Learning about Jamal Ara

Thanks to Sagarika, for sharing this article with me.  What a sad, poignant story - a story as much of gender and communal inequities, as of personal tragedy. Madhuca

Mystery of India’s first Birdwoman

Jamal Ara was a fascinating personality beset by tragedy: she overcame her lack of education to publish scientific papers on birds in top journals, but disappeared abruptly in 1988

Mystery of India’s first Birdwoman

Jamal Ara (1923-1995). Sketch/Uday Mohite

By Ajaz Ashraf

In these fraught times, it is elevating to read about Jamal Ara, India’s first ‘Birdwoman’, a title none less than the iconic Salim Ali bestowed upon her for scientifically studying birds of the Chota Nagpur plateau, Jharkhand. Her story was lost to us until researcher Raza Kazmi recently rediscovered and narrated it, with poignancy, in The First Lady of Indian Ornithology, a chapter in Women in the Wild, a book edited by Anita Mani.

Jamal Ara’s accomplishments dazzle as she had studied only till Std X. She wrote prolifically from 1949 to 1988, contributing over 60 papers and articles to the journals of the Bombay Natural History Society and Bengal Natural History Society, and the Newsletter for Birdwatchers, which catered to both amateur and professional ornithologists. She wrote Watching Birds, a guide for children, now in its 13th edition.

Hold on, she also worked as a journalist for a while, did a programme on birds for All India Radio, wrote fiction, and translated stories of litterateur K S Duggal, who remembered her, in his autobiography, as a “lonely woman” with a flair for writing in English.

Ara was just the person who should have been serenaded post-Independence, if not for anything other than as a riposte to Pakistan’s dire predictions regarding the fate of Muslims who stayed behind in India. But that, sadly, did not happen.

She suddenly disappeared, in 1988, from the Indian ornithology scene. Nobody wondered why she had stopped writing. The address she gave in the letters she wrote to journals was that of Doranda, Ranchi, where Raza Kazmi, too, resides. He made it his mission, in 2018, to search for the mysterious Birdwoman of Doranda.

Her address no longer existed, but Kazmi stumbled upon a 2006 story on Madhuca Singh, a celebrated basketball coach of Ranchi, who credited her achievement to her mother Jamal Ara, “a bird lover.” The search ended only last year, when Kazmi met Madhuca, who was named after Madhuca indica, the scientific term for the mahua tree. Madhuca narrated her mother’s story to Kazmi.

Born in 1923 in a conservative Muslim family of a police officer at Barh, Bihar, Ara was married to Hamdi Bey, a cousin and leading journalist in Calcutta, much against her opposition. Madhuca was born to them. But the marriage soon broke down. Ara and Madhuca could have been on the streets but for Sami Ahmad, a cousin and an Indian Forest Service officer of the 1940 Bihar cadre. A bachelor, Ahmad shifted them to his official residence in Ranchi.

Posted to different forest divisions of Jharkhand, then a part of Bihar, Ahmad would take Ara on his trips to the jungles. In her was kindled a deep love for the flora and fauna of the area, inspiring her to spend hours observing the avian life around her. But her skills as a writer were not honed. She found a teacher in Mrs Augier, wife of P W Augier, an IFS office senior to Ahmad, who also encouraged her to keep birding notes. As she began to chisel out good prose in English, Ahmad and the Augiers encouraged her to turn her notes into articles—and these began getting published. 

Theirs was an old world where companionship meant more than engaging in chitter-chatter.

But this old world was also encountering a challenge from the emerging post-Independence culture of corruption and impunity. The sparks the clash of the two worlds engendered singed Ahmad, after he arrested the son of K B Sahay, a powerful politician who later became the Bihar Chief Minister, for poaching at Palamu. The political system retaliated: Ahmad was suspended. His sorrow became unbearable after he was asked to serve, on his reinstatement, under an officer junior to him. He died in 1966.

Ara and Madhuca, then in college, were financially stricken and emotionally hollowed out by his death. But help came from the old world: a friend of Ahmad heard about their plight and became their safe harbour. His name: Jaipal Singh Munda, the man who had led the Indian hockey team to a gold in the 1928 Olympics and was now an Adivasi leader fighting for the rights of his community. He found a groom for Madhuca—a Gurkha army officer’s son.

It seems Ara turned to translating Duggal’s work, in addition to her ornithological writings, to overcome the emotional trauma the death of Ahmad had been for her. In 1988, she brought her semi-paralytic sister to live with her in Ranchi. But after the sister began walking, she left Ara. The abandonment shattered her; psychotic breakdowns plagued her. 

One day, she made a bonfire of all her writings, notes, and photographs. “It was useless,” Ara muttered. In 1995, seven years after having stopped writing, she died, unnoticed and unsung. 

After Women in the Wild was published this year, Kazmi went over to the residence of Madhuca. Since an irreparable retina scratch has severely impaired her vision, he read aloud his essay on her mother, who winged an arc as unique as that of migratory birds, with an end as tragic as that of those shot down before their return flight home.

The writer is a senior journalist

Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com

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I found this article in the TOI, with more about her writing, it kind of complements the previous essay.

Jamal Ara, cited as India's first 'birdwoman'

Sharmila Ganesan Ram / TNN / Oct 19, 2023, 20:19 IST

"With his large body, bald head and scraggy bare neck, he is not a pretty sight, but he is unrivalled in the perfection of flight." That's how the vulture found itself described in 'Watching Birds', an adorable Rs-55 children's booklet which cost Rs 2.50 when it was written five decades ago.

As keen a weaver of words as she was a viewer of birds, its author Jamal Ara—who was often mistaken for a man because of her name—was a rare, early bird who stood out amidst the flock of pioneering male ornithologists such as Samir Ali and Zafar Futehally.

