL, so be it.

But this fact left me a little disturbed. These were villages where you could hear the river’s roar from the valley far far below as you fell asleep. These were paths where you could walk in the shadow of magnificent old oaks and watch for hours birds spectacularly coloured with a frequency normally reserved for spotting house crows in central Kolkata. These were horizons which were framed by the snowy peaks of the middle Himalayas not by giant billboards for the Jio Dhan Dhana Dhan lifetime offer.

Not exactly Quest Mall

Lest you assume that I will now launch into a tirade against the commercialization of cricket and the destruction of local cultures by corporate monsters, let me add. I too was watching the game, the Kolkata Knight Riders v/s the Bangalore Royal Challengers, that Dileep referred to. I was watching the game in the stadium, the Eden Gardens, giving up my hard-earned money to those evil corporations and cricket auctioneers.

---Warning: Political rant ahead---

Being staunchly left liberal, like I am, means leading a life of inherent contradictions. I genuinely believe that there are some evil corporations and that something needs to be done about them. Yet I do indulge in some thoroughly wholesale commercial activities like supporting the Kolkata Knight Riders.

And before my right-wing friends start cheering and high fiving, I must also add that my contradictions are significantly less hypocritical than those who strongly ‘support free speech’ (as long as it is sufficiently untruthful about *whoever-they-hate* and/or pro pseudo-nationalist governments) and are ‘true patriots’ (a.k.a we do exactly the same shitty things as *them* but *they* started it, so we should get together and be equally evil & self-destructive before *they* destroy us).

---Political rant over---

Back to the story then.

I told Dileep “That match!? I was there at the Eden Gardens screaming with 70,000 other fans.”

Cricket connection firmly established, we talked more. Dileep’s surprise at the progress of the Bangladesh cricket team from also-rans to to-be-taken-seriously; my surprise that he has the time to follow the Bangladesh cricket team (and no, Mr. Right Wing Nut Case, he isn’t a Bangladeshi, he’s a local Himachali and staunchly Hindu Pahadi boy) in between his tough work schedule as a cook/porter for the various trekking teams to GHNP; common agreement on how Pakistan seems to produce an endless supply of amazing pace bowlers like Mohammad Aamer (Mr. Right Wing Nut Case, refer preceding sentence); the sheer difficulty of finding a flat enough ground to play cricket in without having to climb down 100 feet to retrieve the ball;  the magic of watching the West Indies bat on the rare occasions when they find that calypso magic; about how Dileep usually watches only those IPL T20 matches when the team batting first scores above 140 - given that his village duties require him to be up at dawn he can’t afford to give up sleep over foregone conclusions – the conversation is a healthy mix of both plain-Jane and unique.

Dileep's village... stunning but not ideal cricket terrain

Who’s your favourite batsman, I ask? Rohit Sharma, pat comes the reply, there’s something really different about him. This is really weird now, because even though Rohit is not my all-time favourite (Tendulkar/Lara cemented that), I have frequently used the “something really different” description of him so many times myself. The lazy grace of his shots, never anxious, never angry yet powerful AF & the legendary unreliability of his ‘Throw’it Sharma alter-ego – listening to Dileep go on about Rohit Sharma was like me talking to myself.

By this point of time, as darkness approached and the jungle around transformed from a visual spectacle to an audio mystery, I was significantly less disturbed.

Sure, I would prefer for Dileep not to live a lifestyle where he hangs around at the latest generic glitzy supermall sipping coffee from CCD and waiting in line overnight for the launch of the next IPhone *AlmostTheSameThing*. Surely, we need him to be a man of the wilds so that he can continue to protect his ancestral land, this most rugged land of outstanding beauty where the blue skies, green valleys and clear water are more HD than UHD and 4K combined.

But to assume that he should stay away from all forms of modern ‘corruption’ is a little bit too selfish on my side. Since I enjoy all the benefits (and pitfalls) of a comfortable lifestyle and modernity, keeping someone away from every aspect of the same is neither healthy nor practical. He would have to figure out for himself what to learn and what to unlearn.

