Category: elephant (page 1 of 1)

The Animacy of Language

My book review in Biblio (Apr – Jun 2021) of Wild and Wilful: Tales of 15 Iconic Indian Species by Neha Sinha (Harper Collins Publishers India, 2021, 232 pp., Rs 599, ISBN 978-93-5357-829-9).

Engaged, urgent and political writing rarely achieves the cadence, structure and pace one expects from literary works of poetry, fiction, or creative nonfiction. The immediate tends to trump the timeless, the critique of outside power overcomes any reflection of inner self, and the plot is forced along by an agenda rather than the wilfulness of its characters. It is a challenge for a writer to resist the opposing pulls and find equipoise apt for the work. Neha Sinha’s Wild and Wilful, a welcome addition to literature on the natural world, walks that tightrope with grace. Her writing balances the urgency of conservation in a battered world against life in the slow lane. It tempers criticism of the powers-that-be and how humans affect nature with reflections on her own vulnerability and how nature affects each one of us. It calls for a renewal of a more humane and sensitive relationship with nature while foregrounding the characters – 15 species from elephants and starlings to butterflies and crocodiles – each portrayed in all their wildness and wilfulness.

The Introductory chapter outlines how the book is organised in four parts – Earth, Sky, Water and Heart – each holding its own cast of characters of “the wild that walks alongside us and through the pages of our neat, daily lives”. As the author explains,

Under Land, we have political capitals, the deserts, woodlands and forest. Under Sky, we have birds and butterflies that spend days migrating between countries or states. Under Water, we have ponds and rivers. Under Heart, we have urban jungles, the places many of us live in, and the places where we lose and find ourselves in repeatedly.

The first two chapters focus on Leopards and Rhesus Macaques, two familiar species found even in urban areas, highlighting the challenges of coexistence with people. From there, the author segues into the Thar desert, the last stronghold of the critically endangered Great Indian Bustard, threatened now by solar farms and powerlines, and then across the country into Arunachal Pradesh where the White-bellied Heron and Black-necked Crane face equally serious threats from hydroelectric projects. More well known are the species she profiles in the next three chapters: the King Cobra and Cobra, the Asian Elephant, and the Tiger. The ‘Sky’ chapters focus on migratory Tiger Butterflies and Amur Falcons, while the ‘Water’ chapters dive into the lives of the Gangetic Dolphins and Mugger Crocodiles. The final ‘Heart’ chapter, set amidst the gloom of the COVID-19 pandemic, flutters alive with Rosy Starlings on silk cotton trees abloom.

Each chapter braids evocative descriptions of species and landscapes with accounts of the many thoughtless or deliberately destructive human actions warping the relationships between humans and wild species. The caged leopard has “a liquid effortlessness that could only come from true strength…poised even in its panic” writes Sinha in an opening passage that appears to take you into the mind of the terrified leopard and the anguish of the author bearing witness. Describing the leopards that appeared in Delhi and the ones that live in Mumbai, those that saunter through the campus of the Wildlife Institute of India in Dehradun, and those roaming across wildlife reserves, farms and towns, Sinha paints a grim portrait. The leopard is beautiful yet inconvenient, a pest “like a cockroach” to be eliminated rather than appreciated and accommodated.

The author’s descriptions of the species she writes about bring them alive as beings with character and agency. The butterfly seems “made of sunrays carrying dust, coming into existence simply because we wished for colour to float around our faces”. The elephant “…is large, it is nearly soundless. Its huge feet are whispers in the wind, like songs people don’t sing as they work hard raising paddy”. The statuesque White-bellied Heron “is the very image of montane wilderness — a secretive bird with all the coiled energy of something that is living but appears like it is made of stone, almost like the mountain itself ”. The eye of the crocodile “is an ancient eye, a jewel eye, a dinosaur eye”. As Sinha informs us, “There is a whole bouquet of characters in the forest; you just have to learn to know them.”