Despite her prolific, seminal surveys of the fauna of Bihar spanning four decades, the late Ara would remain a sighting as rare as the pink-headed duck.

Her legacy remained unrecorded till Raza Kazmi—a young environmentalist—met her daughter and only living link, Madhuca Singh, in Jharkhand for an essay in the recent book on female biologists titled 'Women In The Wild'.

Born a century ago in 1923 Bihar to a cop father, Ara was one of seven children, two of whom would later migrate to Pakistan. After being deserted by her journalist husband Hamdi Bey, the young mother would find support in her cousin Sami Ahmad, an upright Indian Forest Service officer from the Bihar cadre.

'Akki'—as Madhuca called Ahmad—would put her through school and in the villages where he was posted, the little girl would grow up eating climbing trees, plucking fruits and devouring ant chutney.

Even as Ahmad gifted her books on birds, Mrs. Augier, wife of the nature-loving Anglo-Indian forest officer PW Augier, honed her English-language skills as she had studied only till the tenth standard.

The field notes that Ara took in the unexamined forests of south Bihar soon became articles in the journals of Bombay Natural History Society and Bengal Natural History Society.

Her 1949 piece on the rich wildlife reserves of undivided Bihar was not only the first of its kind work in the region but also remains a seminal peek into the natural bounty of present-day Jharkhand.

The first and possibly the last to look closely and record the birds of Kolhan in Singhbhum—an under-explored landscape in the state—she kept watching, waiting and writing.

When her quest for the rare pink-headed duck—which had last been spotted in Darbhanga in 1935—hit a dead end in 1953, she resolved to resume searching the following winter. Her keen ear for mating calls and hawk eye for the courtship habits of winged creatures, translated into a series of meticulous notes bolstered with graphs and tables.

"It is time the government of India stepped in and curbed the waste of public money. If the forests are not saved, we will be creating a desert. Let us not forget the examples of Babylon and Nineveh," she wrote in a letter published in TOI on September 2, 1961, which questioned and demanded details on the state government's claims of afforestation.

At a conservation conference in the US, she presented a paper on the near-extinct rhinos of Bihar and other vanishing herds of mammals then called 'Big Game'. "She had never been a hunter or came from a hunting/royal family background, and thus her approach towards conservation was solely focused on the preservation of wildlife rather than balancing out 'sport hunting' and preservation," says Kazmi to TOI, comparing Ara to the fierce American naturalist Rosalie Edge.

"Ara's prescriptions for preservation, just like Rosalie's ideas, were far ahead of their time—be it in her recommendation for the establishment of a separate wildlife department, recommendations for creation wildlife sanctuaries, banning of carrying of any arms by any person (irrespective of whether they are private individuals or even government or police officials except for the forest department itself), and so on. These ideas would gain mainstream currency in the Indian conservation sphere only from the 1970s onwards, while Ara was prescribing these remedies from the early 1950s itself," he says.

On All India Radio, listeners heard her swoon about the birds of Ranchi and present-day Jharkhand. Outside ornithology, her writing skills manifested a range of short stories and translations of partition-themed works such as a Punjabi novel titled 'Nahun Tere Mas' by Kartar Singh Duggal.

Her articles revealed her lyricism. "Two of her essays made me go wow when I first read them," says Kazmi, citing 'Sylvan Trails in Chota Nagpur' and 'Just a Weed', both published in a little-known journal called 'Thought'.

He quotes a small sample from the latter piece: "It has been said, “See Naples and die”; I would alter it to “See the Strobilanthes flower and die”. It is no exaggeration; there will certainly be no regrets....The shaded hill slopes and valley bottoms for miles on end are smothered under it and one motors along the forest roads as if in a blue haze assailed by the heavy camphor-like aroma of the flowers. If some Wordsworth had seen it, he would have promptly consigned his poem ‘Daffodils’ to the trash-can, and written another about the Strobilanthes.”

At a time when it was rare to find Muslim women in North India travelling, working and excelling, Ara did it all but when her cousin, Ahmad, died in 1966, she lost a pillar.

Later, her mental health collapsed. One day, she took all that she wrote and photographed to the verandah of her house and set the pile ablaze.

Birds continue to visit her Bihar housing board home, the only one in the street overridden with creepers, climbers, plants and flowers.

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Looking forward to reading her book.

The filmmaker and the entrepreneur: Shekar Dattatri and Ramki Sreenivasan - Livemint

At the M Krishnan writing awards recently, we saw Dattatri's A Race to Save the Falcons.









How appropriate to find this article shortly thereafter.



The filmmaker and the entrepreneur: Shekar Dattatri and Ramki Sreenivasan - Livemint

Among the carnivorous legless reptiles of the suborder Serpentes—snakes, in other words—is a periodic process called ecdysis, which has to do with shedding of the skin. Last August, a phenomenon called “synchrony” of ecdysis was observed among Florida Cottonmouth snakes, where snakes within an insular ecosystem shed their skin at around the same time. This is the story of a similar synchronicity. Here however, the two actors are human: a snake-loving filmmaker and a bird-loving entrepreneur. Both grew up in Chennai, both are passionate naturalists, both want to effect change in the world, and both decided to shed their previous professional skins at broadly the same time.

Shekar Dattatri is a wildlife filmmaker whose films—on Olive Ridley turtles, Silent Valley and Nagarhole among others—have won him a profusion of awards including a Rolex Award for Enterprise and the Edberg Award from Sweden. A self-taught filmmaker, Dattatri made films for the Discovery channel, National Geographic and the BBC, before turning his back on them. Principled, passionate, punctilious and perfectionist, Dattatri, 54, calls himself a ‘recluse’ because he lives alone in a three-bedroom apartment in Chennai.

