Steep cliffs of the eastern coast of Tillanchong

We were camping on an uninhabited island called Tillangchong. The island has always remained a mystery even to researchers as getting access is very difficult. That’s why we chose to come here.

The island has about 5 bays, and in each of these bays extends a reef, and these reefs surface in low tide as they start from the low tide line at a depth of less than one meter and extend all the way into deep waters as deep as 25 meters. The island is about 100 km away from Camorta, in Central Nicobar. The narrow stretch of island has a mountainous terrain, and dense forest estimated at about 80-85 percent forest cover. My aim, in the visit to this island, was to evaluate the biological efficacy of the traditional management systems that exists in and around this island.

For several years, the coastal land of this island has yielded coconut plantations which are traditionally harvested by the villagers of Kakana district in Camorta and Trinket Island in the month of March. During the rest of the year the only other inhabitants are Thai or Burmese poachers, reputed to roam with sophisticated weapons and steal from people or kill on sight. Rumours float around that they are powerfully built and in their own country they are often thieves, murderers, major mafia figures and even former warlords. We have always been warned to be extra cautious while working on this island.

We had arrived four days ago on an expedition to survey corals and sea grass. We reached the island during the early hours of the morning, cleared the camp site, set the fire and put up the tent. That morning we walked along the beach and collected plenty of flotsam. In the afternoon we stretched out under the shade of large Pandanus trees along the shore when at a distance we sighted a dinghy headed straight for us. “These are Burmese poachers,” Emanuel said based on the years of experience to this island, “And as far as I know they are here to poach sea cucumbers.  They won’t harm us and will try to befriend us.” The dinghy stopped 100 m from our camping site and we all ran into the woods. We watched them through the leaves and they watched us through their binoculars. We did not move, they waited and waved at us and after 15 minutes continued their boat ride.

The next day we set off to survey the east coast of the island. We had just moved around the first head rock when we sighted the same dinghy of the previous day. Elrika insisted that we turn back but after contemplating we decided to move on. As we neared, we saw five men busy fishing under the hot sun. Elrika being the only girl on the boat decided it best to go unnoticed. She hid inside the hatch. The poachers looked at us and waved, and we waved back. They were calling us towards their boat; we signalled that we would come later. That afternoon we surveyed the entire eastern coast and got back to our camp late in the evening. That night I did not sleep well and had strange dreams of being attacked. A couple of times I heard the sound of their dingy and hoped that that would not turn to reality.

A rocky outcrop at the southern tip of the island

On the third day we cast off to survey the west coast of the island, a vital part of the island with mountainous volcanic-like terrain and beautiful corals. We raced down the vast blue-green water and headed north of the island. The tropical sun was hot and I felt it burn my skin even through my shirt. Sea birds were dancing along the shore. The water was crystal clear and the sun’s reflection through the water made it even brighter. We were diving and following standard procedures of data collection. Our boat was anchored close to the shore and Emanuel, Euriel and Cain were waiting on the boat.

We finished our dive and as we surfaced, Emanuel screamed “look there are men on the shore”. We got onto the boat and looked carefully. Three men were walking on the nearby shore. Yoayela started the boat engine and we approached the shore. We anchored the dinghy 100m away. Elrika hid.

Near the den of the poacher’s camp; their dinghies almost camouflaged

As we neared, the men ran taking shelter in the coastal forest. We spotted many heads. “They are Burmese and this is their camp site” said Emanuel. We waited for 10 minutes and signalled them to come out. We scanned the shore and at one end we saw 2 camouflaged dinghies. We were curious and we decided to go closer. As we neared, six men appeared from the forest. We stopped the engine and anchored the boat. They waved at us and called us onto the shore. Yoayela, our Karen (a Burmese tribe) field assistant was confident of making conversation as he knew a few words of Burmese. So Emanuel and he jumped into the water and swam toward them while we watched from a distance. Emanuel and Yoayela reached, and the men encircled them. In a while, they were shaking hands and communicating. The Burmese took them to one side of the shore and they sat down in a circle on the sand.

By now curiosity was killing me. I wanted to get to the shore but Elrika stopped me. I had to take a decision. Where would I ever get such an opportunity to meet them again…but a bit of fear held me immobile – What if they kill me? It’s a reasonable risk, I knew. But I couldn’t resist the temptation. “Okay I’m going”, I told myself sternly. I took a packet of biscuits and swam to the shore – for a brief instant I felt heroic.

As I neared the beach, two men approached me with a broad smile; I shook hands with them and gave them the packet of biscuits.   The shorter man kept one hand at all times around his machete slung behind him across his shoulder. He looked at me through the top of his cold, killer eyes and hit his hand on his chest pronouncing loudly: “I am Burma.” In response I hit my hand on my chest and said “I am India”. A tattered T-shirt hung from his muscular shoulders, and a dirty round cap was perched on his angular face. “Tenha yistin yealak” said he and started walking (I got here only yesterday and it took us five days to reach this island). I nodded my face and walked with them. The people at a distance seemed suspicious of my presence. They thought I was from the Navy or Police. But as they saw me closely, they were convinced. So far, so good, I thought. We all shook hands and sat down.

Some of them were comprehensively, celestially and magnificently stoned. They looked at me closely, inquisitive and uninhibited. They tried my snorkelling gear and touched my T-shirt, my curly hair and the tuft of long hair hanging at the nape of my neck. There was nothing invasive about these moments, since they arose from pure and untainted inquisitiveness. One of them climbed a nearby coconut tree, plucked tender coconuts and cut open a few and offered them to us. We soon got involved in a conversation. I realised Yoayela was interacting fluently with one man. His name was Saw Athoo and he too knew the Karen language.  So Yoayela and Athoo played the role of respective translators. He then sought to explain about me to the others by recounting how good I was and that I had met other Karens and he also made up a story about me being adopted and brought up in the Nicobars.

Yoayela, asked them why they chose travelling such a great distance illegally into foreign waters over finding means to earn money back in their hometown. Saw Athoo explained, “Our paddy fields have been submerged due to cyclones and other calamities. Half of the produce from the remaining land has to be given to our government. We are therefore left with no option but to travel foreign waters as it fetches more money to support our families”. I could not help thinking of the differences in our existence. When his family needs he must depart on a tiring dangerous journey. At home, I pop down to the local supermarket and in minutes I can find almost anything I want, although I rarely contemplate the convenience of this luxury.

We spoke of religion, politics, climate, economics, culture, marine life and life in general between the two countries, Yoayela and Athoo translating. We spent almost 1 hour together. As we were ready to leave, the short man gave me a 25-liter jerry can with diesel and said “this is Burma gift.” I refused to accept the gift but he insisted that I take it. In return, I had nothing to offer except my sincerest thanks, once again we shook hands and we swam back to the boat. Back on the boat, Elrika and the others were waiting anxiously. I was bombarded with questions and I answered them all. This was a happy day for me. I had interacted and shared a bond of friendship with strangers who are notorious for their acts.

Friends or foes?

The next day we surveyed the eastern part of the island and the bay where we were camping. At around 4 in the evening I walked through the forest to the small pond to take a much needed cleaning, with Elrika following. I was walking fast in the forest to avoid the mosquitoes waiting to feast on me. All of a sudden, I felt something strike my toe. I continued to walk but just managed to take a few steps and felt a bit uneasy. I sat down to examine the prick on my toe. I thought the thorn of a Pandanus leaf had lodged into my skin. There was a sudden excruciating pain and I could see a drop of blood trickle down. I held my foot tight in agony. Elrika ran toward me with a stick and moved the beast that was all ready to strike again. A sudden fear gripped me; I realized that I was just bitten by a Pit Viper. Elrika calmed me down and suggested that we get back to the camp as quickly as possible. I limped my way back and though the distance was not more than 200m, the path seemed never ending. I reached my tent and slumped on the ground, exhausted.

My new fear

Elrika called out to everyone and told them about the incident. Within minutes Yeaoyela, Euriel, Cain and Emanuel arrived – and the pace of action accelerated. Emanuel looked worried but at the same time he was calm and composed. He ran into the forest and got some jungle medicines, while Yeayola ran to the boat and got the machete. Meanwhile I kept myself busy recounting the details of the incident. In five minutes Emanuel was back with a bunch of leaves. Slowly he squeezed the juice out of those leaves on my entire foot. By now the toe was turning blue and we realized the importance of a lesion in order to let out the venom. Emanuel ordered me to hold my foot and he set off to make a tiny cut with the machete. I was scared. Common sense screamed, “Allow them to make the slit,” but the pain triggered my instinct to react otherwise.  I held my fist tighter and pushed everybody away. Repeated attempts were made to convince me but I was reluctant. Finally I took the needle and pierced myself.  Few drop of blood oozed out. I wiped out the blood but the foot continued to turn blue.

I could see the fear in Elrika’s eyes that manifested into anger because of my stubbornness. “VARDHAN! DO YOU WANT TO LOSE YOUR LEG?” she had the shaft of her hand stretched across my shoulder blade, pushing her weight against mine to pin me down, “Gangrene, Vardhan, that’s what it’ll lead to if you don’t treat it now!” Yoayela turned to her about to say something. He turned back to me, then turned to her and popped the question: “Should we take him to the poacher’s camp? It’s only a half hour away by dinghi.” He reasoned that there would be experienced elders who would be in a position to help me out. I saw the reservation in my heart reflected in Elrika’s eyes. They were Burmese…and poachers. We knew there were 22 of them, of which we had earlier only met six – what if the leader decided to kill us; that they didn’t want us around. But the nearest island with medical facilities was six hours away by boat. It was unanimously decided that I should be taken to the Burmese camp. Emanuel carried me to the boat. Yoayela and Cain started the boat engine and once again we were set off to meet the poachers. It had already turned dark and the only sound I could hear was the thumping of the boat engine and my heart beats, loud and clear, anxious to reach the destination of hope. I was watching the stars and holding my foot tighter. The pain was getting unbearable. I was counting every minute. Though I knew, I quietly asked Emanuel “How long will we travel?”

