Kaziranga One Fine Afternoon

Kaziranga,
March 11th

Big Horn Buffalo with Bar Headed Geese

I am the only person in the Gypsy and the driver stops at Kohora gate to pick up the other three who have booked their safari with him.  They clamber on, a young couple and their friend who takes his seat beside me, camera in one hand, coke in the other.  

Now, I know they say you should not judge people at first glance.  Actually, they say you should not judge people.  And I say they speak rot.  

I promise, it is not the coke (which they finish in turns in about 30 seconds because the bottle has to be discarded outside).  But you learn to identify idiots when you see them, call it perverse experience. 

Mr Couple is full of questions to the driver.  Such as, will we see tigers?   Coke is not satisfied: will we see white tigers?  How many tigers are there?  So many?  Well, then why no white one?  How many rhinos?  So many?  Then, do tigers eat rhinos?  Coke does not ask why white tigers don’t eat rhinos, so I am deeply grateful.

It’s all that sugar in that bloody bathroom-cleaner drink that makes them delirious.

  

All three have their mobiles with which they are 

1. Sending messages

2. Taking photographs

3. Scrolling on Instagram

4. Combing hair (Mrs Couple) and checking if that seven-micron scratch on the nose is now visible.

We haven’t begun the journey yet and there is a rhino in the distance and Mr Couple asks Mrs to take his photo on his mobile with rhino as dot-in-horizon wallpaper. 

Then,

Mr clicks Mrs with rhino-in-horizon

Coke clicks both and shares with larger planet on Insta

Then Mrs clicks Coke and Mr

Then Driver clicks them

Then, our Gypsy is joined by another Gypsy at the hip, which has a large Bengali family of about 63 adults and 22 kids that are doing this team outing to have an incisive debate on why someone’s brother-in-law is not to be trusted with an agreement to sell a flat near Gariahat?  

I understand enough Bengali to not want to buy this flat.

Then, we begin the safari.

Then - immediately - we see a tiger crossing a lake.

Which I somehow feel deep inside is bloody unfair, though it is unfair, I know, to feel unfair.  

I am watching it swim through the binocs (the tiger is swimming in the stream, not through the binocs, hope you got that right), and the three are so excited that they forget that You Live For Reels.  As the tiger walks up the other bank and enters the bushes, about 84 Bongs want to know where the tiger is and are looking, with heightened animation, in the wrong direction, while, from the 85th, I learn that the lift isn't working in the Gariahat flat.  

The bird life is, as always, incredible!

The utterly majestic grey headed fish eagle

European Widgeon, Mr and Mrs.  
My first ever sighting

Bar headed geese are philosophers.  Always searching.

and we see a herd of jumbos by the side and they are chilled out (I wouldn't want them any other way, incidentally).

And one showed us his backside

All this while, the Couple pose, share, repose. Coke is impatient.

One more TIGER, says Coke (he is ok with non-white now).  And the more I hear about the brother-in-law, the more he makes Amrish Puri in Mr India seem like a Buddhist monk. 

I whisper a question to Driver: can we separate at the hip from Gariahat please and he smiles knowingly and slows down.  Sometime later, we are by a stream, I am staring up at the canopy and Mr Couple is standing, mobile video at work.  Something in the water, he says, in our area, we call it Oondh.  

I swivel and see smooth coated otters!  Three of them, swimming steadily in the middle of the stream and up close.  They have seen us too, the one in front popping up, periscope-like, the others right behind.  They are beautiful, graceful, effervescent and as enigmatic as ever  and to see them there on a lazy late afternoon in one of the world’s most beautiful wilderness regions! We watch - in absolute silence - until they are gone.

And all is forgiven.  

Maybe I will consider that flat in Gariahat if these three buy it along with me.

And the Great Hornbill.  What a magnificient species this is.

Home

 Sunday, March 16th

It's a beautiful warm morning and we set out to see the forest from afar.  Today, we will not go in, for an elephant walked our way a few hours ago and is in there somewhere.

Somewhere in those hundred-odd acres that once belonged to a Jagirdar, but is now protected, the result of which is the sort of biodiversity we dream to see.

The flowering of jalaari -Shorea roxburghii - is an annual dream-come-alive, as this little forest responds with a burst of colour, fragrance and, to a fervent imagination, delightful melody, for the bees and the wings sing.  It is short and ineffably sweet, as indeed all good things must be.  

This year, it's done.  Fresh bright green leaves have taken the space left by the spectacular flowers that now cover the ground in a brown crunchy layer.  Perhaps there is philosophy there too - ashes to ashes, dust to dust, as that old one on Lillee and Thommo, those fast bowling relics of the '70s, goes.  