In the end, we are all hypocrites.

That moment of realization

Some to a lesser degree, some more. City nerd. Village boy. Left wing. Right wing. All these labels that we tag ourselves and tag others with, come with certain pre-set expectations. Reality is always a little removed from our assumptions. As we keep walking along with our ‘herd’, we come at some totally unexpected intersections.

I never expected to be fan-boying over Rohit Sharma’s fluid batting in a remote Himachal Pradesh forest with someone whose day job entailed a continuous risk of coming across a bear who might or might not be as big a fan. But it happened. I could write 10,000 blog posts on how precious nature is and yet not know even 10% of what Dileep knows simply via his lived experience. And that’s the truth.

In the end, if a man raised on the city couch and a boy raised in the jungle can connect over the laidback swag of a Mumbai city cricket player, it just may be that this inter-connected world of ours is not such a bad thing at all and things are going to be A OK. We both care for the forests in our own way – he, because they are his to protect and I, because I don’t have any of mine left to protect.

Humans, after all, can talk about themselves and figure things out. Make sure that the Rohit Sharmas roam only the stadiums of the world and Himalayan black bears go about their bearly business without being surprised by roaming Rohit Sharmas.

That way it’ll be much easier to appreciate their different varieties of majesty.

Checking... Black bears? Check. No Rohit Sharmas? Check.

[This is part of my blog’s The Tinder Life (TTL) series, a series of blog posts on certain episodes from my 15 day stay at the Great Himalayan National Park (GHNP) in mid-June 2017. More episodes and also some new series to come soon.]

[http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.in/2017/07/the-tinder-lifestyle-rohit-sharma-vs.html]

Guardian. Child.

"Where would you like to go?" Salvador Dali in camouflage pants & a faded white vest asks. "Anywhere you would go!" I answer with hollow valour. His crazy crazy eyes see clean through me. Yet he turns, hacks his machete at an errant creeper in his way and on we go deeper, deeper into the steaming jungle tracing the pug marks of a striped tawny king.

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The job of a Special Tiger Protection Force (STPF) guard at the Pakke Tiger Reserve, where the Eastern Himalayas begin in misty mysteries, is unavoidably "different". Being charged by a lovelorn elephant or chancing upon a militant jungle camp are all par for the course. Even by those standards, as per his STPF colleagues, Sanjay Disso is "a little different".

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Different. In the way he pats a stately vellore tree, a familiarity one would reserve for a beloved grand-uncle. His guffaw of remembered delight as he talks of elephants undaintily tumbling down waterfalls rings through the forest. The cat grin that he wears as he shares stories of 'his' animals comes alive, almost glows in the depths of a darkening forest as we duck and weave, lift and heave.

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Different. The Dali resemblance is more than coincidental. When not patrolling, Sanjay paints. Not molten clocks, but persistently happy animals – a cheerful great hornbill here, a positively ecstatic flying squirrel there – on the walls of the forest rest-houses that dot Pakke. Boots on the ground protection apart, he makes exquisite fibreglass casts of hornbill beaks which substitute for the real thing in the traditional rituals of native Nyishi tribals.

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Different. But both this thick glasses wearing nature documentary nerd and this man for whom the forest is "the neighbourhood" giggle nervously when deep in & a little lost, the forest rips open not only my week-old trekking shoes but his too. We stand in sombre solidarity over a shard of motorcycle fender plastic, proof of a recent forest guard fatality in an ill fated crossing of paths with an elephant.

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At the end of my stay, we visit his little shack at the edges of Pakke, the exposed brick walls and the naked light bulb of which make us miss the green radiance of the forest all the more. He tells me with kindergarten glee of the camera trap photography contest that he obviously won. The only time his laughing eyes betray a glint of steel is when he explains to me poacher tactics.

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Sanjay Disso. Artist. Warrior. Happy child of the forests. Grim guardian of the beasts.

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[http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.in/2017/04/guardian-child.html]