Forty minutes later, we were at their camp site. We anchored close to the shore and waited for some time. A group of poachers came to greet us on the shore. On seeing Emanuel carry me across the sand they realised something was wrong. Yoayela, explained to them about the snake bite. They examined my toe and tied a tourniquet below my calf muscle. They offered their shoulders for support while I limped along a winding path through the coastal forest that seemed to have no end. All the way they calmed me down and assured me that I would be fine. Mosquitoes and sand flies were having a feast on my poisoned blood.

Through the twists and turns I saw the light of their camp growing stronger and brighter till I was sure we’d reached their den. It was an open space, a clearing of almost 250 square meters – quite a surprise after the narrow winding path. On the left stood a wooden platform on stilts, 2 men stood at the edge of the platform boiling sea cucumbers in metal drums below. Their faces were blazing with the burning fire that made them sweat profusely. One of them smiled at me and came closer while the other continued working. On the right were three large wooden structures on stilts. The walls of these structures were made of bamboo mats. I was soon encircled by men and everybody seemed concerned. They were all talking a language that was difficult to understand but soothing to the ears. I was so amazed at the site that for a moment I forgot about the pain. Not for long.

I was offered to sit on a nearby platform next to a leathery old man. He was smiling, a distinct vast smile that covered almost half his face, as if he had been frozen in the middle of a belly laugh. When he learned of my misfortune, his expression changed to a strange mix of pride and worry. The wrinkles seemed to steady his hands with experience…or was it really mine they were steadying?

He put his hand on my chest and told me to calm down. He offered me water, lit a cigar, and immediately set to work. He instructed the others to hold my foot on the ground while he burned the area around the snake bite with the lit cigar. Emanuel, who had experienced my strength of resistance an hour earlier pinned my back into immobility between his knees and his arms, while three Burmese poachers held my leg down. Watching it made every jab of his burning cigar against my sensitised skin even more painful.

And then he applied some strong smelling balm which set my nerves ablaze. The old man wasted not a minute to heat the surgical blade which would slit a portion of my toe open; at one point I allowed hysteria to take refuge within me. Another man bit me, to remove the venom, but why was he hurting me? I wanted them to stop; just make it stop. And it did. The man stopped. I could hear, I could see, I could smell beyond pain. The pain stopped.

The old man believed in touch as the ultimate means of communion between man and man. He put his hand on my chest and assured me that I would be alright within a week. There was a confidence on his face and his touch. That touch from a stranger had a healing power. Suddenly I felt better. Later I was offered green tea and an energy drink. I gulped it down quickly. I offered my sincerest thanks to everybody around for getting the venom out of my body. One of them knew a few words of English. He asked me inquisitively, “What is your name,” and I answered. I asked him the same and he said “Pochala.” Later he asked me, “When Navy come?” I answered “I don’t know,” and told them, “You should not stay here and move away from here as fast as you’ll can”.

In a while, a pile of rice topped up with gravy was placed on my hand. We had to have dinner before we left the place. I looked at the pile of rice and looked at my watch. We had already spent 2 hours at their base camp and my thoughts were of Elrika. She was alone at the camp and it had turned dark. What must she be thinking? Will she be worried for our safety? Will she find the torch? What will she do sitting alone for so long? What if a wild boar or the crocodile whose tracks were found close to our camp attacked her in the darkness? I had to go back fast. Without hesitation I ate the entire chunk of rice. The food was spicy and tasty. I particularly liked the gravy and the meat pieces. Later I was told that the delicious meat was of a reptile – a Water-Monitor Lizard.

A water-Monitor lizard at the poacher’s camp

Having done that, I stood and said a final good bye to everybody. The old man decided to stay on at the camp. I looked into the old man’s eye and offered my thanks. I don’t know if he understood my feelings, but I guess my body language said everything that I had to say. He patted me on the back and I shook hands with him. Emanuel and Athoo gave me their shoulders and I limped to the shore as the others focused the torch on the small jungle path. The night was bright. I looked towards the water. Moonlight shattered on the water, shedding streaks in the crystal clear water. I was carried to the boat. I said a last good bye to my new friends that I may never meet in my lifetime. I thanked them a million times and I thanked my stars. In the minutes before the dingy started and spluttered away from the shore the short man I met first – the one who kept one hand on his machete while he shook mine with his free hand – held my hand once more and lightly squeezed them as a bond of friendship. I waved goodbye and continued till I could see them no longer.

Back at the camp Elrika was sitting alone on the shore, waiting for me and the others. I told her about all that had happened and she listened intently as if I was telling her a fairy tale. She was happy that they had got the venom out. I was tired and fell asleep in no time. That night I tossed and turned in my tent deliriously wandering through a dream world, alternately sodden with sweat and then racked with the intense foot pain. The morning brought no relief. We packed our tent and our bags. I was once again carried to the boat. In minutes the dinghy started and we moved further away from the island. The sea appeared wide and sluggish; I lay asleep on the boat on a pile of bags, with the hot breeze hitting my face. The sun seared my eyes; flares of cerise and magenta were steaming out of the island. I looked across rile and ruffle of the bay, I tried to fit my feelings within a frame of thoughts and facts. I thought of something my mother had once told me, “There is a kind of luck that is not more than being in the right place at the right time, a kind of inspiration that is not more than doing the right thing in right way, and both only happen when you empty your heart of ambition, purpose, and plan; when you give yourself completely, to the golden, fate filled moment. I was never sure what she meant by “giving yourself to golden fate filled moment” but with this incident I understood what she meant. The entire experience shunned me and probably helped me to understand the dimension of humanity.

*For die-hard fans of Pink Floyd, a disclaimer that I have taken the liberty to caption pictures with some of their song titles—and have tweaked some of the song titles for my own happiness!

In the 1970s, Pink Floyd released the song ‘Pigs on the wing’ in the album ’Animals’. A youthful fascination for the song made me wonder then if pigs could ever fly. The answer is strangely enough ‘Yes’, only if you consider cockroaches to be piggier than regular pigs. Let me explain.

These thoughts came back to me recently as I stood listening to a bunch of nurses and hospital staff fervently singing ‘Hark the herald angels sing’. It was December of 2009 and we were all passengers on a cockroach-ridden ship returning to Port Blair from the Nicobar Islands. My mind wandered back to Floyd’s psychedelic fancies; cockroaches I imagined could be angels hovering above the bunch of men and women heralding in Christmas.

Sheep (after the sing song)

The tub we were on, the M.V. Sentinel, is an old ship still cutting water after more than 30 years at sea. She had been patched with ‘m-seal’ and coal tar over her rusty edges and then painted up to guarantee a certificate of sea worthiness. Her passengers were ostensibly human, but her main cargo seemed to be cockroaches, bed bugs, rats, and other scurrying creatures. The ships blowers and air conditioner gave up on that journey, and, as the crew’s bunks were located closest to the engine room, it must have been hell for them. I suspect it was to avoid a mutiny, that the Captain decided to let the passenger cabins be used by the crew, with only bunk and deck space available for passengers!

The MV Sentinel in all her resplendent glory docked at Kamorta jetty

I was returning from another bout of field work at three sites in the Nicobar Islands. The Islands are where I attempt to fathom the intricacies of natural resource use and management among islander communities in the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami. The Nicobaris lived along the coast, fishing, tending pigs and chicken, and harvesting their coconut plantations – the mainstay of their former economy. The coast harbored a host of natural resources and species within easy reach, some which were protected through local regulations and others through seemingly benign consumption practices. The Islands harbor biological diversity despite centuries of use by indigenous Islanders. Their unique management system has largely consisted of access to resources through permissions and sharing among and between themselves. Cheating was rare and strictly reprimanded. The tsunami not only reduced the available coastal resources, but also created unusual social upheavals amidst the rehabilitative process.

'Echoes' of squeals grunts and clucks from the past

My work in the Islands was stressful as I was constantly reminded of how the lives of the Nicobaris had changed after the tsunami unleashed its destruction four years ago. Uncertainty is the cloud that many Islanders travel on today. Soon after the event some were not sure what to make of their circumstances, with the damage caused by the tsunami and the deluge of rehabilitative aid thereafter. For others, this was the moment to amass some wealth by cadging any government largesse through compensation. For many others, the old life that they had been comfortable with made more sense and they patiently struggled to weave back those strands. Through all of these attitudinal shifts I try to understand how events have affected their sharing and cooperation patterns over the use of natural and domestic resources.

Shine on you crazy diamonds. - A dance session in celebration of a new house 2001

Understandably I was weary and the ticket on the old ship back to the base wasn’t a mood-enhancer. Given the condition of the ship, passengers had two choices, the company of bed bugs and cockroaches in steaming hot bunks below, or rats, cockroaches and the occasional bug for company on the airy deck. I’d been on this journey many times before and knew better than to meekly accept what lay in store. After loafing around on the deck till evening – passing time by staring into the blue sea and skimming through my book – I finally came across a friend, the Second Officer. I stored my precious equipment and belongings in his cabin and he kindly offered me a spare sofa to sleep on. Within minutes however, one of the ship’s bedbugs got to me! My friend handed me a few swigs of ‘Royal Challenge’ whisky saying, ‘Drink, you will soon be in a coma and the bugs will disappear!’ I hate the thought of a roach peering up my nostril, or cuddling up with a bed bug in bed. So I chatted with him till he went on to attend duties at the ship’s bridge and then hurried over to my preferred spot—the SOPEP locker on the upper deck! This is a large box containing life jackets, hoses, helmets and other paraphernalia to tackle pollution at sea; being an elevated region on deck, this was my safest bet.

