Tag: essay (page 1 of 2)

25 September 2021 / 7 Comments

The Life of a Small Bone Hunter

My brief review of The Night Country (1971) by Loren Eiseley, a writer I greatly enjoy reading.

Loren Eiseley has this to say about nature writers such as Gilbert White, Richard Jefferies, and W. H. Hudson, but the words apply equally to himself:

Even though they were not discoverers in the objective sense, one feels at times that the great nature essayists had more individual perception than their scientific contemporaries. Theirs was a different contribution. They opened the minds of men by the sheer power of their thought. The world of nature, once seen through the eye of genius, is never seen in quite the same manner afterward. A dimension has been added, something that lies beyond the careful analyses of professional biology.”

Loren Eiseley (Courtesy: Wikipedia)

Eiseley’s writing is lyrical, deeply reflective, even melancholic. The essays in this book defy a simple description. Are they examples of nature writing? Memoir? Reflections on archaeology and anthropology? Ruminations on the external and internal worlds of the human? Essays on education and what it means to be a teacher? The essays are drawn from all this, gain synergy, become something larger and memorable. It is rare, I feel, to find emerging from the pen of a scientist, educator, and thinker, prose of such grace and humility.

Still, there are those who would complain of such writing, flay his ornamentation of ideas, rubbish his reflection as mysticism. It is difficult to imagine Eiseley himself being able to publish some of these essays in the literary and nature magazines of the present day. Where are the details? the editors may ask. The specifics, the hook, the motif, thread, conflict, and denouement? Or they might return his manuscript, advising him as one of his colleagues did, in all seriousness, to ‘explain himself’, perhaps ‘confess’ the state of his mind and internal world in the pages of a scientific journal. In Eiseley’s words again:

No one need object to the elucidation of scientific principles in clear, unornamental prose. What concerns us is the fact that there exists a new class of highly skilled barbarians—not representing the very great in science—who would confine men entirely to this diet.

Fortunately, Eiseley does not join the ranks of the barbarians, even as he admits in “Obituary of a bone hunter”, with due humility, that his own scientific career is marked by “no great discoveries”, that his is but a life “dedicated to the folly of doubt, the life of a small bone hunter.”

(Review originally written on 3 October 2013. You can read the book here.)

25 August 2017 / 0 Comments

The mistletoe bird

It is one of those little plants that you hardly notice in the rainforest. It perches on tree branches, like a sea fan on a coral boulder, like a Christmas decoration. At a glance, it seems like another tassel of twigs and leaves emerging from the tree. But look closer and you see that its leaves are smaller and a paler green, tinged with coppery yellow, unlike the tree’s longer, parrot-green leaves. On the tree’s brown branch powdered with white lichen, the little plant arises out of a swollen bulb-like base, holding out dark brown twigs dusted with white spots, like chocolate sprinkled with sugar. Clusters of pinkish-red berries and buds line the smaller plant’s twigs, on the tree bereft of fruit or bud.

The clutch of leaves, berries, and flowers are on the tree, but are not of the tree itself. The little plant is an epiphyte: a plant that grows on other plants. It is a mistletoe.

In the company of mistletoes lives an unassuming little bird that you hardly notice in the rainforest.

  • Small enough to hide behind a leaf, a Plain Flowerpecker, in Dampa Tiger Reserve, Mizoram
  • Pale-billed Flowerpecker with a fruit of the Singapore cherry Muntingia calabura in southern India.
  • Nilgiri flowerpecker planting a mistletoe seed. Photos by Kalyan Varma (http://kalyanvarma.net).
  • Plain flowerpecker with a mistletoe fruit in Dampa Tiger Reserve, Mizoram.

…Read more in the The Wild Heart of India: Nature and Conservation in the City, the Country, and the Wild. An edited version of this article appeared on 19 August 2017 on Scroll.in. It appeared in my blog on the Coyotes Network on 25 August 2017.

31 May 2015 / 0 Comments

Fire and Renewal in Mizoram

Last month, a photo-story of mine appeared in the remarkable People’s Archive of Rural India. Here is an excerpt and some images as a slide show. You can read the full story here Crop cycles: Fire and renewal in Mizoram.

March 15, 2014: Today, farmers of the Serhmun village would start a fire on the hills near Tuilut, to meet a deadline set by the state government. We were in Damparengpui, a remote village in Western Mizoram, from where we wanted Lal Sanga to take us in his autorickshaw up the bumpy, winding hill road to Tuilut.

“Do you really want to go all the way to see that?” he asked. It would turn out to be the loudest, hottest, most spectacular fire that I had witnessed at close range. A deliberate fire that would reduce to ashes what had been, until some weeks ago, a dense bamboo forest. And yet, the fire did not signify destruction as much as it did a new beginning.

Read on…

Or click to view the slide show.

… This post appeared in my blog on the Coyotes Network on 31 May 2015. Read more in the The Wild Heart of India: Nature and Conservation in the City, the Country, and the Wild.