Across the Kaveri river lives Sreenivasan Ramakrishnan (or Ramki as he prefers to be called), 45, a garrulous Bengaluru-based entrepreneur who worked at Procter & Gamble before starting—and selling—his own successful marketing analytics firm, Marketics. When I call him garrulous, he says, “Like a laughing thrush,” referring to birds that belong to the genus, Garrulax. Ramki, no surprises, is a birder and photographer.

Ramki and Dattatri had heard of each other, of course. Most people who grow up in Chennai experience not seven degrees of separation but just one or two. When they finally met in 2009, both were ready to move from one professional avatar into another.

At that time, Ramki was in a professional limbo. After selling his 250-person firm, Marketics in 2008, he embarked on a mission to document India’s rare birds like the Austen’s hornbill, Bugun’s liocichla, and the broad-tailed grass bird among others. Sighting these birds, let alone photographing them, is the Holy Grail for most birders. And yet, something was missing. “I was growing increasingly disillusioned with wildlife photography because it does nothing for wildlife,” says Ramki. “I discovered that entire species and ecosystems were disappearing. Just because you love wildlife doesn’t mean you become a protector of wildlife. Conservation is interventional. Photography is not. In fact, today, wildlife photographers are part of the problem.”

It was at this questioning stage that he met Dattatri. The timing was fortuitous. Like Hamlet’s malaise and Arjuna’s angst, both men were experiencing the ennui that envelopes successful professionals mid-career, forcing questions about the meaning and purpose of life.

Dattatri was used to being approached by admirers with the same tired question: “What can I do to help conserve wildlife?” Dattatri would tell them about the “unglamorous” part of conservation: the hard work, the threats from vested interests, and the dogged persistence that was necessary. Most people never came back. “Ramki is one of those rare people who puts his money where his mouth is,” says Dattatri.

They met in Ramki’s house. What each thought was a casual meeting ended up laying the groundwork for Conservation India, a wildlife portal that would become their joint venture. Within a few hours, both men had agreed on a blueprint. Wildlife conservation in India, they agreed, did not need another NGO, but rather, a free, open, neutral portal that disseminated authoritative, authentic, well-curated information. Presciently, Ramki had already registered a domain called Conservation India (CI), which became the name of their nascent venture. Ramki and Dattatri had heard of each other before they met. Most people who grow up in Chennai experience not seven degrees of separation but just one or two. When they finally met in 2009, both were ready to move from one professional avatar into another.

At that time, conservation in India had very little readable material in the public domain. “It sat in people’s heads or in scientific literature,” says Ramki. Some NGOs and individuals such as the Wildlife Conservation Society-India Program (WCS) and tiger expert and conservation zoologist Ullhas Karanth drew upon science for conservation. But the general public, even avid wildlife-lovers (or wild lifers as they are called) had little knowledge about basic things such as the range of a tiger, how long it lived or what it ate. Ramki and Dattatri wanted to change that. They wanted to bridge the gap between wildlife enthusiasts and conservationists. “Both Shekar and I have been influenced by Dr Karanth,” says Ramki. “He has brought about meaningful outcomes by mixing science with advocacy, policy and ground-level action.”

They thought about how to fund the venture. They didn’t want to be beholden to sponsors. They considered selling merchandise on the portal, but discarded the idea as too commercial. In the end, Ramki decided to fund it himself. “Like the rest of us, Ramki loves the outdoors but chose to go way beyond,” says Bittu Sahgal, co-founder, Sanctuary Asia magazine. “Through CI, he helps ordinary people fight the good fight more effectively.”

Their work too was pretty much evenly divided. Besides funding the venture, Ramki designed the technology back-end including coding, hosting, security and design, and most importantly, the custom-built automated news round up, somewhat like an RSS feed. It is refreshed with the latest conservation news several times a day. “We are heavy lifting through the technology so that each of us can devote our time to our other interests. We have no fixed assets or employees,” says Ramki.

Dattatri had connections in the conservation community. His standing as a filmmaker who “would walk away if anything smelled fishy,” as he says, gave them credibility. Dattatri curates most of the content. Ramki gets involved in campaigns and networking. Together, they designed the look and feel of the site.

Today, CI gets a traffic of anywhere from 10,000 to 60,000 visitors a day. The site has had over one million unique users. Perhaps just as important, they have earned the respect and goodwill of the conservation community because of their stance and their stories. Students of conservation visit the site, sometimes ten times a day. “Credibility is our greatest strength,” says Ramki. “And Shekar brought that to the table. He is a details guy, perfectionist, punctual—like a Rolex,” Ramki laughs.

Ramki speaks in a specific cadence that I initially cannot place. I struggle to identify it and then realize that Ramki’s cadence belongs to a subspecies: boys who grew up in Chennai, studied at Vidya Mandir perhaps, like Ramki did, then went on to college elsewhere, perhaps at BITS Pilani and did different things. This is the cadence of a highly articulate explainer who connects disparate ideas and spins webs; who doesn’t say in two words what can be said in ten. Ramki belongs to this persuasion, as do many other people in my acquaintance. They presume debate and therefore assume that they have to persuade.

If you are interested in Indian wildlife, the CI portal is a must-visit. Besides the daily news round up, there are lyrical articles about say, Mangalajodi in Orissa where villagers once killed and now protect birds. There are periodic campaigns that take on issues such as hydel projects, wetland rules, saving Amur Falcons and the Pulicat Bird Sanctuary. “Experts and authorities write for us for free out of their interest and passion, but everything gets vetted,” says Dattatri. “It is not as if they are doing me or Ramki a favour. It has to be someone with domain knowledge, not some random person’s opinion.”

Karanth was not only a mentor but also an early adopter of the site. He lists out the reasons why: “CI highlights urgent, emerging conservation issues in real time. More than that, it provides a clear signal—distinct from all the noise out there—for anyone interested in accomplishing conservation in the real world.”