Goodbye blue sky- at the far side, the remnants of Kakana village Central Nicobar

The dark side of the moon-plantations and coastal forests destroyed after the tsunami of 2004

Astronomy domine- at dusk before the stars take over

I laid myself comfortably and looked up at the ships smoke stacks puffing at the stars above. The eager hospital staff nearby were not finished with their carol singing. I imagined the angel Gabriel as a large cockroach descending upon them and lifting them to heavenly bliss twitching its feelers over them soothing them to sound sleep. I was the one who couldn’t sleep. Gabriel is also the name of one of my key informants from a Nicobarese village where natural resources were wiped clean by the tsunami. Survivors of the tsunami including Gabriel were relocated to the heights on a grassland on Kamorta Island as a precautionary measure, though other factors of livelihood were not considered in this monocular vision of safety after the tsunami. The grasslands are a beautiful landscape that is desolate as far as livelihood resources are concerned; given this predicament the villagers relocated to such regions have survived for the past five years on Government aid and dole. Gabriel is one of the few to bounce back and begin recreating some of what he lost.

On the turning away- Housing style post tsunami for nuclear families on the grassland

The majority lived in pecuniary delight for a while, given the flood of cash compensations and their inability to do much else on the grassland. They live distant from the coast now, with few canoes and functional boats. Fish are far to come by unlike in the past. Feeding their domestic pigs is now restricted to few days in a week, compared to the daily routine before. There are many more uncertainties ahead. I looked up above to see the moon obscured by a ghoulish and cottony cloud on its journey across the sky. The stars literally twinkled and danced about. I felt good on my elevated bed; safe, rocking free on the sea’s swell below the ship, breathing the clean cool air of the night. I didn’t have to worry about a livelihood on the grassland, or of what a governmental rehabilitation program meant, or of who stole coconuts kept aside to feed my pigs. Mosquitoes that come to life at dusk are normal; the heat of the day under tin roofed houses on the open grassland is abnormal. Life before the tsunami was lived under the shade of coconut palms on the beach, with the sea throwing up wonderful surprises on the shore each day, sometimes from distant lands. Rope, wooden planks, plastic or wooden toys, footwear from around the globe, containers of all types from the ubiquitous plastic water bottle to jerry cans and even biscuit packets that arrived every blue moon. There wasn’t much need to go shopping often, as the sea threw up different goods every now and then that could be put to some use or the other. It was possible to innovate with goods available for free on the shore. The rest of the world bought and used those goods, then discarded or emptied their bins into drains that led to the sea. The sea’s currents took over and distributed goods for all those along its shores. There is an old saying – the sea knows how to keep itself clean; what we throw into it, comes back on some shoreline. Islanders the world over and those on the coast have made best of these opportunities with the assortment of trash that washes ashore. Uses of this trash apart, seeing the mess on beaches only increases the disgust I have for urban spoils and chaos.

Welcome to the machine- in the days of wind and oar propelled canoes

Interstellar overdrive-a family waits on the beach to sail to their village

Meddle- a beached Akai television to look at yourself

Material goods came with colonizers from distant lands with the promise of development, but largely to make money and lives of people like themselves more comfortable. The locals were soon won over. The few shops in town were for special occasions when cash was available and rations had to be sourced for lean periods such as the beginning of the monsoon. Otherwise life on the coast was a wholesome existence. Fish and other marine life were within easy reach, coconuts with multiple uses hung just above and the tree’s fronds shaded comfortable stilt houses close to the beach. Many families lived together and ate from a common kitchen, now with ‘permanent shelters’ they all live separate and on cement floors. Around those former stilted homesteads, domesticated pigs squealed and grunted while chickens clucked and crowed providing daily life some percussion. The sea’s breeze kept spirits high along with toddy sessions at the ready for any occasion. Canoes slid into and out of the water whenever needed. There were few motorized boats (if at all) then and the putting of an engine would make every head turn to see who passed by or arrived. Life had surely changed with one tsunami.  For me, life on the SOPEP locker was good except for the thought of them pigs on the wing below.

Comfortably numb- a pleasant toddy session

Shifting my thoughts, I reflected on times when I had seen animals at sea. There were places where I saw real marine angels- manta rays gliding below the sea’s surface like dark shadows from the deep. Such sights were in contrast to the periscope like stare of saltwater crocodiles lying still on the surface of estuarine creeks. There were dolphins and sometimes porpoises that made an appearance while sailing, spinning or somersaulting out of the water or just popping around our dinghy smirking at us slowpokes. The grandest sight was a multitude, literally thousands of dolphins as far as my eye could see. This was when I sailed south to the Nicobar Islands more than a decade ago. It was some sort of mass migration that I’ve never seen again. The ship I was on seemed atom like amidst the sea of dolphins.

Learning to fly

'Hey you'- if you didn't believe that dolphins can smirk!

My biggest surprise was seeing Orcas in the Bay of Bengal one November in 1999. I was returning to the mainland for a short holiday, and saw large fins shearing the water’s surface and moving perpendicular to the ships path at dusk on our second day at sea. Only when I saw the large flipper of one of the males in the pod did I realize they were Killer whales. Seeing a sperm whale spouting into the sky at sea was very different from an occasion when an adult made its way into Port Blair harbor getting stuck and confused for two whole days until it oriented itself seaward and to freedom. Underwater life while snorkeling is another dreamy world of colour, grace and shapes as you glide above the reef peering through the confines of a mask. What’s seen on the surface is usually fleeting, ephemeral, and all about luck. I realized I was lucky to have seen these and more. I was safe from the ravaging cockroaches for now, and I turned myself to sleep.

The narrow way- part 3. Dolphins cavorting

It was the 25^th and I woke up to a beautiful early morning sky tinged orange and blue with a slight but cool breeze. The nurses and hospital staff were still asleep and I had my early morning peace. I sat up cross legged on my prop like crow’s nest, blinking myself awake. The silhouettes of the Andaman Islands were coming into view through the early morning haze. The ship heaved and pitched over a lazy swell taking us closer to urban Port Blair. I reflected on the short visit to my field sites, knowing that it could be a while before I got back again. I idealistically hoped that things would change in the Nicobar Islands and that life wouldn’t be lived on the grasslands forever. My ideal is the beach. Then my eye caught sight of a being below. Just a few yards away from the ship, a huge grey brown shape appeared on the surface, moving in an opposite direction alongside. I thought ‘shark’! but ….in a few seconds, I saw its flat tail and a rounded head that could belong to only one creature- a dugong! It drifted by without a care, being heaved by the swell of the sea and carried on a current past the ship’s wake. A few seconds more and it was gone. The early morning sun reflected off the sea’s surface obscuring any further view. This was it then! Hark the herald O angels! This was a beautiful and rare sight-and a total surprise. An obese but graceful animal that is rare to see was my sight of that morning. I smiled to myself; In the Andaman’s, as in other areas, dugongs are called ‘sea pigs’…nothing close to the notion of being mermaids of the sea, but certainly a lot better than those pigs on the wing. In retrospect those pigs on the wing were the reason I got to see the fat mermaid at the gates of dawn-yet another sight to remember!

See Emily play

The combination of ideas in this account may seem strange (the account is true by the way), but when I wrote them out, I realized that I happen to have a fancy for ‘living in the past’, and have lamented on the changes in lifestyle among the Nicobar Islanders. I do not turn back from that lament, but look forward to the surprises that lie ahead. Through my field research I have come across many instances of resilience among many friends and others islanders I meet. As every turn along the beach can turn up surprises, I do acknowledge that social and ecological processes do take unexpected turns-sometimes churning up beautiful versions of change.

Wish you were here

While coffee is grown by the relatively well-off, farmers in the plains rarely have the capital to invest into seeds and fertilisers each sowing season. They borrow from local moneylenders, who charge annual interest rates between 40 and 300 percent. Few farmers are able to repay these debts, which turn into crippling inheritances passing from father to son.

For decades, this was the saga of farming here. But since the 1990s, a massive but quiet economic revolution has unfolded, driven by trade in a rather unusual commodity.

Cattle dung. Nearly all the 30,000 farmers in these dry-lands keep cattle, mainly as draught animals and also for dung, traditionally an important input into farming. Farmers began selling this humble cow-dung because it fetched a far higher price than chemical fertilisers: for the price of one kilo of cow-dung you could buy 10 times its subsidised chemical equivalent.

But who was buying such expensive manure? It was coffee growers from the adjoining hills. They had had a major windfall in the early 1990s from soaring global coffee prices. The market leaders, Brazil and Colombia, suffered a series of frosts and droughts to which they lost half their produce. This seriously dented the global supply and pushed prices to heights never seen before. Smaller players like India made a killing, bringing massive profits to coffee growers in this region.

Flush with cash, they sought organic manure because it improved the yield and quality of coffee. And of course, conscientious and discerning consumers like you and I were willing to pay higher prices for coffee grown on organic inputs. Does this not sound like a fantastic example of consumer choice benefitting the last link in the value chain—the impoverished farmer of our story who supplied cow-dung to the coffee grower?

But, let’s not stop with the farmer. Let us take this story a step further. Lying just beyond the fields of these farmers is a large and spectacular tract of forest, stretching from Nagarahole and Wayanad, to Bandipur and Mudumalai. Together, these jungles hold nearly a fifth of the world’s remaining tigers and Asian elephants.

Is our demand for organic coffee driving elephants in southern India to the brink?

