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Come to the Okavango
It is like my arm – our guide and boatman, Happy – told us, talking about its shape. Rain falls on the shoulder, the mountains in Angola and water flows down the arm and into the fingers only to be swallowed up by the sands of the Kalahari, home, among other species, to the magnificent…
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Wildlife Conservation in India
I firmly believe that the key to wildlife and forest conservation is the wholehearted support of local people. That can’t happen when they don’t know the forest, don’t know how to conduct themselves respectfully and safely in it and so live in fear of forests and wildlife instead of loving and enjoying them. That is…
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Zoo in Corbett
Let me introduce you to the tiger. He is not an object. He is not a spectacle. He does not exist for your pleasure or like all politicians, for photo ops. He is not living in your land; you are encroaching on his. The tiger (gender neutral term as it refers to the species, and…
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Corbett Park Tourism
It takes roughly three hours to get to Haldupudao but since most of that journey is through the forest, crossing rivers on wooden bridges and driving over gravel riverbeds with a foot or more of water, it was thoroughly enjoyable. The Maruti Gypsy is the vehicle of choice for Indian jungle roads. It has front…
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Memories of Anamallais
It is difficult to describe the beauty of the place where we lived; a place that changes the scene from season to season. In the summer, when it is hot and dry, the waters of the Parambikulam Reservoir recede towards the dam and the submerged land becomes visible. It is a surrealistic scene of a…
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Tiger by the tail
There is a welcome awareness about the need to protect tigers in the wild and the wild places they live. Welcome even more because it comes now at a time when the tiger population in India (numbers are even more elusive and ephemeral than the tiger) has fallen from 100,000 in 1900’s to less than…
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Return to the Past – Anamallais in 2007
Truly it is said that tea planting is not a job. It is a lifestyle and a way of life with its own norms, culture, taboos, ways, and manners. We in the hills, were a community, comprised of people from a huge diversity of backgrounds, who in the normal scheme of things would never have…
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For he was a man
I started my corporate career in Guyana with the Guyana Mining Enterprise in Kwakwani, on the Rio Berbice. Kwakwani was a small mining town, hanging on the bank of the Berbice River trying not to get pushed into its deep and dark waters by an aggressively advancing forest. Living in the middle of the Amazonian…
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You can never relive the past
Raman and I would discuss the reasons for corruption in our system. Our people, the vast majority of them are good, simple, and have sincere hearts that have learned to become helpless. Every conversation ends with the same refrain, ‘Ah! But what can we do?’ The reality is that if anything can be done, it…
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Of Butler English etc.
Life was simpler in those days. We had less technology and more time. People were more open, warm, and less complicated. People looked at commonalities and bonded on that basis. If I think about how many differences there were between me and some of my dearest friends, I can tell you that we differed on…