18 February 2015 / 0 Comments

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.

  • At the Boragaon garbage dump near Deepor Beel, Assam (Photo: Jaydev Mandal)
  • The people go first, the stork waits (Photo: P. Jeganathan)
  • Greater Adjutant stork with black kite in distance (Photo: Jaydev Mandal)
  • The floating leaves that carpet Deepor Beel (Photo: Divya Mudappa)
  • Elephant killed by train (Photo: A. Christy Williams)
  • Ducks and geese in flight over Deepor Beel, Assam (Photo: Divya Mudappa)
  • A Greater Adjutant descends from the skies (Photo: P. Jeganathan)
  • Dusk at Deepor beel (Photo: Jaydev Mandal)

…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.

9 December 2014 / 0 Comments

Kalakad: Three Years in Rainforest

(With Divya Mudappa, for a volume commemorating 25 years of Kalakad – Mundanthurai Tiger Reserve)

A place that is marked by the presence of people is not unusual, but a place whose presence itself leaves an indelible mark on people is something extraordinary. In the ancient mountains at the southern tip of the great Western Ghats ranges, sheltering among rocky peaks and rugged slopes draped with tall evergreen forest, lies one such place. A place of beauty and challenge and diversity, which if you have really experienced, you will declare has no real equivalent. And if you have lived and worked there, wherever you go, the place will go with you. It will remain a benchmark, a touchstone, a reference point in felt memory and field experience, against which you will forever measure other places, newer knowledge. A place that does all this, slowly, gently, but inevitably, is Kalakad – Mundanthurai Tiger Reserve.

  • Photo: P. Jeganathan (19 March 1999)
  • Canarium flush (Photo: Arati Kumar-Rao)
  • Malabar Trogon (Photo: Kalyan Varma)
  • Civet scat with Diospyros seeds
  • Bischofia javanica seedlings in the nursery
  • Photo: Kalyan Varma

… This post appeared in my blog on the Coyotes Network on 9 December 2014. Read more in the The Wild Heart of India: Nature and Conservation in the City, the Country, and the Wild.

8 October 2014 / 0 Comments

The Walk that Spun the World

It starts as a walk in a forest in Vermont, which takes me, strangely enough, into the high Himalaya. On a balmy July afternoon, with hesitant clouds massing out west, I set out on foot down the road that passes through the village of Craftsbury Common, Vermont. I leave behind the public library and the silent church whose spire towers over the open meadow of the commons and the white clapboard houses in the village. Ahead, the forest appears, flushed green and dense and dark from summer rains. Open fields, loon lakes, and lush farms adorn the landscape, but it is the tranquil forest that entices me in. Almost involuntarily, I am drawn into the woods, up the winding trail that disappears into darkness.

  • Photo by M. D. Madhusudan
  • Photo by M. D. Madhusudan

… This post appeared in my blog on the Coyotes Network on 28 October 2014. Read more in the The Wild Heart of India: Nature and Conservation in the City, the Country, and the Wild.

24 August 2014 / 0 Comments

Perils of Oil Palm

The Economic Survey Mizoram 2012-13 made a bold claim. After quoting the Forest Survey of India’s (FSI) State of Forest Report 2011 that 90.68% of Mizoram is under forest cover, the Economic Survey claimed, literally in bold letters in a box, that the State’s forests

have suffered serious depletion and degradation due to traditional practice of shifting cultivation, uncontrolled fire, unregulated fellings etc.

The claim is a frequent one made by the state government and the agri-horticulture bureaucracy. Actually, what the 2011 FSI Report said was

Due to change in customary cultivation practices, focus has now shifted to raising horticultural crops… thus preventing secondary growth on old shifting cultivation patches. This has also led to the decline in forest cover assessed in the state.

Thus, Mizoram’s forest cover may be taking a turn for the worse not because of shifting cultivation but because of the State’s push to establish permanent cultivation, notably horticulture crops such as oil palm.

  • An oil palm plantation on a steep slope adjoining Dampa Tiger Reserve, Mizoram (Photo via Wikimedia Commons).
  • Tropical rainforests cleared for oil palm plantation in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo (Photo via Wikimedia Commons).
  • Forest areas have shrunk to fragments as oil palm plantations expand over vast areas in south-east Asian countries, like here in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo (Photo via Wikimedia Commons).
  • Oil palm promotional poster along the highway near Lengpui airport.
  • Oil palm plantations now occupy shifting cultivation fields on slopes and wet rice cultivation areas in valleys.
  • Converting secondary forests and shifting agriculture to oil palm is a travesty of watershed management.

… This post appeared in my blog on the Coyotes Network 24 August 2014 and in Newslink, a daily published from Aizawl, Mizoram, on 20 August 2014. [Original PDF here]. … Read more in the The Wild Heart of India: Nature and Conservation in the City, the Country, and the Wild.