Which brings us to the twist. The cow-dung that goes into organic coffee, comes straight out of the cattle that graze—illegally—inside the last strongholds of the tiger and the elephant. Farmers have nowhere but these fragile forests to graze their cattle, which number in lakhs. And since the dung trade began, their populations have risen sharply. These cattle convert the forests, with ruthless efficiency, into first class manure. As they have marched in, the forests have retreated and the numbers of wild herbivores—deer, wild cattle and elephants—have declined.

Thus, in a strange juxtaposition only globalisation can bring, the frosts in faraway Brazil and, not to forget, conscientious consumers of organic coffee worldwide, have helped convert some of the best and last remaining elephant and tiger forests in the world first into cow-dung and then into coffee.

So, as you take your next sip of coffee, perhaps you want to check if it tastes… just a little bit strange.

- M D Madhusudan and Pavithra Sankaran

This article appeared in the Times of India dated 25 June 2010.

A farmer surveys his paddy field destroyed by elephants. Photo: Sanjay Gubbi

Shetty is not alone. Across India, lakhs of marginal farmers and pastoralists with small livestock holdings compensate for the lack of physical space for wildlife with vast spaces in their minds and hearts. For many of these people who live on the edges of national parks and wildlife sanctuaries, the losses inflicted by wildlife make all the difference between food and starvation. Yet, many of them do not retaliate or kill these animals.

Not long ago, bears and wolves roamed the European countryside but systematic persecution by farmers and herders, unable or unwilling to bear the killing of their livestock, has ensured their extinction. Recently, when it was suggested that wolves might be reintroduced in parts of Spain, local people threatened to shoot the reintroduced animals. Some years ago, when a jogger in California unknowingly ventured too close to a mountain lion’s cubs, she was killed. After a huge public outcry, the people of California voted to have the animal shot.

In stark contrast, dozens of people lose their lives to elephants in Assam each year. Large numbers of lives are also lost to tigers, leopards and bears across the country. But it is to the credit of our rural populace that they have only demanded safety from these animals, rather than their elimination.

The immense tolerance and accommodation millions of people in India make for wildlife, extends a huge and hugely unacknowledged subsidy to conservation. But for their forbearance, it would be almost futile to attempt conservation in a densely packed country of a billion. But this tolerance is not without contradictions; the same farmer who may forgive an elephant for pushing him deeper into debt may also set a snare to catch deer or pigs for an occasional dinner. Persecution and tolerance may seem incompatible, but they do co-exist in the same cultures.

Tolerance must not be seen as a substitute—but certainly as a very strong supportive element—to conservation action. However, this support cannot continue while people’s burdens continually increase. Farmers and pastoralists across India are known to lose around 15% of their produce or livestock to wildlife each year. These losses are driving rural poverty and people’s patience is wearing thin. Since 2008, in Karnataka alone, over 50 elephants have been electrocuted by live wires laid by farmers desperate to protect their crops. Increased desperation always means reduced tolerance.

An elephant feeds on a paddy crop while a farmer watches. Photo: Sanjay Gubbi

The people who share space and resources with wildlife are among the poorest and most disempowered in our country. Conservation efforts today are focused almost entirely on securing wildlife habitats and policing forest boundaries, but they ignore the costs the mere presence of wildlife can place on human communities nearby. If we do nothing to reduce the burdens conservation places on them, or at least to share in their costs, we will only ensure that the cultural space they make for wildlife is lost. And that loss is bound to leave us immeasurably poorer, both ecologically and culturally.

- M D Madhusudan and Pavithra Sankaran

An edited version of this article appeared in the Times of India dated 28 May 2010.

Our being here is a violation surely, another sacred space invaded in the increasing commodification of voyeuristic experience, and if I am not entirely uncomfortable with being part of this grave-diving party, it is because we are not the first ones here. The giant sweetlips, motionless above the drop-off gives us a patient, tired look as we disturb his hunting ground. There is a quiet disdain in his assessment: with lycra skins, plastic fins, silicone eyes and artificial respirators, we are more synthetic than organic, and rather inelegant aliens in his silent universe. I guess he knows from experience that if he tolerates our presence another hour, either our weak physiologies or our primitive technologies will force us to surface leaving the busy shipwreck to get on with the long, elaborate business of decay.

And as you surface, you look back once more at the wreck below.  From out in the blue the ship is a laceration on the face of the reef, a deep gash that starts at 17 meters and continues until it meets the breakers at the surface. The island of Minicoy has several such wounds on her reef face – steam ships that ran aground on trans-Indic voyages, carrying grain and cotton and spices and travellers between Europe and the Indies.  After 1885 the wrecks are less frequent after a lighthouse was erected on the southern tip of the island.  The lighthouse is manned still; the lighthouse keeper is a gentleman in the old manner – a self-styled naturalist, a collector of flotsam, keenly aware of the historical symbolism of his post, a proud custodian of his craft.  He accompanies us up the winding iron staircase of the lighthouse, and from this height you can just about make out where the wrecks of old wounded the reef before this tower was built.

Wounds heal.  After the grinding crush of iron keel on aragonite coral, after the life rafts are deployed and the passengers rescued, after the cargo holds are salvaged and the ship stripped of every useable part, the reef calls on its resources to try, as best it can, to repair the tear in its ecological skin.  The fish are the first to venture back, and for species that thrive on structure, a fresh wreck can be choice real estate.  The benthos takes a little longer.  Coralline algae will eventually cover the metal remains, and where there is coralline algae, coral is not far behind.  Slowly, the aragonite will grow back again, and although the scars will always show, the reef does its best to embrace the alien structure and make it part of its own complex framework.  Given enough time, the wreck is little more than a cicatrix on the bark of the reef, a mild blemish of rusting metal and flourishing coral.

The reef is good at mending bruises.  From its pre-Cambrian origins, it has spent most of its existence on a turbulent earth, shifting and gurgling with earthquakes and tsunamis, storms and high waves, extreme tides and shifts in temperature.  And by now the threats of ocean warming and El Niño events on coral reefs are familiar tropes to a media-suffused populace.  We have all seen, and  are perhaps even a little weary of those dramatic images of bleaching coral and dying reefs.

When a small disturbance scales up to catastrophe like this, the self-healing capacities of the reef are put seriously to test.  Yet even here, a healthy reef can recover.  Much is dependent on having good neighbours close at hand. If a few of these reefs escaped the big catastrophe, they can seed the bare spaces with coral. Like white blood cells to the site of a lesion, a flood of coral spat will descend on the spot made dead and vacant by the disturbance, and occupy every free space.  And if the reefs still have a fair complement of grazing herbivores – surgeonfish, parrotfish and the like – those opportunistic algae that can quickly bully out the coral will be kept under check. Given a period of relative calm, and this spat will quickly grow, engaging in a serious-as-death struggle with its compatriots for a space in the sun. Within a decade or so, the wound is mended.

Even in a healthy reef, scars remain long after the healing.  Some species of fish and coral may never recolonize a reef if their populations fail.  These absences often go completely unrecorded, because we often have no baselines to help us determine the loss.  The species that remain have strange demographies, dominated by young individuals, or with some ages completely missing from the population.  These populations, like some post-war generation of lost young soldiers, will carry the signature of this loss for a long time after the disturbance has gone.

Back down in the reefs of the Minicoy you can read this signature everywhere. Minicoy bears the burden of its isolation heavily when hit by large disturbances.  The once effulgent abundances of branching Acropora are there no longer, and you suspect (although you have no way of knowing) that many of the genus are probably locally extinct.  The coral that remain are either very large – survivors of the last mass bleaching – or very small – individuals that managed to recruit to the reef after the event.

As you descend to the wreck for one last time, you realise, that viewed in one way, the scornful dismal of the sweetlips on your previous visit, was actually a fair metaphor for the wreck itself.  Much like you, the wreck is a bionic entity – and after all these years, the identities blur between human and natural forging.  This is not new of course. The ability of coral to take human structures and make them its own is well known.  And it does not take long for us to wonder if this ability can be used to help reefs in the process of wound healing – hurry along a repair that would otherwise take decades.  It is a neat idea surely, and it appeals to the engineers in us.  We are a meddling lot, and it is difficult to leave well-enough alone. Already, on experimental and larger scales, there are efforts afoot to restore reefs through artificial means, using many of the same techniques the reef uses when dealing with a shipwreck.  Concrete blocks of different configurations are being cemented to the reef, waiting for recruits of coral to descend.  Complex electrified contraptions are being established, with the purported aim of encouraging calcium deposition.  For many, even these relatively passive means are not fast enough.  Nurseries of coral are being constructed, where coral from the reef is broken into bits and coaxed to grow into individual heads.  These will later be taken and cemented to the reef, to produce, in the reasoning of the coral nurserymen, instant reefs.

If I come across as a tad sceptical, it is not because I do not believe that these techniques of engineering reefs are a solution.  What I am not entirely sure about is what problem they are a solution for.  The dilemmas the reef face today from local and global pressures are complex ecological dilemmas, and trying to solve them with simple – dare I say, simplistic – engineering solutions is appealing surely, but almost certainly blinkered.  If it is our meddling that has brought reefs to the current brink of disaster, it is a vain presumption to believe that all it will take is a little more meddling to right those wrongs.  More seriously for me, it appears to absolve us of deeper responsibilities – to understand the underlying processes that drive the reef’s immune system in the face of disturbance and catastrophe, and to ensure that these processes are protected.  This takes more imagination of course.   It requires a certain humility to recognise the boundaries of our own accomplishments. And it requires an intellectual investment beyond cement and epoxy. In the absence of this knowledge, the future for reefs is uncertain. We are traveling without a lighthouse here, and shallow strands are everywhere.

