A Kaleidoscope of Ideas

Picture Courtesy: Rumna Mukherjee   My first experience with wildlife was through the pages of a book, ‘The Man Eaters of Kumaon’ written by the eminent hunter, writer and naturalist, Jim Corbett. A second hand, hard-bound with yellowing pages that still remains nestled in my bookshelf, passed down by my father during one such summer vacation as an attempt to make me read anything other than the Harry Potter books. The mesmerizing, tranquil beauty of Uttarakhand’s Pauri Garhwal and the gripping adventures with a tinge of mystique and suspense made an inexplicable narrative for a child who had only witnessed these magnificent feral cats as emancipated and indolent beings in various Zoological Parks over the years.   The vibrant cover image of a feral tiger, our national animal, in its very element, dredging up goosebumps is what I then longed to experience in reality— an opportunity to witness these glorious and feral felines in the pristine wild. In 2015, the opportunity pre...

  In concrete jungles entwined in fiber optic vines and content in our own niches, as a generation most, if not all of us might have lost touch with earth or directly depend on it for our sustenance and day-to-day survival as is understandable. Living separate lives with diverse identities, genders, social statuses, and whatnot, the one commonality that bridges all the gaps fuelled by diversity and connects us organically, is us all sharing one planet. While looking at the evolution of modern man, our very own ancestors depended exclusively on nature and their surroundings for survival. While nature nurtured us across the geological time scale into beings not entirely dependent on forests, rivers and ecosystems, there still exist pockets of communities in the world and in our country, strictly dependent on the earth for their sustenance, spiritual satiation and identity; communities of Homo sapiens existing far from the grasps of an urban sprawl.   India has an abundantly ri...