It took two men. This is their storyDattatri was one of those kids who loved wildlife from childhood. Like most of his generation, he grew up in a book-loving middle-class family in Chennai. Unlike most of his peers, his parents gave him the gift of indulging his interests rather than obsessing over school marks.

When Dattatri was 10, his sister gave him a Gerald Durrell book called Rosie is my Relative, about an elephant. Soon, Dattatri borrowed his sister’s library card and began reading up other nature books in the British Council Library. By age 12, he graduated to books by Jane Goodall, George Schaller, Konrad Lorenz, Jim Corbett, Salim Ali, E.P. Gee, and many other wildlife writers. Dattatri had his life planned out. He would study wildlife biology all the way to a PhD and spend his life working with animals.

You and I may see nothing, but an Irula can spot say, 15 species of snakes, 13 amphibians, mongoose, hares, monitor lizards, jackals- Shekar Dattatri

At age 13, Dattatri walked into Chennai’s famous Snake Park and “ambushed” Romulus Whitaker, the founder. “I don’t know where I got the confidence but I said, ‘Mr Whitaker, I know how to handle snakes and I want to be a volunteer here.’ If it had been anyone else, they might have said, ‘Little boy, go away, come back when you are 21 with a letter from your parents.’ But Rom said, ‘Sure, okay, don’t do anything dangerous.’

‘And so my journey began’Dattatri was studying at Chennai’s P.S. High School then. He began volunteering on weekends at the Snake Park, first as an errand boy for the keepers, then accompanying them while cleaning the reptile enclosures, then taking tourists around the park, and then announcing tours and information over the public system. The Snake Park published a cyclostyled magazine at that time. “Rom showed me how to develop negatives. I went to the British Council library and read up on photography.” An older friend loaned him a prized Nikon camera. Pretty soon, Dattatri was spending day after day in the Snake Park dark room developing, fixing and glazing photographs. His school attendance suffered. He began spending two days a week, then three and then four days a week at the Snake Park. Being a back bencher, his classmates covered for him. “Somehow I got through from one class to another. I would get 33 marks, my teachers probably gave me 2 grace marks and promote me to the next grade,” says Dattatri.

Right in school, Dattatri decided that he would not get married. He wanted to be a “free bird” doing exactly what he wanted to do. Sometimes though, life would intervene. After spending his twelve years of schooling pretty much around snakes and animals, Dattatri realized that he had no college admission. Worse, the application deadline had passed. The only option open to him was Loyola College, which was autonomous. Dattatri applied to Loyola. On the same day, he also posted an “impassioned letter” to the principal stating why he had to give the lad admission even though he had poor grades and virtually no attendance in school. The principal called him for an interview and regarded the lad with a twinkle in his eye. Dattatri got into Loyola and continued his usual pattern of absenteeism. “At Loyola, all the students would quake when they were to enter the principal’s office because he was a stickler for attendance,” says Dattatri. “But Father Kuriakose would see me and say, ‘Ah, snake boy, what have you been up to?’ with a big smile.”

He began working with a graduate student named J. Vijaya (now deceased). They did local expeditions with the Irula tribal folks from Chingelput district. Dattatri describes them as “amazing bush people.” Dattatri would accompany Viji and the Irulas into the scrubby, thorny wastelands outside Chennai. “You and I may see nothing, but an Irula can spot say, 15 species of snakes, 13 amphibians, mongoose, hares, monitor lizards, jackals,” says Dattatri. “Irulas are incredible at finding wildlife. They know which season to go where, and which ponds to go to in order to find fresh water turtles.” Dattatri photographed them all.

In the early eighties, American filmmakers, John and Louise Riber came to Chennai to do a film on snake bite. Since Whitaker was in and out of the country, he deputed young Dattatri to stand in for him. For close to two years, he followed the Ribers around, watching, listening and asking questions about framing shots, and developing content for wildlife films. This experience caused him to jettison his dreams for a PhD in wildlife biology and turn instead to photography and filmmaking. Whitaker, Dattatri and a couple of others formed a film making company called Eco Media.

An early assignment was for Sanctuary Asia with editor Bittu Sahgal as the producer. Sahgal sent a professional Bollywood cameraman to film at the Periyar Tiger Reserve in Kerala. Problems began almost immediately. The cameraman had no interest in filming otters and elephants. He wanted action and starlets. When the Bollywood cameraman upped and left the tiger reserve (leaving his equipment and assistant behind thankfully), Dattatri, knowledgeable about wildlife took over the filming. “Shekar is extraordinary because he is an entirely self-taught naturalist, social scientist and film maker,” says Karanth. “In his ability to communicate complex conservation stories effectively and aesthetically, he has few peers globally.”

Soon National Geographic and Discovery came calling. Dattatri made films for them for a decade. Alongside he did freelance camera work for Animal Planet, BBC and others. One about Nagarhole shows not just the elephants, tigers and frogs that inhabit the reserve but also ends with an unabashed plea for conservation: “For what is at stake here is not just the preservation of a legacy but the safeguarding of India’s very identity as the land of the tiger and the elephant.”

By the year 2000, Dattatri was well established as a wildlife filmmaker. “Work was always looking for me but I felt hollow inside,” he said. “I was at the top of my game, earning money, winning awards and yet, I was feeling depressed because I was making these beautiful films ignoring the problems all around them—the problems of conservation.”