A version of this post first appeared on the NDTV blog site.

This is where tourism offers us a very different way of valuing and utilising forest resources. The consumption of wood, meat and ore may sustain livelihoods and foster commerce. But such use also renders a resource finite. The recognition that these uses leave us with less of the resource for the future, has prompted us to explore sustainable ways of using nature to support livelihoods and further commerce. Tourism, as opposed to mining or logging, does not involve extraction and seems the ideal way of keeping a resource intact, while continuing to derive economic benefits.

Ecotourism, goes one step further. Not only does it mean commercial but non-extractive use of forests and but also sharing of economic benefits with local communities. To be equitable and successful, ecotourism also has to offset the loss of livelihood for people who depend on extractive use of the forest. Unless a different way of making a livelihood is offered to the villagers who gather honey, collect firewood or graze cattle in the forest, preventing them from removing these products from the forest is not just unfair; it simply will not work.

If that is the philosophy of ecotourism, how has it fared, in practice? Are we, to paraphrase a government slogan, “taking only memories and leaving only footprints” when we holiday in our wildlife sanctuaries and national parks?

(Bandipur Tiger Reserve) Feeding wildlife encourages animals to come to the road, causing accidents and wildlife roadkills. (Credit: M D Madhusudan)

Let us look a little more closely at our footprints. We leave them behind in the form of large, old trees cut to make roads within forests so that we can go see wildlife. In the form of vast numbers of vehicles entering sanctuaries and parks on these roads each day. In creating and maintaining artificial ‘view lines’ on either side of forest roads by regularly clearing natural plant growth. In fact, our demand for wildlife holidays has caused the forest department to keep parks like Bandipur Tiger Reserve open to visitors even during the summer, taking staff away from fire prevention and control. We even demand evening campfires in our resorts, burning wood cut from the very forests we have come to see. In a place like Bandipur, which receives around 400 tourists each day, these footprints add up to a massive but unseen impact on wildlife and their habitat.

As for sharing the economic benefits, we must ask if and how the rapid growth of wildlife tourism has benefitted local people. Your weekend may have been made memorable by the herd of elephants you saw on the morning safari. But did you know the same placid herd had just then ambled back from a raid in a jowar field right behind your resort, ruining a farmer for the year? In fact, the man who carried away your breakfast plate may have tilled the very land your resort stands on; unable to bear the losses from crop raiding elephants year after year, he may have sold it.

While local communities certainly have an impact on the forests they depend on for firewood and grazing, they also subsidise conservation in ways that have almost never been measured. Were it not for the immense tolerance of local people, there would be far fewer of these wild animals for us to see. As tourists who derive the benefits of sanctuaries and parks, do we not have a responsibility to share in their costs?

One way of offsetting costs is to provide employment to local people. Few, if any, resorts make it a policy to hire people from villages around the resort; it is far cheaper to employ a migrant labourer. A noteworthy exception is the government-run Jungle Lodges and Resorts where around 80% of the staff in most of their properties are from local communities.

The form of ecotourism we encounter today achieves neither of its original goals. In fact, it enlarges our footprint on the forest and totally ignores the second commandment of giving back to local communities. But this can change. Ecotourism businesses, like any other, care about consumers, not crusaders. You and I can ask the right questions of our resorts, demand responsible behaviour and achieve a change that no amount of regulation can bring about.

- M D Madhusudan and Pavithra Sankaran

A version of this article appeared in the Deccan Herald on 11 May 2010.

Biologists and philosophers have many lofty answers to the deeply fundamental questions of human existence. Ask Richard Dawkins and he will, delving into the firmaments of the science of evolutionary biology, essay answers to the question he posed in the opening of his famous book The Selfish Gene: why are people? The answers provide one view of our existence. Ask the philosophers and they will thread you through the arguments as to what sets apart us from them, and how we know we are who we are. The religions and the prophets have their own answers, too, some deep, many dubious. For me, as yet, the glimmerings of an understanding hover at the periphery of my vision, but is clouded by an intellectual cataract that needs to be lifted.

We are a species named Homo sapiens, meaning the man that knows or the man who is wise. Sometimes it seems strange that sapiens, a Latin word meaning wise, is applied to our species. Behind and beyond our intellectual and cultural achievements is a litany of apparently senseless acts—war and plunder, environmental destruction and pillage, racism and genocide, crimes and violence—which questions the assumption that we are the wise ones. Are we truly sapient? I, for one, am not so sure.

We are also called human beings. I am not a trained philosopher, yet it seems to me this is a term of firmer substance. It suggests a species that has something above a mere functional existence, it hints at the possession of a mind of non-trivial cognitive capacity, and of certain existential qualities of perception and self-awareness. To me, it suggests and in some ways is inseparable from, a refined quality of sentience.

The dictionaries define sentience as the state of having or feeling sensation, or our faculty or readiness to perceive sensations. We may perceive our own sentience and those of others in many ways. A neurologist may see it in the firing of neurons in the brain as clearly as a behaviourist may see it in the turn of a head. It may be in the dilation of the pupils in the eye, in a lump in the throat, or, during the aftermath of an emotive moment, in an averted glance or in the words said or left unsaid. We feel it; it affects us.

Are we a sentient species? Sure, we are.

If we take sentience to refer to the form of perception or awareness of sensations emanating from our sense organs, we are clearly not alone, as a species on this planet, in being sentient. Yet, sentience has also been defined as “an example of harmonious action between the intelligence and the sentiency of the mind”. Applied to us, this view of sentience suggests the need to strike a harmony between our intelligent understanding of the world and our mind influenced by sentient perception. It suggests a marriage between reason and affect. A marriage that, if performed, may justify our claim, as a species and as individuals, to uniqueness.

I think of human sentience often, in the context of conservation. I think of it when a burst oil well a mile under the sea spews, not spills, millions of litres of oil into the open ocean. When equatorial rainforest of exhilarating diversity is cut and burned to make way for a vast plantation of one species. When the furrows of old roads and mines are still raw on the hills and the metal claws of heavy vehicles gouge for more. And when the rail track sings to the passing of an express train—sings a ringing requiem for the four elephants left behind, their life ebbing away in stunned and bloody repose. I think of it, even, when the man, by the side of the road, raises his crowbar to bring it down on the head of a small, harmless, and nearly-blind burrowing snake, just because it is a snake.

Image courtesy: Kalyan Varma (www.kalyanvarma.net)

Aren’t these, and many other human-nature interactions, matters that not only concern us, but affect us? Should we then approach solutions for a reconciliation purely through reason and science, as is a common refrain (including of this blog), or include in our ambit human emotion and feeling? Can we build a popular movement, patriotic to a cause as to a nation, if we were to use only logic and dry fact, ignoring sentiment and disposition, music and arts, poetry and passion? Should we always seek answers in our intellect rather than in our humanity? In today’s world, where credible science is called for to inform debate and decisions, human emotion and feeling is treated as an errant child to be kept in rein—side-lined, side-stepped—or as an unwanted churl who would confuse rather than clarify. In the process, a great and material part of human existence is brusquely overlooked.

I think an approach built on science, alone, cannot help conservation. We must include human sentience. Both reason and affect must be brought to bear on conservation problems.

The idea is not new, yet it is seems worth articulating, reiterating. Fortunately, threads of support for this approach are emerging from diverse sources.

First, an over-reliance on science alone may turn out to be counter-productive (or at least insufficient) as seen in climate change campaigns. George Monbiot, writing about “The Unpersuadables” says:

The battle over climate change suggests that the more clearly you spell the problem out, the more you turn people away.

He sounds lost “that there is no simple solution to public disbelief in science”. I cannot help wondering if an approach that did not rely only on science would help more.

Understanding human emotions and incorporating that into how we deal with human-wildlife interactions, conflicts, and conservation issues is now being suggested as an important direction to take. The discipline of conservation psychology is also taking shape, hoping to link the understanding of human behaviour with conservation. Writing in the book Who cares about wildlife? Michael Manfredo presents developing ideas and results of research on the effects of emotions on memory, decision processes, norms, values, attitudinal changes, and health. His tentative conclusion:

Emotions act with cognition to direct human behaviour. They play an important role in memory, decision making, and attitude change; they clarify roles and social structure… Wildlife professionals should re-examine the widely held view that emotional response issues are trivial, unimportant, or non-informative. Emotions merit careful consideration and thoughtful response.

He also quotes Jon Elster, who says, more pithily:

Emotions matter because if we did not have them nothing else would matter.

Another line of argument comes from the work and ideas of the renowned primatologist Frans de Waal in his recent book The Age of Empathy: Nature’s lessons for a Kinder Society. de Waal opens his book with the questions:

Are we our brothers’ keepers? Should we be? Or would this role only interfere with why we are on earth, which according to economists is to consume and produce and according to biologists is to survive and reproduce?

Linking both ideas of competition-is-good-for-you to their origins around the time of the Industrial Revolution, de Waal presents a survey of modern research in animal behaviour, primatology, and anthropology, where there is compelling evidence for the importance of empathy in moulding social relationships. He examines social animals from dogs to dolphins, monkeys and apes, wolves and elephants.

If man is wolf to man, he is so in every sense, not just the negative one.

He also does not shy away from talking about emotions and moods, greed and gratitude, attachments and morality. I have not read the complete book yet but the previews seem tantalisingly pertinent. “What is it that makes us care about the behaviour of others, or about others, period?” Can we probe the hidden wells of human empathy for a more benign and graceful citizenry on this planet?