In the distance, we see a tree-in-red: that is the coral tree, Erythrina indica, in full bloom and it is a rich and fiery colour.  The lemon-yellow that is closer?  That is a favourite, the laburnum or konnapoo tree offered to the Gods in about a month from now during the lovely festival of Vishu.  This tree has bloomed well and is getting a rich dressing on its canopy as it awaits the real summer......

And amidst this cornucopia is a tree shorn of flowers and leaves; the fruits dangle with the bareness of deciduous magnificence.  This is Diospyros melanoxylon, thubre mara, and we savour the pulpy, tangy, astringent fruit and chat and laze around and pray that forest fires and human desires keep away.  Close by is a tree with astonishingly similar fruits that can give you a hard time if consumed, maggari mara or Catunaregam spinosa, fruits that in those days gone by were used to work up a solution to wash clothes.

Next week, elephant permitting, we will wander in on a fine morning.

For the forest is home.  

Bovinity is not for me

February 2nd 2025

The other day, Seenappa and I, on examining the lime plants at Random Rubble, the farm, carefully concluded that they had been attacked by stem borers.  Now, as you know, I keep myself abreast of the latest developments in scientific thinking, so I immediately thought of cow urine.  

The head of IIT Madras, in a deeply emotional moment of bovine divinity (which phrase shall henceforth be termed bovinity and is my unique contribution to the language),  has endorsed cow urine as a panacea for a variety of diseases (including dullness between the ears because of a pre-existing vacuum).  Since he has not specifically mentioned stem borer, I asked ChatGPT for help and, accordingly, Seenappa prepared a solution of cow urine + garlic + chilli with a teaspoon of asafoetida, a pinch of which will otherwise repel a blue whale.

I have some advice for you if you have never experienced a solution of cow urine + garlic + chilli + asafoetida.  

Don’t.

We applied this to each plant with a brush (the IIT Director, in keeping with his astute scientific temper and bovinity, would have emphatically disagreed and asked us to apply this with a cow’s tail, but Seenappa’s cows were deeply and violently reluctant to lend their tails and one needs inter-departmental cooperation in these matters).  Besides, you could end up dead, and, as they say in the Wild Wild West, dead men tell no tails.  

About three minutes and twenty two seconds into the application, Seenappa, who was holding up the bucket - had he been in Citibank, he would have been Executive Vice President (Liquidity Management) - began to smell strongly of cow urine + garlic + chilli+asafoetida and I was forced, abandoning table manners and societal decorum, to ask him what he had had for dinner.  

Now, if you have read my earlier posts about this stellar representative of Sapiens ruralicus, you know that when his IQ is compared to that of Winnie the Pooh, Winnie turns out to be an intellectual giant on the same infrared wavelength as Carl Jung.  He stared at me blankly (Seenappa, not Winnie the Pooh) and remarked enquiringly that I was smelling of 

1. Garlic

2. Cow urine

3. asafoetida

4. Chilli

and appeared surprised by the coincidence except for the order of odour (which is such a cool phrase and hence to be bookmarked for future use), all of which, of course, got me raving mad, but there was nothing to be done.  

As we progressed, the lime fruits on the plants, which are world famous in Bangalore for their citrusy fragrance, began to smell of bloody cow urine + garlic + chilli + asafoetida, birds abandoned their chicks, the yellow-billed babblers announced their opposition with screechy alarm calls and fled and I saw a mongoose shoot past with a clearly disgusted look in our direction.  

When we were done, I hung up my gloves after rinsing them and dropped my clothes in white vinegar, had two baths with lux and Dove, lit seven incense sticks in a never-before seen display of devotion and left a bottle of eucalyptus oil open.  

The next morning, I woke up to a beautiful day smelling of

1. Cow urine

2. Garlic

3. Chilli

4. Asafoetida

William Anders – A tribute, a story and a pledge to think about

 William who?
 
Anders was an astronaut who was assigned to Apollo 8, a particularly dangerous lunar orbit mission in end December 1968, as humans had never been outside earth’s orbit before and he didn’t expect to make the return trip.  Yet, he and two others went off into space and he was hardly excited when they reached the moon itself, for it was a stark, grey, barren and bleak moonscape of depressing monochrome.  ‘Ugly’ he often said when recalling the sight.
 
But they had to do their task of finding the proper landing sites for the missions to follow and photographing these sites, so they got down to work. All of them were equipped with cameras, and Anders was photographing the grey and forbidding moonscape in monochrome when – unexpectedly – he saw something unusual in rich colour from the corner of his weary eye, ‘a shining blue marble that was rising above the moon, wreathed in cloud’, a gorgeous, fetching sight and he realised, with surprise and feverish excitement, that this was the Earth.
 

