The road points like an arrow towards the hills. Amidst fallow fields and coconut farms, flanked by rows of grand tamarind trees, it takes a curve at a little rise. From here, the wide panorama of hills ahead is blue-grey and inviting.
Natural food: a bonnet macaque eating Sterculia fruit (Photo: by Kalyan Varma)
Stuffed into cheek pouches
Bonnet macaque on flowering Cassia fistula tree.
Nibbling on Stereospermum pods in the tree canopy (Photo: MD Madhusudan)
Family by the road: sisters or friends?
Killing with kindness: feeding monkeys is harmful in many ways and may lead to their death.
Escaping traffic
Garbage and waste by the road near Monkey Falls in Anamalai Tiger Reserve
Osama bin Laden was killed in Abbottabad in Pakistan on 2 May 2011, say the news reports. Really?! Or should I say—not again?! He’s been killed twice in India already! Once in 2006 and again in 2008. Yes, it made news splashes even then, although not as large a splash as his most recent death. Osama’s first death occurred in December 2006 in a tea estate in Assam in north-east India, at the hands of a hunter, a hired gun tasked with taking out the terrifying serial killer. And as if that was not enough, he was killed again in May 2008, in the Indian state of Jharkhand, at the hands of an empowered mob of government authority—the Forest Department and the Police. The second death was not easy. It took 20 bullets to silence Osama. And from the recent news, it seems even that did not work, after all.
The painful truth is that the first two deaths of Osama referred, not to the terrorist mastermind and leader of al-Qaeda, but to two separate individual Asian elephants Elephas maximus, Asia’s largest land mammal, with the contrasting reputation of being the gentle giants of its forests. These individuals were named after a feared human, on the most-wanted list of a distant superpower. They were labeled serial killers and raging bulls, as rogues and as terrorisers. And yet, when people came to see the prostrate corpse of the killed elephant, they placed flowers on its body, even as many asked whether the right animal was killed or it was just another innocent elephant victim.
Prayers for dead elephant (Photo courtesy: Hiten Baishya)
Sarika
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TR Shankar Raman
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TR Shankar Raman
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Dr. Jalaja
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Dr. K. Sreelalitha
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