14 August 2014 / 0 Comments

Madagascar Essays

Two essays of mine based on field experiences in the island of Madagascar appeared recently. In these, I write about lemurs, tourism, conservation, and restoration of rainforests in the island. Here are a couple of teaser extracts and links to the essays.

Black and white ruffed lemur in Ranomafana

From ‘Madagascar, Through the Looking Glass’ that appeared in EarthLines in March:

Where are the other trees in the countryside, he wonders? They see only a single palm tree during the drive and stop to photograph it. A few mango trees, Chinese guava, and that is all. Everything else is eucalyptus or wattle or pine. He feels something deep and significant is missing but cannot put his finger on it. Is it the absence of the great forests and other trees that were here once? The missing lemurs, even the giants, and the birds, like the elephant bird Aepyornis maximus – the mythical roc? Is it them? Were they even here, a millenium, two millenia ago? What was here then? He does not know. Does anybody know, he wonders. There appears no trace, no trace at all that he can see or sense, no memory of the past, of life before loss. He has never before seen an entire landscape that has lost its memory.

Read the full piece here: PDF (1.1 MB).

Indri in the forests of Andasibe

From ‘The Call of the Indri’ appearing in this month’s issue of Fountain Ink:

The smallest primate in the world is a lemur. At 30 grams, Madame Berthe’s mouse lemur is just a tad heavier than a sparrow. Imagine a miniature tennis ball, covered in a soft pelt of brown and cinnamon and creamy white, which has sprouted delicate limbs and clasping hands, a long furry tail, and a little head that turns to look at you through large, lustrous eyes. Like all other lemurs—including the iconic ring-tailed lemur, the aye-aye and sifakas, dwarf lemurs and sportive lemurs—this lemur’s natural range is confined within the island of Madagascar. The largest living lemur in Madagascar is the indri. At seven kilograms, the indri weighs as much as a healthy, six-month-old human infant. But instead of a crawling or bawling child, imagine a wild primate, dressed in striking black-and-white, capable of prodigious leaps from tree to tree and endowed with an incredibly loud and mesmerising singing voice.

In October 2012, one month before our visit to Madagascar, Madame Berthe’s mouse lemur and the indri, along with four other lemur species, were listed among the world’s 25 most endangered primate species. … All lemurs larger than the indri are already extinct.

Read the full article here.

16 June 2014 / 0 Comments

The Enduring Relevance of Rachel Carson

It is tough for a single publication or its author to have an impact across nations, cultures, genres, and disciplines. It is tougher still for their appearance on the world stage to spark a social movement, rekindle human values and awareness, and create new mandates for action. And toughest of all is when the author is a woman, a scientist, who must overcome the prejudices of her time−of gender, of notions of progress, of the omnipotence of untrammelled industry−to articulate a clear-eyed, renewed vision of a better world, a cleaner environment, where people do not merely live, but flourish.

If I had to pick one exemplary work from the environmental canon that does this and does it well, it would be the one that burst on the scene on this day, 16 June, all of 52 years ago, in the United States of America and then swiftly encompassed, in its scope and sweep, the rest of the world. The book, Silent Spring, and its author, marine biologist Rachel Carson, are widely credited to be the sparks that lit the fire of the global environmental movement.

  • Google Doodle on Rachel Carson’s birthday, 27 May 2014 (Courtesy: Google)
  • A young girl mixing chemicals without protective equipment beside a pond in a coffee estate, Western Ghats
  • Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring (Photo courtesy: Environment and Society Portal )

… This post first appeared in my blog on the Coyotes Network on 16 June 2014. Read more in the The Wild Heart of India: Nature and Conservation in the City, the Country, and the Wild.

4 June 2014 / 0 Comments

Bingeing on books and the 3QD Arts and Literature Prize

My blog post here on the Coyotes Network on my books and bookstores binge of 2013 is on a list of 50 nominees for the Arts and Literature Prize 2014 at 3 Quarks Daily, a great place on the internet to find good stuff worth reading. Check out the list of posts on the 3QD website here. Over the next week (till June 9), the posts will remain open for public voting from this page. My post is a ways down in the alphabetical list (#46. View from Elephant Hills: Trophies 101: a year of books and bookstores).

Mohsin Hamid, author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, is the judge for the prize. I don’t know if my post is going to make the shortlist, but if it does, how nice to think that Mohsin Hamid would be reading it, too. I had read The Reluctant Fundamentalist on my previous book-reading binge during 2011. It was one of the 100 books I read that year, and was a strangely appropriate and compelling read because I read it just a week before the tenth anniversary of 9/11. I did not read any books by Mohsin Hamid in 2013, but one of the books I bought at The English Bookshop, carried a double recommendation: one from the proprietor, Liesl Olivier, and one from Mohsin Hamid, who wrote the foreword. The book, Sostiene Pereira, which I read in English translation, Pereira Maintains, is sheer pleasure to read anytime.

Anyway, do check out the 3QD page for there is a bunch of nice posts there. Happy reading!

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