He decided gradually to become a “barefoot filmmaker.” He consciously turned his back on television, refusing new projects and bought a smaller ‘prosumer’ camera to make the kind of films he wanted. It was in this phase that he made some of his most compelling films. SOS: Save Our Sholas, for instance, offers a poetic yet realistic glimpse into the amazing Western Ghats. Narrated by Valmik Thapar, the film is both an introduction to these shola forests and a call to action—a theme that will suffuse all of Dattatri’s later work. It was at this time that he met some friends in Bengaluru who were campaigning to close down mining operations in Kudremukh, an important biodiversity hotspot. Wildlife First, an advocacy group co-founded by Bengaluru-based Praveen Bhargav had been campaigning since 1996 to stop iron ore mining at Kudremukh. The group filed a public interest litigation and lobbied local politicians. Dattatri suggested a documentary film that encapsulated all the issues. The result was a 11-minute film called Mindless Mining: the tragedy of Kudremukh, narrated in English and Kannada. “I don’t think anyone in the advocacy groups initially realized its use or impact. They looked at it and said, ‘This is nice and maybe we will get something out of it,’” says Dattatri.

Wildlife First showed the film widely: to MLAs and at farmers’ meetings. The film, available on the Conservation India portal is a snapshot of the problem and the solution. “Shekar is one filmmaker who has sacrificed his otherwise lucrative career in making nice films for National Geographic and other channels and instead, put a huge amount of his time to help change decisions in the highest level,” says Bhargav. “His film holds the unique record of being filed in the Supreme Court as an annexure to support the petition which ultimately led to a landmark judgment which was to close down an iron ore mining in the heart of Kudremukh National Park.”

I was at the top of my game, earning money, winning awards and yet, I was feeling depressed because I was making these beautiful films ignoring the problems all around them—the problems of conservation.- Shekar Dattatri.

On December 31, 2005, the Supreme Court’s judgment stopped mining in Kudremukh. “It was hugely motivating for me because it showed that I could make these other kinds of films,” says Dattatri.

Ramki’s home office is in Indiranagar, a trendy area in Bengaluru crammed with brew pubs and restaurants. Behind his desk is a lithograph of a Malabar Trogon by John Gould. Ramki collects these and speaks with the ease of a polymath about lithographs.

“I stick to the British period, not because I am a fan of the white man but because I feel that they document Indian natural history very well,” he says. Ramki likes drawings. His first job, before he got an MBA, was as a freelance cartoonist, he says—which he did for a year.

Ramki rides to our first meeting on a bicycle. We meet at Yogisthaan, which serves good food in a garden setting. Tall, slim, and bearded, Ramki is vegan and a yoga enthusiast. He practises advanced Ashtanga yoga and pranayama, pretty much every day. Recently, he has also started running “sub 10K” distances.

Ask Ramki why he is attracted to birds or wildlife and he is, for a change, speechless. “I like birds and mammals because they are the most visible denizens of the wild,” he stammers.

“But I don’t want to give an anthropocentric reason and call it a connection to nature or that it gives me peace or whatever.” We go on to talk about other things. Later, Ramki returns to the thought. “I like wild places where I can walk: forests, grasslands, scrublands, desert. My fundamental passion is trekking.”

Ramki still manages to go on one trek a month. He and his wife, Swarna, have one adopted son, Shiva, 5.

On weekends, they go to the Valley School to listen to lectures and also meet up with their friends, birder Shashank Dalvi, and his wife, Vishnupriya, an ecologist who live there.

Birding has been Ramki’s longest preoccupation. In between, Ramki still mentors a few start-ups—18 Herbs, a company out of Madurai is one he mentions but there are others. He likes the start-up ecosystem and speaks with the same passion about being an entrepreneur.

But for this we have to go back a couple of decades. In 1998, at the age of 25, Ramki co-founded Intercept, an advertising firm, that quickly grew to multiple locations across India. By 2002, it was obvious that the company, like many of its kind, would be the victim of dotcom bust. Yet, the founders were loathe to shut down the firm. “One day, in our guest house in Mumbai, I had an epiphany,” says Ramki. “It must have been a hot summer’s night. I was probably staring at the fan in the non-AC room and suddenly, I decided that enough was enough.”

Ramki moved from Chennai to Bengaluru with a heavy heart and started Marketics, a data analytics firm in 2003. It must have been hard for the lad from Luz Church Road to explain the move to his parents. Not only was he shutting down his firm but rather than take up a sensible well-paying job, he was starting another entrepreneurial venture. The gene must run in the family. Ramki’s only brother, C.S. Swaminathan, is a co-founder of media outlet Founding Fuel. “Once people have tasted the freedom and creativity that comes with entrepreneurship, they can never go back to a regular job,” Ramki explains.

It was at this time that serial entrepreneur and partner at venture capital firm Growth Story, K. Ganesh met Ramki. “Intercept focused on digital advertising and was way ahead of its time. The same with Marketics, which was doing big data and Knowledge Process Outsourcing before those words were invented,” says Ganesh. Ramki and his two co-founders pitched to Ganesh who ended up investing Rs1 crore or about $200,000 in their nascent venture. “I liked the fact that despite losing money through his previous start-up, Ramki was not taking the b2b (back to banking) or b2c (back to consulting) path that many of his start-up peers were doing,” says Ganesh.

In 2007, the four partners—Ganesh says that the company was divided four ways pretty evenly—sold the firm to WNS for $65 million. They distributed the money to about 120 employees. As CEO, Ramki and his co-founders decided to share the wealth, even with employees who were not eligible. “I can guarantee that 99% of his employees will come back to work for Ramki if he starts another venture,” says Ganesh. After the sale of Marketics, Ramki didn’t start another business venture. He turned wholeheartedly to conservation. “Is he capable of building much larger firms, having been a pioneer in the big data and KPO space? Yes, 100%,” says Ganesh. “But conservation needs people like Ramki, because people like me won’t do it. By saying, ‘enough’ to wealth, he has shown great maturity, equanimity and contentment.”

This yin-yang quality was evident when the two men met recently in Bengaluru. Dattatri had come to Bengaluru for a couple of days and their time together followed a similar cadence. They met with a wildlife biologist, brainstormed about what to do, met with conservation professionals and planned future campaigns. Ramki’s charisma has to do with his energy and enthusiasm tempered with his ability to back off and allow people to do their thing. At his heart, he is an egalitarian.