The personhood of animals evident from their intimate portrayals is not difficult to appreciate. In the chapter on elephants, the author notes how people of the Toda community perceive animals “like people…they are a who, not a what”. For the villagers living alongside mugger crocodiles in village ponds of Kotmi Sonar in Chhattisgarh, the reptiles are their crocodiles that they lived alongside with an “easy, deeply felt understanding”. The touching story of the 75-year-old Bababji, who lost his hand to a crocodile, yet treats them as his wards and protects them is testimony to this felt affinity and appreciation for other living beings. Writing of Gond tribals in the central Indian forests and their remarkable knowledge of the native trees, Sinha notes, “Where we see trees, the Gonds see characters and old friends.…trees like people…” Later, in writing about dolphins and the proposal for their capture for use in entertainment in dolphinariums, Sinha notes how even the authorities are beginning to find this morally unacceptable and consider dolphins as sentient, non-human persons. And yet, if there was one thing that was disappointing in getting to know the book’s wild and wilful beings, it was that the author, with few exceptions, uses the impersonal pronoun it to refer to them, in language suggestive of a what, not a who.

This is not a trivial concern in writing about the natural world. As Robin Wall Kimmerer writes in her fine essay “Speaking of Nature” in Orion magazine (March/April 2017)1:

…I think the most profound act of linguistic imperialism was the replacement of a language of animacy with one of objectification of nature, which renders the beloved land as lifeless object, the forest as board feet of timber. Because we speak and live with this language every day, our minds have also been colonized by this notion that the nonhuman living world and the world of inanimate objects have equal status. Bulldozers, buttons, berries, and butterflies are all referred to as it, as things, whether they are inanimate industrial products or living beings.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Orion, “Speaking of Nature”

Kimmerer goes on to call for restoring the grammar of animacy that is often part of indigenous traditions to the English we use in writing and speaking about the natural world, even suggesting inventing new pronouns for the purpose. Wild and Wilful certainly does not render land as lifeless object or forests as purely utilitarian. Yet, if there ever was a book of nature writing in India that could have adopted a grammar of animacy and been even better for it, it is Wild and Wilful.

Besides giving voice to the plight of animals, the book also features other voices. Like the voices of conservationists trying to save the Great Indian Bustard from extinction or opposing the ill-planned removal of leopards and macaques to foster informed coexistence instead. There are voices of tribals and villagers who retain deeper connections with land and other living creatures. And, perhaps uniquely among popular books on Indian wildlife, the voices of women living in forests alongside tigers. Readers of the book are drawn into the world and worldviews encapsulated by these voices. Often, the author also directly addresses the reader, ‘you’, stepping in with an inclusive ‘we’ or ‘us’ as if for a collective arm-around-the-shoulders conversation:

If you encounter a wild animal, you are not in its company. Rather, you survive by the grace of the animal. Most wildlife is swifter, toothier and stronger than us. …We survive because the animal decides to let us be.

The prose is fluid and well-paced, engaging, even revelatory at times, making you want to stay to be part of this conversation. Sinha’s writing is unlike that of the “lone, enraptured male” of the genre2, and is more akin to the thoughtful and evocative work of writers like Terry Tempest Williams or Rebecca Solnit. As a regular columnist and a conservationist herself, Neha Sinha has directly engaged in most of the conservation issues she writes about, making for a more authentic and compelling narrative.

Beautiful profile photographs of the main animal protagonists accompany each chapter, not to mention the wonderful cover photograph of elephants. The book has few errors or typos and only the rare misstep in prose. The host plant of the tiger butterfly is Calotropis not ‘Caloptris’ (p 154, 156); Chhattisgarh hardly connects the Eastern and Western Ghats, or the Chota Nagpur Plateau to the Himalaya (p 149), and the White-bellied Heron does not sit on boulders (p 58) as much as stand on them. These hardly take away from the pleasure of reading: some chapters alone make the book worth buying. This fine book deserves to be read by everyone interested in nature or conservation or good writing on the natural world.

In the end, Wild and Wilful evokes a better understanding of the vulnerability of these animals to the many forces impinging on their lives and survival: trees and tigers and elephants at the mercy of roads and speeding vehicles and railway lines; bustards and flamingos killed by powerlines mushrooming across Western India from so-called green energy projects; attitudes that treat wildlife as the other, the nuisance; the deadening of rivers behind dams and dredged waterways and the deafening of dolphins by underwater noise from boat traffic, and more. But that is not all. Wild and Wilful brings home a more salient message: that the loss of the wild will be a great loss to our own lives and spirits too.

REFERENCES

  1. Robin Wall Kimmerer: “Speaking of Nature: Finding language that affirms our kinship with the natural world”, Orion, March/April 2017, pp 14-27. https://orionmagazine.org/article/speaking-of-nature/.
  2. Kathleen Jamie: “A Lone Enraptured Male”, London Review of Books, Vol. 30, No. 5, 6 March 2008. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v30/n05/kathleen-jamie/a-lone-enraptured-male.