It was so beautiful and enthralling to see - that little, shining blue marble - that he was emotionally overwhelmed. “Oh my God!  Look at that picture over there!  There’s the Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty!” he told the others and scrambled to load the camera with colour film.  He had no light meter, so he took a number of photos, changing the F-stops and the aperture with every click, hoping that a few would come out well. 
 
Once that was done, all Anders wanted to do was to look out of the window at the Earth.  It was Christmas Eve and that little blue marble looked like a fragile, delicate, gorgeously ornate ornament on a Christmas tree.  Anders thought of the tumultuous events that were underway in that marble beyond the moon: a catastrophic Cold War underway in Vietnam, a young generation across the developed world in rage and protest with riots in Europe and campuses in the US in flames, the ravaging of soil, water and mountain and burning forests leaving depredation in its wake….all in that delicate blue marble that needed people to work with each other, not at each other, that needed collaboration, not conflict, hearts not guns, forests not giant dams and gouged-out ravaged land.
 
Years later, Edgar Mitchell, an astronaut on Apollo 14 and the sixth man to walk on the moon, memorably put it like this: “You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a ---.’”
 
Three of Anders’ photographs developed well and one of them became known as Earth Rise.  It was printed on the covers of magazines, on stamps and on posters that decorated countless walls in campuses. It was the catalyst that, alongside Rachel Carson’s book, ‘Silent Spring”, birthed the environmental movement in the developed world, for a photograph is worth a thousand words and stirs a million emotions.  One of the world’s greatest wilderness photographers, Galen Rowell, described it as “the most influential environmental photograph ever taken.”  
Those photos did more that capture our earth, they captured our imagination. 
 
And he was repeatedly reminded of the wonder he had seen and of what he had said on his return: “We went all the way to the moon to discover the Earth.” And William Anders always wondered if he had actually said it.

Who Flung Dung?

 The other day I came across a news item that read, “Bundles of currency notes recovered from heap of cow dung in Odisha”.  The byline mentioned an amount of twenty lakhs, which, assuming it was all in hundred-rupee notes, would mean that at least one end of this cow was kept very busy with its tail pointing to north-north-east on a windy day.  This was when I decided, being sentimentally attached to all ideas that have money at the end (literally, if you see what I mean), to take the bull by its horns and watch the other end carefully. 

Since this was official breaking news, I thought of calling Ram Reddy who has kept more cows than can come home (whenever they do, that is).  I did not think of Seenappa, my farm hand at Random Rubble, because he has an IQ of 8.26 (including 18% GST) and will be out of depth in an intellectual conversation, even if it is bullshit (the topic, not the conversation.  Will you read carefully, please?).

Now, cows are ruminants and therefore grass turns into a robust dung, with a lively smell that gets rid of your blocked nose just when you wished it would stay. This is called the dung-lung connection in technical discourse (ok, I just invented it, but the point remains).  

 

To help you (and Seenappa) understand this better, here is the scientific reaction:

Grass → Dung (+lively methane exchange with atmosphere + Dung lung)

Lots of grass —> Lots of dung (+village evacuation at short notice + Increase in sales of local agarbatti) 

Yet, I never knew that a cow could do the following conversion:

Grass —> Dung + Currency notes (methane flavour)

Lots of grass —> Dung + Lots of currency notes (+village traffic jam, to hell with methane)

Following this I reasoned that 

1. Not all cows do the above because, if they did, the Reserve Bank of India would own a dairy farm and not a Mint and we would need demonetisation once a week, along with Vitamin D capsules

2. But at least one cow (reference, newspaper) has done it.  It is, in other words, Ms. Cash Cow

3. Hence, that one cow is special

4. Hence, find out why that one cow is special

5. Or buy that cow

6. Or hire that cow on EMI (with PayTM that will EMI anything that mooves.  Sorry, moves)

7. Once Cow is acquired, feed cow with a bucket on both sides (of which one bucket is empty, you ignoramus).

8. Raise Private Equity on Cash Cow, by valuing it as a Unicow, a Unicow being a bovine Unicorn, if you have been living under a rock.

You can clearly see the fiendishly clever thinking here, without doubt.  Once I had the business plan all worked out, I went back to the newspaper article to find out the location of the village in Odisha and that is when Reality struck:  apparently, the money was in a plastic bag and hidden in dung by a thief.  

I have now written a strongly worded letter to the Editor of this newspaper, asking him to fire the sub-editor who came up with the headline that has misled much of humanity.  But if you ever have this urgent, implacable, insistent desire to know about the chemical constituents of cow dung, you know whom not to contact. 

PH Value

The other day, I had a bit of a cough
With this thing stuck in my throat
So, I messaged the GP,
“Bad throat, rasping cough, doc, and loads 
and loads of flem,”
He replied, “It’s phlegm.  I will call you back.”
OMG! P-H-L-E-G-M?

What’s that? Where are the vowels?