The foundations of a conservation ethic must be built on human sentience. And for this to work it may need to sincerely garner the support, not only of conservation scientists, but of painters and musicians, poets and songwriters, playwrights and psychologists, humourists and social workers. It needs, as is often said, to rebuild burnt bridges across the arts, humanities, and the sciences. It needs to bring back into serious discourse our motivations, emotions, passions, sensitivity, and humanism. Then, perhaps, in the years ahead, we will tread our path on planet Earth as Homo sentiens.

Hornbills are hunted both for cultural reasons (the casques are used as an adornment) as well as for trade

Hunting is perhaps one of the oldest ways humans have interacted with wildlife. Over time, as we honed this ancient skill, we systematically drove several animals to extinction. Mastodons, woolly mammoths and moas (giant, flightless birds that lived in New Zealand until the 15th century), were all given the final shove by human hunters, unaided by guns or gunpowder. With modern weapons in hand, we did even better. Passenger pigeons, whose massive flocks once darkened American skies, were shot by the thousands in the presumption that they could never become extinct. But they did.

Closer home, animals like the wolf and tiger teeter on the brink. Their once vast ranges are now mere fragments but still, neither they nor their prey are safe from poison, snare or shotgun. Even without killing the last individual, hunting can reduce animal numbers to a point where extinction becomes inevitable. Such pervasive hunting has taken a heavy toll on wildlife, leaving behind silent, empty forests.

The modern bullet has replaced the ancient arrow in many parts of the world, but continues to be shot for much the same reasons. In some of India’s remote regions, people still depend on wild meat for protein. In many tribal rituals of the northeast, offerings of wild meat are as much de rigueur as coconuts in a south Indian temple. In parts of northwestern India, a boy gains entry into manhood when he has killed his first animal. A bludgeoned leopard could save a villager many sleepless nights and a few goats. But there are newer trends as well: growing global markets for animal body parts have driven hunting to unprecedented levels.

It is no surprise then that hunting remains widespread across India despite stringent laws. When those laws came into force in 1972, an activity with complex social and cultural roots became illegal almost overnight. People then had two choices: give up hunting or pursue it clandestinely. In some places, the law combined with new forms of recreation to draw people away from hunting, but neither has been able to stop it completely. In many places in south India, the widespread availability of affordable farmed meat, notably broiler chicken, has greatly reduced the hunting of wildlife for the pot. But even in such places, wildlife continue to be threatened by strong cultural preferences for wild meat.

Although we know the problem has social, economic and cultural roots, we still treat its eradication entirely as a law-enforcement exercise. Further, this task is placed in the hands of ill-equipped, poorly-motivated and sometimes corrupt forest department personnel who don’t always make the best guardians of the law.

While the law surely needs strong enforcement, it also needs solid public support on the ground. Such support can be created only when the socioeconomic roots of hunting are addressed in a culturally sensitive manner. Kaziranga National Park, for instance, may enforce the law by shooting suspected poachers at sight. In contrast, Namdapha Tiger Reserve has won support for the same law by addressing a traditional hunting community’s needs in education, healthcare and livelihood. The difference in their approach may hold the key to eliminating hunting: the simplicity of a single solution is seductive, but context-specific solutions built on an understanding of local ecology and society perhaps stand a better chance.

- M D Madhusudan and Pavithra Sankaran. An edited version of this article appeared in the Times of India, 30 April 2010.

See also: Wildlife Valhalla by Rohit Naniwadekar and Karthik Teegalapalli

(posted on behalf of Amruta who is right now still bravely roaming the forests of Arunachal, counting her beloved Toko plants along the way...)

Kumar, Khem (my field assistants) and I were in Khari, which is an anti-poaching camp along the southern boundary of Pakke Wildlife Sanctuary & Tiger reserve in Arunachal Pradesh.

Forest at Khari

Our work plan was to explore forest patches here and locate as many populations as possible of our study species, Livistona jenkinsiana (commonly known as the Toko tree). The Toko is an ecologically and economically important Arecaceae member found in the tropical forests of Arunachal Pradesh. Several animals such as hornbills, squirrels, porcupines and wild boars are observed to feed upon its fruits. Several tribal communities across North-east India are known to extract their large leaf fronds to use as roof thatching material and the seeds are used for consumption as a substitute for betelnut. The interesting thing is that unlike symbolic tropical plant species, the Toko exhibits clumped and patchy distribution, restricted to specific microhabitat conditions.

An adult Toko tree loaded with fruits

In Pakke there are quite a few areas with substantial populations of Toko. However local communities continuously harvest the species and often the entire tree is cut down. Due to its increasing rarity in many areas in the wild, we thought it would be vital to study its reproductive ecology in this undisturbed but fragile rainforest ecosystem. Thus the first step was to explore the forest and get acquainted with the pattern of its patchy distribution.

Toko leaf: Its big size and waterproofing texture makes it a perfect roof-thatching material.

It was the month of August and so it wasn’t surprising that our day had begun with heavy showers.  We had our usual early meal and then sat around waiting for the rain to stop. In a couple of hours it stopped but the sky was still very dark. However our low ration levels kind of forced us to be optimistic about the weather and go ahead with the planned work for the day. So, Kumar, Khem and I pulled on our leech socks, packed some biscuits and cucumber (our usual lunch) made sure our equipments and observation sheets had enough water-proofing and set out to see what the day had to offer us.

The river was wide and high and the current really strong. So instead of walking along the river, which would have been easier, we decided to try and find the way through the forest. After a lot of bush bashing and getting ourselves stuck in knee-deep mud a few times, we reached the area we wanted to explore. Three of us were proving to be a great team. Kumar was doing a grand job of finding the way through the forest and Khem was  extremely happy to  use the GPS. It was with some difficulty that I managed to fill in the data sheets without getting them too wet. The leeches however were proving to be a real nuisance and we were struggling to work and get rid of them at the same time.  They would get lodged in your armpits, on your hair, stomach, back, face and even on your tongue. Kumar couldn’t stop laughing when he saw me trying to take a leech out of my mouth. He was probably wondering how I managed to let it in.

We had a few hours of productive work. The most exciting part for me was the sight of the first patch of Toko population that we came across. There were one-year seedlings, successive stages of saplings, sub-adults and adults all growing together. What it looked like to me was that in the forest this huge joint family of Toko for some reason had chosen to live on this hill for generations. I thought to myself, this is going to be very interesting, to try and find out what results in this patchy and clumped distribution of Toko. Is it (i) resistance to density dependent mortality below the parent tree in specific micro-climatic conditions, or is it ii) dispersal by specialized animal species that defecate the seeds in clumps in specific micro-climatic conditions required, for germination and recruitment? Or there is something more complex going on?

One-year old seedling of Toko. This one leaf after many years will grow up to provide hundreds of fruits essential for survival of various animals in the forest

One year old Toko seedling

Toko saplings of different ages

The sky slowly started getting dark again and my GPS started losing signal. The leeches also decided to be more affectionate towards us. It finally started drizzling, and this soon turned to a heavy shower. Leeches and the heavy rain didn’t stop me though and I continued on my Toko search. I think subconsciously I was enjoying the happiness of overcoming the initial nervousness I had, about my decision of working in these interior rainforests of India. This was my very first endeavor of learning about these mysterious forests. Although extremely excited about starting work in a completely new place with new people, I remember how anxious I was about being able to deal with leeches all over me, walking long distances in these dense unknown forests, the possibility of contracting malaria and independently applying myself to collect meaningful scientific data. The happiness was probably about attaining this feeling of comfort and the increased level of confidence about working and living in this new place.

Kumar and Khem however had completely given up on looking out for Toko and were busy removing leeches from different parts of their body with irritated and annoyed faces. I decided it was time we started walking back. Kumar was relieved to hear this and I guess as a return favor said, ‘Abhi hum log naya aur chota rasta se jayega, jungle ke aur ander ander se’ (We will go back through a new and shorter path which goes from further inside the forest). I was happy about this, since it meant being able to explore a new portion of the forest. It was a beautiful patch of forest with small meandering streams with crystal clear water running over pebbles and liana’s hanging over it. The rich soil, the trees, the sound of water and leaves, everything appeared magical and stunning. Kumar and Khem were walking in front and I was drifting behind, thinking how blessed I am, to be able to wander in these remaining patches of pristine rainforests.
My thoughts were broken by some sudden noise coming from my right and when I looked up, I saw a ‘Gaur’ running in my direction and it was not more than 10 meters away from me.  My first reaction was to run but then I saw its huge horns coming towards me and all I could remember are two thoughts running through my head. First, the Gaur is a little distance ahead of me and is running perpendicular to the path I am on, so if I keep running I am definitely going to get hit’. The second thought was ‘what’s going to happen next?’ I still don’t know if it was a natural instinct, but at that very precise moment I fell down just at the right time. When I sat on the ground I thought, ‘well, Amruta, you have probably escaped the horns but what about the feet? If they touch you even by mistake you are going to be in trouble!’ I closed my eyes and experienced what sounded like the the heaviest leap ever, over me. But that was it. When I got up I saw Kumar and Khem were making loud noises with their ‘daov’ (a local design of a machete) and the gaur was turning back. I ran and stood with Kumar and Khem and added to the noise. The Gaur turned back, but ran in the opposite direction to where we were standing. Once the Gaur had gone out of sight, the three of us looked at each other and spontaneously smiled at each other. Maybe we were happy I was unharmed or maybe we wanted to ask each other if we had imagined whatever just happened.

Kumar examined me and couldn’t believe that I had managed to escape without even a scratch on my body. We went to see the place where I had fallen and to find out from where and why the Gaur had come running the way it did. What was surprising was none of us had noticed the animal until it came so close.  None of us got a chance to tell each other to get prepared to run or defend ourselves. We think it was unlikely that it was standing there and just charged me. What was more probable was that it was already running away from something like a tiger or wild dogs and that I just happened to come in its way while it was running to save its own life. I guess only the Gaur knows why it was running at that speed.