I like birds and mammals because they are the most visible denizens of the wild.- Ramki Sreenivasan

Ask anyone about Ramki and a few words will pop up with regularity: wildlife of course, and entrepreneur too, but more than anything, he is someone who doesn’t play by the rules. “I prefer to influence rather than command,” he said. “I am anti-establishment and I am not bound by rules.” This contrarian yet egalitarian quality is necessary in conservation. Journalist Bano Haralu knows this first hand in their well-documented, and successful campaign to prevent the massive killing of Amur Falcons in Nagaland. Ramki, she says, connected multiple groups and brought the campaign to fruition. “He was astute in knowing how to highlight the news in a manner that would get maximum impact,” says Haralu.

Thanks in part to the success of their campaign, Haralu quit her job as a television reporter and became founding trustee of Nagaland Wildlife Biodiversity Conservation Project. Ramki designed her website and logo and continues to give her his time and effort. “I never wanted to start an organization but our work together gave me the push,” says Haralu

Dattatri too has “pushed” associates into the path of wildlife, in his case, education. Bengaluru-based artist, designer and educator Srivi Kalyan heads the Master’s in Earth Education and Communication program at Shristi Institute of Art Design and Technology.

“In the four years that I have known Shekar, we have talked a lot about educating youngsters about conservation,” she says. “I would say that my current position (as an environment educator) is in part because of our conversations.”

Wildlife conservation is harder than most other causes because it demands a way of seeing and thinking that doesn’t come naturally to people. The holistic web of nature where each species is linked to the other is not obvious and cannot be explained in as clean a fashion as educating girls or erecting toilets. People who love the wild are aplenty but those who make it their life’s work to fight for it are few. And for those who choose to fight, the bad news keeps coming.

Elephants get electrocuted, entire lakes of fish die one morning, and forests get fragmented. Those who love nature, with deep and abiding passion, have to confront one sobering fact: most humans don’t care about wildlife and are oblivious to the damage that they are inflicting on the earth. Conservationists also have to routinely watch videos of their beloved animals and birds being mutilated, poached, trapped and shot. That takes spine, guts and the stomach for watching and digesting horror. It also takes a certain frame of mind.

“You cannot be pessimistic if you want to be a conservationist,” says Dattatri. “Because we lose so many battles. But someone has to do it and if you don’t do it whatever little else is there will also go.”

The ultimate birder!

Thank you Google.  I didn't know about her!

Phoebe Snetsinger’s 85th birthday

The rough animation for the doodle, featuring (left to right) the blackburnian warbler, red-shouldered vanga, village weaverbird, eastern bluebird, and red-capped manakin.

Sometimes it takes dire circumstances to compel us toward action. Phoebe Snetsinger, who would have been 85 years old today, became the world’s most prolific bird-watcher — a feat she achieved by surmounting tremendous odds.

It wasn’t until 1981 — when she was diagnosed with cancer — that Phoebe truly came into her own as a birder. In subsequent years, she scoured the globe for obscure or unknown bird species, ultimately raising her bird count to 8,393, the highest in the world at the time. Some of the notable birds she sighted include the Blackburnian Warbler and the Red-Shouldered Vanga, depicted among many other interesting birds by animator Juliana Chen.

Alternate concepts for the doodle, featuring a portrait and bird nests.

Today, we celebrate the courage of Ms. Snetsigner, and the beauty of life — however hidden it may be.

Sketches of birds both featured and considered for the doodle. 
Happy birthday Phoebe!

How to Make a Forest | OPEN Magazine

How to Make a Forest | OPEN Magazine

2 June 2012

How to Make a Forest

...with minimum fuss and maximum effect

It is possible to make the most adverse circumstances bend to extraordinary will. The story of one such green warrior in the Doodhatoli mountains of Uttarakhand

2

BY Sopan Joshi EMAIL AUTHOR(S)