Blowin’ in the Wind — II

From a boat on Assam’s Deepor Beel—the freshwater lake lying south-west of Guwahati, the largest city in India’s northeast—you can look east past thousands of waterbirds and a carpet of floating leaves to see the city’s seething, smoking garbage dump. Under spotless blue skies, a thin brown haze blankets the lake from fringing forest to quarried hillock, from skirting township to the Boragaon dumpyard. As another dump truck lurches to a halt and tips its load of filth over, an unruly mob of Black Kites and a cloud of dark mynas explode from the murky earth flapping like pieces of tattered cloth caught in a gust. The truck deposits another mound of unsegregated waste—a fraction of the more than 600 tons generated daily from the city of nearly a million people—all plastic and putrefaction, chicken heads and pigs entrails, street dirt and kitchen waste, broken glass and soiled cloth, bulbs and batteries and wires and electronics and metal and paper and more. Beside the truck waits a line of people: women, adolescents, and children. And behind them, a phalanx of Greater Adjutant storks—tall, ungainly birds with dagger-like beaks and naked yellow and pink necks—awaits its turn.

…Yes, ’n’ how many ears must one man have
Before he can hear people cry?
Yes, ’n’ how many deaths will it take till he knows
That too many people have died?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind
The answer is blowin’ in the wind

Bob Dylan, Blowin’ in the Wind

This piece follows an earlier post, ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’.

… This post appeared in my blog on the Coyotes Network on 18 February 2015. Read more in the The Wild Heart of India: Nature and Conservation in the City, the Country, and the Wild.

How Green is Your Tea

(With Divya Mudappa in Business Line, BLink magazine special issue on animals, 27 Sep 2014)

Gaur grazing at edge of a forest in a tea estate in the Anamalai hills.

You could have imagined you were on a forest trail. Fifty metres away, the dark hulk of a solitary bull gaur, over five feet tall at the shoulder with taut muscles and thick, curving horns, looks up from the swampy valley where he stands in his white-stockinged legs. Eyes locked with gaur, your ears pick up the harsh bark of a great hornbill resounding through the cool mountain air from a patch of tall trees on the hill slope beyond. As you skirt the gaur and walk quietly down the trail, stepping past fresh scat of a sloth bear and dropped quills of a porcupine, a stripe-necked mongoose darts across, a flash of crimson bright against background green. The green is not the multi-hued mosaic of a real forest, but a more uniform smear of a monoculture. Row upon row of neatly pruned metre-high bushes range away in tight lines, punctuated by well-spaced and heavily-lopped silver oak trees. In the mountains of the Western Ghats, at the edge of the Anamalai Tiger Reserve, you are walking through a large tea plantation.

In south India, tea is grown as extensive monocultures with sparse canopy of alien silver oak trees.

Read on here… or from magazine pages below.

…This post first appeared in the blog on the Coyotes Network on 28 September 2014 and in Business Line, BLink magazine special issue on animals, 27 Sep 2014. Read more in the The Wild Heart of India: Nature and Conservation in the City, the Country, and the Wild.

The Journeys of the Elephants

It is just bad behaviour on my part, I must admit, when I, as a wildlife scientist, point fingers at other people’s ignorance about wildlife, issue unsolicited comments and corrections at errors they make, poke fun even. Still, it is hard to resist at times, especially when it concerns animals as wonderful and legendary, and, yes, as large as elephants. It is particularly hard to stay quiet when someone is talking or writing about Asian elephants, Elephas maximus, but uses a painting or photograph or example of the African species, Loxodonta africana. How can one mistake the Asian elephants, with their arching convex backs and smaller ears, their two-humped foreheads and trunk tips ending in a single finger-like lobe, a grand animal that looks like this,

A herd of Asian elephants (Photo: Divya Mudappa)

for African elephants, with their saddle-like concave backs and much larger ears, their females carrying tusks like males, their sloping foreheads and corrugated skin, trunk tips ending in a pair of pincer-like lobes?