Footprint of Mithun that landed over me

We saw the tree that the animal had banged his huge horns on, and had I not sat down, my condition would probably have been worse than that tree. What made me feel good about myself was that I did not panic at any point during those 10secs. I guess in such situations no one does since there is no time to panic! It is difficult to describe the exact feeling but I believe I felt lucky, happy, special and thrilled about those 10 seconds.

Wounded tree

On the way back we were discussing about the incident. I had been in the park for nearly three months and not seen a wild Gaur and I kept saying to Kumar and Khem, “etna din jungle mein gur raha hai, phir bhi Gaur nahi dekha ab tak.” (I have been roaming in the forest for so many days but still haven’t seen a wild Guar). Khem now said, “apko Gaur dekhna tha na! dekho! aur nazdik se dekho! (You wanted to see a Gaur right? Do you want to see a Gaur any closer now?)?” We all laughed.
What a day it had been. I thanked nature for taking care of me and making one more day of my life so beautiful and special.

The name given him was R. K. G. Menon, but that was not how he was known. He had a nickname of long standing—60 years, no less—emerging from the hallowed corridors of the Madras Christian College: Cutlet. He was always, to all of us who knew him, just Cutlet.

R. K. G. Menon (Cutlet)

Imagine a rugged man turning into his fifties carrying out, during 1977-79, a full-fledged field study of the behaviour of blackbuck at Guindy National Park and Point Calimere, initiating systematic waterbird counts in Vedanthangal, carrying out and publishing in 1982 what were perhaps the first population estimates for an ungulate in India using line transect techniques, and all of this years ahead of any similar effort by other Indian, university-trained and funded researchers and field biologists. Imagine a man without a formal college degree or training or affiliation, who yet kept pace with the advances in scientific thinking in animal behaviour and ethology and could not only discuss this with clarity but also apply it in his own work. Cutlet was this and more.

Till his last days, watching blackbuck and interpreting their behaviour would delight him no end.

I used to meet Cutlet during meetings or field trips of the Madras Naturalists’ Society (MNS), an organisation he helped to found. There was little close interaction of the sort that came later, because in the initial days I was merely learning the ropes of basic birdwatching, interested in just getting outdoors, all excited with every new species I saw, and little else. Even then, at the Adyar estuary and other places, I remember him, spouting clouds of smoke from his pipe, teaching me to use my binoculars properly, and telling me to take detailed field notes, to count the number of birds and not stop with just identification, and to observe their behaviour. “Write it down. If you think its all in your memory, it is not worth it. It’s just kaka-pee [crow-shit]“, he would say, or something similar and with more choice adjectives that I, unfortunately, cannot repeat here.

Cutlet (in centre) at the Adyar estuary with friends (Photo courtesy: V. Santharam).

It was almost exactly twenty years ago, when he had crossed 60 years of age and I was dawdling through my late teens, that I got to watch him in the field. We were both part of a small group of nature enthusiasts from MNS trekking to Konalar in the Anamalai hills. Although he kept company with us on the trek and in the evenings, he would take off on his own through the grassland during the day to sit quietly somewhere observing tahr or langur or whatever else caught his attention that day. He would not brook crowds, noisy or otherwise, even of nature enthusiasts, that came to see wildlife but did not observe. And he would make no bones of telling this to his companions or to comment on this in his writings as well. One day, we found a dead sambar nearby and Cutlet observed the broken neck and patiently tracked the signs around, showing us signs and scats and interpreting based on what he knew of the carnivores, that this was a tiger kill. On that trip, I learnt from him some of the hallmarks of fieldwork, about good backpacks and footwear, usage of binoculars and deprecation of cameras, about silence and observation, field clothing and sleeping bags, not to mention a number of hilarious jokes, songs, and limericks in the evenings.

Cutlet was a well-read man with a scientific temper, a character that distinguished him from many other naturalists around him. I do not know of him missing a chance to immediately borrow and eagerly read any interesting book, whether it was field research or a serious scientific text or monograph on animal behaviour, ethology, and evolution. The list of books and authors that I was introduced to and read thanks to him is a large list, indeed. The Mountain Gorilla by George Schaller was a defining book that turned me towards field research in wildlife. Cutlet did not just tell me to read it, but helped locate what was perhaps the only accessible copy in Chennai: from the shelves of the library of IIT Madras, where the book had lain almost unnoticed. Not having the means himself to purchase many books or build a private collection, Cutlet was heavily dependent on libraries and friends for access to books or journals. He pointed me to the Connemara library to find Gorillas in the Mist by Dian Fossey, or old volumes of the Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society. Off to R. Selvakumar’s house to request copies of other books by Schaller to read. Head to the British Council Library for Niko Tinbergen’s The Study of Instinct. And so on.

The authors and books I got to read and discuss threadbare with him in his one-room rented house in Gandhi Nagar, Adyar, are a revealing list, when I think of them now. He’d read all of them, and if I managed to get a copy, he often read them a second time. In ethology, books by Niko Tinbergen (The Study of Instinct, extracts from The Herring Gull’s World) and Konrad Lorenz (King Solomon’s Ring, On Aggression) topped the list. From these, we would chat about Tinbergen’s four questions, about interpreting super-normal stimuli and intention movements, about displacement activities and imprinting. More textbook-like among the books were McFarland’s Animal Behaviour and Dimond’s The Social Behaviour of Animals. Among field studies, we would discuss classics like Fraser Darling’s A Herd of Red Deer and David Lack’s The Life of the Robin and a whole host of more recent books from field research. George Schaller on lions, gorillas, deer and tiger would recur. Hans Kruuk on hyenas, Douglas-Hamilton, Cynthia Moss, and Joyce Poole on African elephants, Clutton-Brock on red deer and primates, David Mech on wolves, and, of course, out of his special interest in blackbuck, Fritz Walther and Elizabeth Cary Mungall on gazelles and antelopes. I got to read many of these thanks to the libraries at CES and the Indian Institute of Science and through the help of Raman Sukumar.

Cutlet was also up-to-scratch on the rapidly growing field of evolution and sociobiology. He’d read and could hold forth on E. O. Wilson’s Sociobiology, Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene and a slew of other books and ideas that were among the most interesting developments from the 1970s through the 1990s. I remember wading through arguments over The Blind Watchmaker and The Extended Phenotype. I remember Cutlet’s appreciation for and critical thoughts on ideas considered rather divergent at the time, such as Zahavi’s concept of signal selection and the handicap principle and Wynne-Edwards’s theory of group selection. In all of this, he would try and link the concepts to his own observations of blackbuck and other animals. How the blackbuck pelage and behaviour linked to signal selection. How its territoriality can be understood in relation to ideas spanning Fraser Darling and Lack and Robert Ardrey (The Territorial Imperative) to Walther and Mungall.

Books like Sinclair’s The African Buffalo and Schaller’s The Deer and the Tiger linked behavior and ecology. Cutlet was not too hot on the field of ecology per se and somewhat de-emphasised looking at plants. Still, the field of behavioural ecology interested him. When I got a copy of a new edition of the classic Krebs and Davies textbook on behavioural ecology, he read it and tried to see links to blackbuck behavioural ecology. One of the topics we would repeatedly discuss is the decline of blackbuck population in Guindy National Park. Cutlet saw how reduced numbers had profoundly changed the social behaviour and reduced interactions among males. He saw territorial and social interactions as key in stimulating reproduction and believed that the population decline was an example of an Allee effect at work. Trying to bring to the attention of the Wildlife Warden various pertinent aspects related to conservation of this blackbuck population, Cutlet explained the possibility of such an effect in simple terms in a letter written in January 1993. Once again, this was perhaps an idea that was ahead of its time or our own data, which I encountered being discussed in leading journals only years later.

In retrospect, what made these bouts of reading and discussions a great learning experience for me and fascinating for Cutlet, was perhaps the fact that neither of us had anything to lose or anything material to gain from it. It was pure curiosity and personal interest. Cutlet was far removed from any academic or peer pressures to perform cutting-edge research, publish papers, or proclaim his scientific interest or ability. The bureaucracy and corridors of academia, that can stultify as often as it can stimulate, were not for him. He had no job on the line, no tenure to uphold, no defining seminar or workshop to commit to, no funding priority to meet, no deadline-driven reports to prepare (barring a few that he wrote for the Forest Department on management issues). My college coursework (BSc Zoology) was as archaic and lifeless as a beat-up tin can and the dead specimens being dissected in our labs. What I dabbled with in ecology or ethology and the books I read were de-linked from exams and grades and performance in courses. And so, the reading and the discussions seemed to work, and they seemed worth it.

Although he had no formal training in quantitative aspects of the science, Cutlet still believed in repeated observation and quantification using proper sampling techniques. Years before I was formally (and in a more text-book fashion) introduced to behavioural sampling techniques, I got a thorough grounding in the basic methods from Cutlet. Out of his sundry collection of reprints, he yanked out a well-used photocopy of a paper that still remains a classic in the field: Jeanne Altmann’s 1974 paper on sampling methods for the observational study of behaviour, a paper that has seen upwards of 6000 citations till date, some of them Cutlet’s. Cutlet spoke of the benefits of different kinds of sampling for different aspects of his study of blackbuck behaviour, and the terms and ideas slowly sinked in: ad libitum sampling, focal animal sampling (his favoured method, especially on identified individuals), scans and other methods. He exhorted me to make a copy of the paper and read it; we would march off to observe the behaviour of chital and blackbuck at Guindy National Park. Cutlet described how to make an ethogram, identify and name individuals, code behavioural data, and how to watch animals unobtrusively. When I thought I would start a study on chital behaviour in Guindy National Park to complement his work on blackbuck, he gave me a copy of a 1981 paper by Shingo Miura on social behaviour by chital in Guindy that helped me get started. Cutlet would similarly exhort other MNS members and students to add value to their field trips by doing systematic counts and observations. The number of younger people he helped in the field of wildlife studies is not a small one. In many ways, he was one of the best teachers I had.