Way to go

SACHCHIDANAND BHARATI Building water tanks to save the forest

Before their menfolk started migrating out in droves, before rainwater started running off the eroded slopes of the Doodhatoli mountains in Uttarakhand, the people here had suffered an erosion of confidence and dignity. So Sachchidanand Bharati didn’t believe it when he read in 1993 about the region’s age-old water management systems. It was an account of large ponds called taal (like Nainital), small ponds called khaal, and chaal, a string of small, terraced tanks to catch water running off the slope.
If the book was right, the name of Bharati’s village—Ufrainkhaal—meant it was built around a small pond. But there wasn’t one. He went around asking old people, but nobody knew of the existence of a small pond in Ufrainkhaal, 6,000 feet above sea level in the mountains north of the Jim Corbett National Park.
A teacher in the village intermediate school, Bharati had cut his teeth as a young volunteer in the Chipko movement of the 1970s, hanging around environmentalist Chandi Prasad Bhatt. He was well known in the neighbourhood for rallying the villagers of the area against a government logging permit in 1982 to fell the forests that sustained them. His efforts were non-violent and successful: the government had to rescind the logging permit. But the forests were degraded because rain, which was plentiful, ran off the slopes into distant valleys, eroding the soil along the way. The rainwater had to be retained on the slopes.
But there were no accounts to be found of building khaals and chaals to catch the gushing runoff. Bharati decided to experiment with designs and sites in 1993. The hill folk knew their terrain, knew terraced farms and thought, as Bharati found, in three dimensions, unlike the plainspeople. But the water scarcity and the degraded forests had made livelihoods impossible, and the villages were bereft of men, who had gone ‘down’ in search of employment.
Bharati began talking to the women who were left behind. In the first year, they built a chaal on a monsoonal channel that had dried up. After the next monsoon, it retained water longer, the surrounding soil remained moist, the forest looked healthier. Over the next five years, Bharati’s Doodhatoli Lok Vikas Sansthan built several chaals in Ufrainkhaal and neighbouring villages, improving their design through trial.
They had broken free of the vicious cycle of drought/flood—more water meant the forests were getting more dense, which in turn retained even more water. The big test came during the drought of 2000-01. Forest fires are a regular feature in the pine plantations that pass for government forests in the region—pine kills all undergrowth and its needles pile up into a tinderbox. The fires did not spread to the regenerated oak forests, which have soil moisture and diversity. Yet there was the fear that the fires will engulf them, so the village women who had built the chaals turned out in numbers to prevent fires in government forests. Three women died in these efforts. The fire was controlled.
The women guard the forest with their lives. Literally. Their method is remarkable. Guard duty is determined by khakhar, a stick with bells tied on top. Whoever sees the khakhar pitched in front of her house takes the next turn at guard duty. When she gets tired, she goes and pitches it in front of a neighbour’s house. Simple. No duty roster, no register, no grievance. They don’t need official orders or coercion to protect what is theirs.
They also don’t need a budget or an office building or a development project. Their only major expense is on the sweets they distribute at their camps; this is met through donations from friends and well-wishers. Labour is contributed without cost. The annual expenses seldom exceed Rs 25,000.
No need for full-time staff either. Apart from the school teacher Bharati, there are three others who work for this non-organisation. There is Devi Dayal, their postman; Dinesh, a vaidya who practises ayurveda; and Vikram Singh, who runs a grocery shop. All four have to meet lots of people every day. Messages get conveyed and relayed just fine with homegrown IT that mainly resides between the ears, and people turn up to volunteer without Facebook reminders.
Bharati and his colleagues have steadfastly rejected the trappings of a formal organisation. They don’t issue press releases or seek publicity, they do not demand development funding. In fact, they once refused an FAO offer of a grant of Rs 1 crore. The villagers here know a healthy forest is essential to survive, and they revel in being its protectors. When the government offered a watershed development project, Bharati politely refused.
Yet they have built about 20,000 chaals in about 125 villages over the past 19 years—the numbers are estimates, because they don’t go around counting and documenting their work; they just do it, and move to the next task. And they don’t have fancy terms like ‘social forestry’, ‘community forestry’ or ‘Joint Forest Management’ to describe their work either. The largest of their regenerated forests is in Daund, which spans about 800 hectares.
It’s not just the expanse either. The canopy of their regenerated forests is 100 feet high. The humus on the floor is several inches thick. There are birds and wild animals. There is water for the forest, for agriculture and to grow fodder. There is liquidity for all kinds of life.

Pradip Krishen on New Delhi's trees

Pradip Krishen on New Delhi's trees - India Real Time - WSJ

By Krishna Pokharel

Pradip Krishen

Bistendu, also called mountain persimmon or bombay ebony, is one of Delhi’s native trees that can be seen on Delhi’s ridge and many large parks.

Pradip Krishen is passionate about trees. A filmmaker-turned-naturalist as well as an author, Mr. Krishen spent almost a decade working on his “Trees of Delhi,” his popular 2006 field guide. His “Jungle Trees of Central India,” will be released later this year. Writing about plants and trees was also the focus of his session at the Jaipur Literature Festival, which ended Tuesday.

On a recent afternoon, India Real Time sat with Mr. Krishen, 62, and asked him to what extent New Delhi’s trees are a British legacy. Edited excerpts.

WSJ: What was Delhi’s vegetation like before the capital was moved there in 1911?

Mr. Krishen: All the evidence that we have, which is basically some travelers’ accounts, suggest that most of the area that is south of the Walled City [Old Delhi] was pretty empty. There are some reports by people in the later part of the nineteenth century that suggest it was just rubble, gravestones, old mausoleums, and mostly just a devastated kind of place.

But if you look at the natural ecology of this part of Delhi, there is no reason why it shouldn’t have supported good vegetation. What’s known as the lower-alluvial or the Bangar region, which includes all the areas like Golf Links, Mathura Road, Lodi Gardens, has very good soil. But if you read, for example, accounts of what Lodi Gardens was like at the turn of the century, it sounds awful.

For reasons that may have been partly historical and partly just because it was just over-grazed kind of place, it was very poorly vegetated before trees were planted there after 1911.

WSJ: Are New Delhi’s trees, in some ways, a British legacy?

Mr. Krishen: New Delhi’s trees are definitely a British legacy. But it’s important to sort out what is the British component and what is the non-British component. Obviously, the schemes are getting muddied. For example, along Akbar Road where you have the imlis, now you have second row of amaltas at the back. That is not part of the British planting.

Pradip Krishen

Author and naturalist Pradip Krishen

What is also a British legacy is the prosopis julifora, which has taken over all of Delhi’s semi-wild areas. If you go to the ridge, it is now dominated by this Central American tree that was introduced only in the 1920s. It has invaded this place in a huge way.

WSJ: How important were trees and plants for the design of Lutyens’ Delhi?

Mr. Krishen: There were many many avenues in Lutyens’ Delhi. They initially only chose 13 species of trees and slowly expanded to 16 species, which they planted along various avenues.

The original intention was to have major avenues point in the direction of a particular feature, like a monument or other. The trees that lined the avenue would frame the monument. They wanted the trees to frame that feature by choosing trees of appropriate sizes.

They were consciously trying to avoid using trees that have become so common that nobody would look at them again. For example, all the most common trees that the Mughals would plant as avenue trees, they would tend to avoid.

They didn’t plant mangoes, the banyan, nor the shisham [Indian rosewood.]They planted things like the peepal [sacred fig] but not hugely. The neem [Indian lilac,] the jamun[Indian blackberry] and the arjun became the three main trees for them.