So when I met a friend, I asked him what pehelegem was

And he said, ‘Search me’.

So I did.

(and found nothing, except a chocolate wrapper.  And

He found it odd, for some reason).

Then, I reasoned it out: in medicine, when

P is followed by a consonant, not a vowel,

Like pneumonia

The P is silent

And the disease is phatal

Sorry, fatal.

So, Helegem?  

My friend said, “I don’t know.  But NO,

DON’T search me this time.”

Then I asked myself,

"Why did the Doc says he'd call back?

Is it serious? Does it need him to speak in a low

and grave (pun not intended) voice?

Then, I panicked and messaged Doc.  

OMG! Was this like some African strain?

Would I pass out?  Or get airlifted to Ward 74?

With tubes  in my nose and those beep-beep monitors

And frenetic nurses and worried specialists?

Would I survive to write out a will?

(and one more book?)

And he replied, “You vacuous, fatuous

Asinine, half-witted, moronic, empty-headed,

Foolish, imbecilic, thick-headed, batty idiot

It is pronounced flem but written phlegm.

Gargle with salt, and think of your first crush.”

And I did.

I gargled with salt

And thought of the time when I first stepped on an ant

At age eight-and-a-half

(all because a pretty little girl with dimples had smiled

And I had blushed).

Methinks, it isn’t me, but that guy Roget of Thesaurus

Who is a vacuous, fatuous

Asinine, half-witted, moronic, empty-headed,

Foolish, imbecilic, thick-headed, batty idiot.

If he could come up with this many synonyms for idiotic

Why not a single one for flem?

Oops, bloody phlegm.

Five + Five Ants = Tenants

If you found American politics comical and entertaining, then clearly you are missing out on Apartment politics, which make Trump look like Amrish Puri decapitating seven sidekicks and American politics more boring than reading a bank locker rental agreement. 

So, it all begins when the owners of a new apartment complex come together to form a Whatsapp group. If the builder owns some apartments there and is part of this group, then the others create a second Whatsapp group which is generally named Residents-cum-Victims, with the image of a noose as the DP.

A retired Army officer is generally the most active member because he feels that civilians are so disorganised that they cannot manage anything. Civilians feel that he is so organised that he cannot manage anything.

There is always one financial planner in an apartment complex who comes up with the bright idea of investing the corpus of Rs.8.72 lakhs in an equity mutual fund that he normally would not touch himself with a spear-tied-to-a-barge-pole. Such adventurism is promptly castigated, of course, particularly by the above retired Army officer whose endearing approach to Life since 1971 has been to Shoot the Bloody Bugger.

Almost always he becomes the President of the Building Association, being completely unemployed except for his evening Patiala peg. As President, he tables the proposal to acquire CCTV and nuclear missiles because he feels that the apartment could be invaded anytime, particularly by spotted doves, which are drones sent by a neighbouring enemy country.

Generally, at least one apartment is let out to bachelors, resulting in the creation of another Whatsapp group to keep watch on the above and to debate if the smell emanating from that apartment was burnt rasam or weed. Since none in this group can identify the smell of weed and surfing the Net only tells you how horribly you can die from smoking up, everyone asks everyone for help, but no one wants to volunteer that his/her kids could expertly tell the difference.  

The Bachelors-at-Bay make matters most interesting by hosting a party in the middle of kids’ exams, which gets all the WhatsApp groups super-active, with everyone and their mothers-in-law voicing opinions, judgments, stern warnings and dire outcomes (‘They don’t CARE’ or ‘Mark my WORDS’, clearly indicating a need to conduct classes on When-to-use-CAPITALS ) and forwarding videos of Recovered Alcoholics because they could not find anything else to send.

This apartment owner lives in Minneapolis and therefore is one fricking, big help in this whole situation, but will nevertheless apply American Rules and suggest that an Officer of the Law be called, on which issue the Doves-Are-Drones Army man has strong views generally after his second peg. After the party, someone takes a video of the bottles outside the apartment and posts it everywhere and tags the PM on Twitter, thus achieving a Dutiful Citizen I-Love-My-India status with tiranga and bhel puri.

Owners also choose their apartments carefully as a result of which there is someone from Coorg who cooks panni curry on Sundays living next to a Mylapore maami who thinks garlic is Ravana Incarnate.  The resultant neighbourly affection, of course, results in the creation of two Whatsapp groups and vibrant lively conversations on manners, right- and left- wing, ancestry, calling-the-cops and fictional childhoods. 

Then, in one of these groups, someone will post a highly relevant message like ‘See What This Man From Venezuela DID To His Dog’, which, of course, makes the sender neither Left-Wing nor Right-Wing, but belonging to the North Wing of the apartment complex.

And the Armyman replies that We Must Shoot The Bugger.