With backpack strapped on perfectly and a cigar in his mouth, Cutlet poses with a bunch of younger nature enthusiasts during a field trip (Photo courtesy: M. Raghunathan).

Cutlet also taught me the basics of field work, by example and demonstration rather than lecture. Besides behavioural observations, he trained me in the basic line transect method, that involved walking along straight lines through the forest and counting animals and measuring distances to animals on either side. Cutlet was perhaps the first person to apply line transect techniques to estimate population density for ungulates in India, publishing a paper in 1982 in the Indian journal Cheetal with estimates of chital populations. His work was based on one of the early publications that developed this survey method, the paper by Anderson and Pospahala (1970). Cutlet had also approached a statistics professor at the Madras University to understand the method and then applied it in his work. By the time I began my work, the methods had developed further and a computer software called TRANSECT was available and I could easily learn how to use it with from Sukumar and others at CES. Still, I had to learn the ropes in the field. Cutlet had an excellent liquid-filled magnetic compass (he always appreciated good equipment, particularly binoculars and telescopes, and would repair and maintain them in good condition himself) and he taught me to use it to walk the transect and maintain the course through the forest. Find and hold to the bearing, use the mirror, and sight along the viewing slit at a distant tree or landmark and then march towards that. “When an army marches through the desert, the guy holding the compass would have to direct the others. He needs to find a lone palm tree that can be a reference to navigate.  And as he marches, he’d have to call out periodically: Lone palm tree, Sir!”, Cutlet said, half in jest. As the compass-bearer while walking transects with Cutlet in Guindy and the nearby IIT campus, I would then often choose a palmyrah tree as marker and say: “Lone palm tree, Sir!”.

Still, Cutlet was highly self-deprecating. He would reiterate his lack of formal qualifications and scientific training and tell me that he was no good and that if I wanted to really learn the ropes or make a mark in this field I should go see others, the real scientists, the professors. As I made a faltering start at my own field project on chital and blackbuck in Guindy National Park with his help, Cutlet repeatedly urged me to go to Sukumar at IISc for guidance (“he is the elephant man who knows stuff about populations and ecology”). He also pointed me to Ajith Kumar, another person he held in great  professional regard and personal affection (“Ajith is a Cambridge man who’s worked with David Chivers”, “go talk to him”).

Cutlet, and what he was as an ethologist and curious naturalist, was largely overlooked by most people who knew him. Cutlet was a no-nonsense man and would get rather irritated by others who chose to remain ignorant of science and ideas, who merely went for nature trips to picnic outdoors but nevertheless would loudly spout an entrenched opinion about why animals did this or that. He would not mince words when speaking to such people and, in his earlier years, would not baulk at using the most colourful language either. This, as expected, put some people off. This, coupled with his lack of formal qualifications, his self-deprecating comments, and his solitary existence in a dingy one-room house, appeared to provide adequate reason to those who wished to turn their face away from him. And there were those who perhaps thought he was a mere curiosity, a loner better left to his pipe and his eccentric predispositions. Although Cutlet was somewhat chauvinistic at times and could come out as strongly opinionated in his own way, he could and would be swayed by a well-substantiated and logical argument. Kavita Isvaran, now a leading scientist who has herself carried out detailed studies of blackbuck behaviour, speaks about how when she first met Cutlet to discuss the phenomenon of lekking in blackbuck he was very skeptical, almost dismissive. Through the course of a thorough discussion he, however, eventually came round to recognise that his understanding, restricted as it was largely to one population, needed to be expanded to accommodate the findings of newer research.

Yet, it was his own fieldwork that really defined Cutlet. Cutlet made over a thousand hours of focal animal observations on blackbuck (often working from dawn to dusk in the field) and analysed and worked on several drafts and manuscripts on blackbuck behaviour. He carried out fortnightly water bird counts at Vedanthangal in 1981–82 using a block count technique from standard locations, a method that others from MNS were able to replicate in 1991 to compare with his data. When a collaborative opportunity arose (with very meagre but vital funds) to monitor chital antler cycles, Cutlet would pedal off in his cycle to in GNP and IIT and walk all over to survey chital for up to 15 days every month for two years, meticulously classifying individuals by antler size, stage, and condition.

The times and circumstances were not very kind to Cutlet. Coming from a well-off family and once the proud owner of a 1000cc V-twin Vincent HRD Black Shadow (one of the fastest motorcycles of that period) among other bikes, he lived his final years in his one-room house, getting around on a moped or a bicycle, but still remarkably content with himself. He worked without funds and in his spare time during various jobs that he took on to make ends meet. He had no formal support for statistical analysis or preparation of results and graphics. He extracted numbers from his notes and punched them into a trusty calculator to calculate quantitative measures describing blackbuck behaviour: rates of aggression, time spent in various activities and so on. He made charts and territory maps, drawing them with ruler and pencil on graph paper. He wrote drafts of manuscripts in a flowing long hand on foolscap sheets, usually with an excellent fountain pen (Parker, was a favourite brand, with Chelpark ink, as were Sheaffer’s). His English was old-style and excellent, but he would re-read and edit, and if major reorganisation was required he would rewrite by hand. To make copies to send to someone for comments he often copied by hand as well. When it was in a shape that he deemed worthy of submitting for publication or soliciting comments from a scientific colleague, he would march off to a nearby commercial typist and get it typed, proofed (especially to correct the glaring errors of the typist of all biological and scientific terms, not to mention having a good laugh every time ‘agonistic behaviour’ was typed as ‘agnostic behaviour’), and then typed again. He took pains to do this for many articles he wrote and the few errors that crept in in the published versions should perhaps not be laid at his doorstep.

Only a small part of these studies has ever been published. Not only his research on blackbuck, but his work on antler cycles that was meant as a collaborative study. While Cutlet wrote drafts on various aspects of blackbuck behaviour based on his field study, he’d laid much effort into analysing and writing about agonistic and territorial behaviour. He worked on detailed manuscripts on these aspects (the originals of which are unfortunately not available) and sent them to Dr. Elizabeth Cary Mungall, the leading blackbuck researcher at the time, for comments and feedback. She responded with detailed comments on the text, tables, and figures exhorting him to publish it as it “… will be an interesting contribution to the literature”. In a letter dated 4 May 1983, she writes:

You are doing good work and all of us who share your interest in blackbuck and their relatives thank you for your efforts in bringing your results to publication so that the rest of us can learn about your results also.

Some of the drafts that do exist of his writings are put up in a separate website for reference by biologists, naturalists, those interested in animal behaviour, and anyone else who would like to see and understand the fascinating world of blackbuck and other species through the eyes of Cutlet. These and his published writings provide an indication of the earnestness and range of interests of the man writing under his real name of R. K. G. Menon, who, behind the scenes, was still just Cutlet to everyone. Besides his own work on blackbuck and chital, he worked on scientific papers with G. U. Kurup (on the behaviour of blackbuck during a solar eclipse), with A. Rajaram on the microscopic study of hairs of Indian mammals, with V. Santharam on waterbird populations at Vedanthangal, and he guided and co-authored work with me and R. Sukumar on the decline of blackbuck and ecology of chital and blackbuck in Guindy National Park. In more general articles, he wrote about crows and dogs, sambar and tiger, and of course, blackbuck. There are brief articles about crop-raiding elephants and man-eating leopard (he visited Suligiri, where a man-eating leopard was shot by government diktat). He wrote of rollers and lapwings, of cannibalism and protean behaviour, and of days spent in the jungles of his memories.

Cutlet had a number of other friends who he was fond of and had often had a rollicking good time with. My association with Cutlet being largely related to our shared interest in animal behaviour and Guindy, I know little about his other friends, his family, or his life beyond the blackbuck or prior to the 1990s. Still among those naturalists and nature enthusiasts I knew, Cutlet stood apart for his efforts and his enthusiasm concerning animal behaviour. As Mungall wrote in her letter of 1983:

You mention that you have no support from any group and yet you list yourself as a naturalist of the Range Rover Foundation, Adyar, Madras. Is this a volunteer group? Is it very active in wildlife conservation? If all its members are like you, it certainly is a wonderful organization for India.

A couple of days before he died, he called his close friends, went out with them, had a meal at their home. He was happy, but in his talk his friends detected a poignant tone. On the morning of 26 December 2008, while walking back home after a regular meal at his regular hotel, he collapsed and passed away on the streets of Madras. He was 80 years old.

I have pondered over what can be a fitting memory of this remarkable man who sought no recognition or acclaim and always stayed off the limelight. Perhaps a permanent record of his contributions, as we have tried to do in this website. Perhaps, if there is someone watching (and watching over) the blackbuck of Guindy that he loved so much, that would be apt. Perhaps, if someone carried on the bird counts that he initiated at Vedanthangal, the water bird populations would mark his memory in the trends of their numbers. Perhaps some effort at sustaining this locally through the MNS, an organisation that he helped found. Or perhaps, in a much broader sense, the very continuation of a free spirit of enquiry and passion for ethology that marked his life would be sufficient. In the final reckoning, Cutlet lived alone and cut his own swathe through this life. He was, in a very real way, like the lone palm tree he spoke of. A lone palm tree, serving as a benchmark in the wilderness, that we can keep referring to as we find direction in our own lives. “Lone palm tree, Sir!“