African elephant

Still, it happens all the time. A website or newspaper reports on a serious issue involving elephants and people in the fragmented landscape of forests and fields and cities in southern India, but uses a photograph of a large herd of African elephants marching through open savanna. A tea producer in Assam brands its tea packet with an image, not of Asian elephants walking old migratory routes where huge tea plantations now exist, but that of a herd of African elephants, adding gratuitous insult: these are ‘raging elephants’. A reputed Indian scientist suggests making fences with disused railway tracks to separate people from elephants here in India because it has worked in Addo National Park in Africa, and the authorities take the suggestion and run to install another barrier in an already sundered landscape. To sell news or products or opinions, the African is pulled in place of the Asian, again and again and again. One baulks at the indifference, at the injustice and ignorance on display.

Yes, ’n’ how many times can a man turn his head
Pretending he just doesn’t see?

Bob Dylan, Blowin’ in the Wind

One good thing about ignorance, however, which no one understands, or so wrote José Saramago in his novel The Elephant’s Journey, is that “it protects us from false knowledge.” The Elephant’s Journey is Saramago’s fictional retelling of the historical journey made by an Asian elephant, Solomon, gifted in 1551 by King João III of Portugal to Archduke Maximilian of Austria. Saramago writes of Solomon’s journey from Lisbon to Vienna, through the Iberian peninsula and northern Italy and across the alps, with a “masterfully light hand” and tender humour. His words in this delightful novel came to my mind in the last few days, oddly enough, after reading about the results of a recent scientific study on elephants. A study probing more than three centuries into the past, pulling specimens out of museums, flipping open the pages of an historic book of the eighteenth century, in which Carl von Linné or Linnaeus, the father of modern biological taxonomy, formally classified the elephant, bestowing the scientific name Elephas maximus, for the very first time. In Saramago’s strangely appropriate words:

The past is an immense area of stony ground that many people would like to drive across as if it were a motorway, while others move patiently from stone to stone, lifting each one because they need to know what lies beneath. Sometimes scorpions crawl out or centipedes, fat white caterpillars or ripe chrysalises, but it’s not impossible that, at least once, an elephant might appear…

And when the elephant does appear before you for the first time, after the initial wonderment and fascination fades away, you might be tempted to conclude, like the European peasants do when the elephant appears in their village, that:

There’s not much to an elephant, really, when you’ve walked round him once, you’ve seen all there is to see.

The specimen Linnaeus used (Courtesy: Swedish Museum of Natural History)

Sure, until someone looks even closer, like the scientists did in the recent study. The study in question, by Enrico Capellini of the University of Copenhagen and an international team of scientists, found that something long believed to be true about Asian elephants, their very identity as Elephas maximus established by Linnaeus in his historic work Systema Naturae, was the result of an error. Linnaeus described the Asian elephant from a ‘type’ specimen, an elephant foetus preserved in an alcohol-filled jar (a somewhat large jar, one presumes). The specimen—long considered as the first taxonomic specimen and permanent benchmark for Asian elephant—turns out to be (you guessed it!) that of an African elephant. Published in November 2013, the study weaves brilliant scientific and archival detective work, delving into ancient DNA and protein molecules, into museum records, artwork, and archives, to conclude that Linnaeus had it wrong. And Saramago says:

as elephant philosophy would have it, what cannot be cannot be,

Which means that Elephas maximus Linnaeus, 1758, as the species is named, fully and formally, refers at the first instance to the African elephant. Which means that I might now have to suppress my smug, superior erudition on telling Asian from African elephants and instead eat my own words. Which goes to show that you never know where you will be led when you dig into the past. Into history.

It is the idea of history itself, that Saramago examines from his fictional vantage point, using the lens of literature.

…but that is how it’s set down in history, as an incontrovertible, documented fact, supported by historians and confirmed by the novelist, who must be forgiven for taking certain liberties with names, not only because it is his right to invent, but also because he had to fill in certain gaps so that the sacred coherence of the story was not lost. It must be said that history is always selective, and discriminatory too, selecting from life only what society deems to be historical and scorning the rest, which is precisely where we might find the true explanation of facts, of things, of wretched reality itself. In truth, I say to you, it is better to be a novelist, a fiction writer, a liar.

Perhaps Linnaeus, in his enthusiasm to describe the elephant, paid insufficient attention to history. The elephant foetus that Linnaeus labelled was obtained at his behest by the Swedish royalty from the collection of Albertus Seba, a Dutch pharmacist interested in natural history and trader in animals collected from various parts of the world. Seba obtained the elephant foetus from the Dutch West India Company, which traded in Africa and regions west across the Atlantic. Linnaeus, however, believed and declared the locality of origin of the elephant as Ceylon (Sri Lanka), which may have been the case if the source had been the Dutch East India Company. If Linnaeus had paid more attention to history, as to biology, one would perhaps have not had to wait 250 years for an analysis of ancient mitochondrial DNA to establish that the elephant originated in a part of Africa where Dutch traders were active in the 17th century. Linnaeus had, unwittingly, been looking Lanka instead of talking Togo.

As I said to you once before, the elephant is a different matter altogether, every elephant contains two elephants, one who learns what he’s taught and another who insists on ignoring it all, … I realised that I’m just like the elephant, that a part of me learns and the other part ignores everything I’ve learned, and the longer I live, the more I ignore,

Fortunately for us ignorant retrospective liars about elephants, Asian and African, the taxonomists are still on our side. Waving their bewildering box of rules about names and naming of animals, called the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature, they have provided a face-saving way out. Out of the other specimens (‘syntypes’) of elephants that Linnaeus had seen, known, or used while describing the elephant, one can designate another specimen (a ‘lectotype’) to shoulder the responsibility of carrying the species’s name. To find and pin down the new name-torch carrier, the scientists have pulled out, not a rabbit from a hat, for that is not hip in science, but what is perfectly de rigueur: a skeleton out of a closet. A genuine Asian elephant skeleton, confirmed by anatomical and DNA analysis, which Linnaeus himself had referred to, will now be the specimen-designate for Asian elephants. The Asian elephant, thanks be to The Code, will remain Elephas maximus. It is as Saramago ordained,

because life laughs at predictions and introduces words where we imagined silences, and sudden returns when we thought we would never see each other again.

Where that skeleton came from is another remarkable story. One that takes the tale another hundred years into the past, into the mid 17th century. In 1664, John Ray, an English academic who quit Cambridge to pursue natural history and travel through Europe, saw and wrote about “…the skin and skeleton of an elephant which was shown in Florence some 8 or 10 years ago and died there”, a specimen that Linnaeus, too, was aware of. The skeleton remains today, much as Ray described it, in the Natural History Museum of the University of Florence. The scientists have verified from anatomical and molecular analysis that the skeleton is that of an Asian elephant. I applaud their patience, their achievement, but it is Saramago’s subtle humour that rings in my ear.

If your highness knew elephants as I believe I do, you would know that india exists wherever an indian elephant happens to be, and I am not speaking here of african elephants, of whom I have no experience, and that same india will, whatever happens, always remain intact inside him,

The skeleton was that of an elephant named Hansken. Hansken was a female Asian elephant, brought to Europe courtesy the right company this time, the Dutch East India Company, from Sri Lanka, with the fortuitous result that the type locality mentioned by Linnaeus for Elephas maximus can now remain the same. Arriving in Europe in the 1630s, she was taken as a travelling curiosity through varies cities, including Amsterdam, where in 1637, she was sketched by a person no less than Rembrandt!

This is Hansken. This is Elephas maximus (Sketch by Rembrandt, Courtesy: British Museum via Wikimedia Commons).

Now, I cannot help wondering if Rembrandt and Linnaeus were aware of the other elephant that had journeyed from Sri Lanka through Europe, a century earlier in the 1550s: the Suleiman of history, the Solomon of Saramago’s story. (Is history and his story really all that different, for an animal with culture and memory like the elephant, for people like us? In Saramago’s part of the world, in Portuguese and Spanish and Catalan, is not the word for story and history the same? Historia! So it is.).

Still, after the conundrum posed by Linnaeus’s error, what a distinguished and artful conclusion to arrive at, for Asian elephants! A newly-designated specimen, the skeleton of Hansken, whose fleshed-and-blooded portrait was made by Rembrandt himself! Destiny, Saramago writes,

when it chooses, is as good or even better than god at writing straight on crooked lines.

Of Solomon, we know that he entered Vienna in early 1552 and died in less than two years. What we know little about is of the people who attended to him, particularly his mahout. Not so, of course, in Saramago’s story, wherein “to fill in certain gaps so that the sacred coherence of the story was not lost”, he invents a mahout with a peculiar eastern Indian sounding name, Subhro. As Solomon enters Austria, Subhro, too, is passed on with the elephant to Maximilian, who with a sort of Germanic disdain, renames the elephant Suleiman and rechristens his mahout, Fritz. What do we know of the life of Subhro-Fritz? Or of Hansken’s mahout? There are inscriptions and woodcuts, coins and frescoes, depicting Solomon in Europe, and Hansken is immortalised by Linnaeus and Rembrandt, but clearly the elephant is the centre of attention, not the mahout on its back.

The elephant ‘Soliman’ in Vienna, 1552 (Source: Felistoria, Wikimedia Commons)

One wonders. What is the fate of the keeper when it is the kept that garners all the attention? As Subhro himself says:

but, one way or another, dear friend, while your future is guaranteed, mine isn’t, I’m a mahout, a parasite, a mere appendage.

And what, one wonders, too, will happen now, to the poor African elephant foetus in the jar? Does it become a footnote to history, a museum relic, an anecdote, an aside? Now, to paraphrase E. E. Cummings, after the doting fingers of prurient philosophers have pinched and poked, and the naughty thumb of science prodded the elephant-that-never-was, now: will it rest encased in its alcoholic tomb? Will it be quietly mourned, yet spurned, like a miscarriage, spawned by Linnaeus, of an anonymous mother? Or will fade to obscurity again, for centuries, forever, like a misbegotten afterbirth? Will we conclude, as Saramago suggests, of this elephant’s journey, as we might of the life of the mahouts:

and that was that, we will not see them in this theatre again, but such is life, the actors appear, then leave the stage, as is only fitting, it’s what usually and always will happen sooner or later, they say their part, then disappear through the door at the back, the one that opens onto the garden.

Still, worse things could happen. The foetus could become a museum celebrity, to be probed and pinched and peered at further. It could become a case study: required reading in taxonomic textbooks.

Or perhaps, it will remain a mute witness, as the elephants do on their own journeys through landscapes of Asia and Africa, when we subject them to our scrutiny, amusement, benevolence, entertainment, affection, harassment, and exploitation. As they will continue to do while we struggle to come to terms with elephants with whom we have lived for thousands of years. Struggling to understand the elephants for who they are, to respect their identities and individuality, and to give them the admiration that they deserve, we continue to seek answers on our own terms. Perhaps we will find those answers yet, from patient science or great literature, or perhaps from wise Solomon himself, in The Elephant’s Journey:

For the first time in the history of humanity, an animal was bidding farewell, in the literal sense, to a few human beings, as if he owed them friendship and respect, an idea unconfirmed by the moral precepts in our codes of conduct, but which can perhaps be found inscribed in letters of gold in the fundamental laws of the elephantine race.

Further reading:

Callaway, E. 2013. Linnaeus's Asian elephant was wrong species. 
Nature doi:10.1038/nature.2013.14063

Cappellini, E., Gentry, A., Palkopoulou, E., Ishida, Y., Cram, D., Roos, A.-M., Watson, M., Johansson, U. S., Fernholm, B., Agnelli, P., Barbagli, F., Littlewood, D. T. J., Kelstrup, C. D., Olsen, J. V., Lister, A. M., Roca, A. L., Dalén, L. and Gilbert, M. T. P. 2013. Resolution of the type material of the Asian elephant, Elephas maximus Linnaeus, 1758 (Proboscidea, Elephantidae). Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society. doi: 10.1111/zoj.12084

Medina, R. 2013. Ceci n’est pas un éléphant.
http://mappingignorance.org/2013/11/20/ceci-nest-pas-un-elephant/

Saramago, J. 2011. The elephant's journey. (Translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa.) Mariner Books.

14 to 41: where I had always wanted to be

There are times in your life, when, in an unexpected moment, you come face to face with yourself. It could happen anytime, to anyone. It could happen over your breakfast as aroma and sound—hot coffee swirling in your cup and a dosa sizzling on the stove—suddenly release a sensory cascade of recollections as history intersects happenstance. It could happen in a memory or a dream, where past and present merge into a fused and frozen time indistinct, even, from the future. It could happen while you walk down a street and momentarily catch your own full-length reflection in a shining, shop-front glass. In that moment, the person who you were confronts the one who you have become. Chances are, it might catch you unawares.

… This post first appeared in my blog on the Coyotes Network on 15 November 2013. Read more in the Prologue of The Wild Heart of India: Nature and Conservation in the City, the Country, and the Wild.