Pradip Krishen

Barna, also called bengal quince, is a small tree that can be seen in full bloom in Delhi in April.

There were some inspired ideas. Very often you take a tree from the wild and you don’t quite know how it’s going to adapt to cultivation. There is for example a tree called the anjan [Indian blackwood.] It’s a tree that to my mind had never been planted as an avenue tree anywhere. It’s not even a north Indian tree. Somebody I think took a bit of a risk and planted it on Pandara Road. It turned out to be one among the most beautiful trees of the city.

WSJ: Did the British planner get some of the trees wrong?

Mr. Krishen It’s only been 100 years and in many cases it’s only 70-80 years since British planting was done. In a way, it’s a good time to do a kind of ecological audit of how these trees have performed.

They tried a tree which is commonly called Buddha’s coconut or narikel. It was planted in one avenue because in some towns like Dehradun it forms very beautiful avenues—very tall, very straight and very formal looking. Somebody who was trying to get that effect would have said “let’s plant narikel in Delhi.” But if you go to Bishamber Das Road today, where it was planted, there are huge gaps and the tree has not survived well.

WSJ: What was their planting ‘philosophy’?

Mr. Krishen To my mind, the biggest issue was that the British consciously tried to avoid planning trees that they knew to be deciduous, trees that seasonally shed their leaves.

Pradip Krishen

Flowers of amla, or indian gooseberry, tree that can be seen in Humayun’a and Safdarjang’s Tomb gardens in Delhi.

They seem to have this bias that if a tree loses its leaves then “we don’t want it.” Otherwise how do you explain why they would not plant the amaltas [Indian laburnum]? It is one of the most beautiful trees that we have in this part.

As somebody who works very closely with trees that are native, I find this odd because actually all the trees that the British planted turned out to be deciduous, like the jamun.

WSJ: What are the ecological challenges that the trees of Delhi face?

Mr. Krishen: Some trees are much more capable of dealing with atmospheric pollution and some are more prone to particular kind of pollution.

Water is going to be crucial. If you plant a tree that has a tap root that goes right down and if you expect that tap root to be reaching ground water, what is going to happen when that ground water levels are dramatically falling because of the extraction of water?

Loris calling!

The Hindu : FEATURES / METRO PLUS : Loris calling! reports that

There are more than 60 slender lorises in the farms and wild habitats around Nagavalli and surrounding districts, most of which have been rescued by the master and his team.

Nagavalli is 15kms from Tumkur, and the "master" is a school teacher at the local Government High School. He is quoted in the article as saying,

“I am a science teacher and am interested in wildlife and biodiversity. But, it was my students who told me about three slender lorises they had seen in the school compound. Fascinated, I started researching and then creating awareness about them.”

May his tribe grow!

The eco-warrior - Uday Veer SIngh

The Business Standard writes about the eco-warrior, Uday Veer Singh, a forest officer who has made a difference.

Johnny Allen Auroville

Auroville after many years � Ian Lockwood

There are a kaleidoscope of personalities and lifestyles in the community but Johnny lives my idea of the vision. He uses locally available materials for construction, the power comes from the sun and biomass and the impact on the ecology is minimal. He is still using a biomass-fueled Stirling engine to make peanut butter and dosa mix and chutney every Saturday. This was the engine that had first brought my father Merrick here. I had tagged along on several trips in the early 1990s. Johnny’s home is set amongst towering trees, thatched workshops and cowsheds. He is just the sort of teacher that helps you understand the practical side of sustainable living. Lenny was given a personal tour of the Stirling engine, a compost toilet and models of housing units that Johnny is designing for young people.

Satish "Batagur" Bhaskar

Every now and then, the Blackbuck e-group of MNS throws up a wonderful link, story and/or discussion. About a fortnight ago, Santharam posted this link about a personality, which I read with fascination and increasing astonishment. If you do read it, you will share my feelings as well!

Indian Ocean Turtle Newsletter

Satish "Batagur" Bhaskar

Rom Whitaker (as narrated to Janaki Lenin)
Email: kingcobra@gmail.com, janaki@gmail.com

In the early '70s the Madras Snake Park became a local hangout for young folks from nearby campuses like Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), AC College of Architecture and Madras Christian College. Thirty years later I run into some of these guys, sometimes in strange places. They're now mostly as paunchy and balding as I am and we trade a few stories and get into laughing fits over "the good old days".

One of the characters who showed up back then was a soft-spoken engineering student named Satish Bhaskar. He was a teetotaling non-smoker, a real ascetic compared to the rest of us. His passion was the sea, and he spent more time swimming than in the IIT classroom. It's not for nothing that his hostel mates called him Aquaman (privately)!

I was concentrating on crocs at the time, and whenever I could get away from Snake Park it was to survey gharial, mugger and saltwater crocodile habitat across India. At the same time, we also wanted to know sea turtle status: which species come to Indian shores, where, when and in what numbers. So, we really needed a full time sea turtle man.

Opportunely (for the turtles), Satish was getting disenchanted with his IIT course (after finishing most of it) and yearned to be a field man with a mission. The Snake Park had a tiny research budget, but it was enough to hire Satish as Field Officer (Rs. 250 a month, approx. US$ 28 based on exchange rates of that time) and get him out on his first few survey trips. When the fledgling WWF-India saw the good work he was doing for endangered sea turtles, Satish landed his first grant which really set him in motion.

About this time, the Madras Crocodile Bank was being born and Satish was its first resident. He helped to build the place (in between the sea turtle trips) but funds were so tight and sporadic that there were times when he had no work. So what did he do? He kept in shape by filling a bag of sand, carrying it to the other end of the Croc Bank, dumping it and starting again! Villagers still remember Satish hoisting a 50 kg sack of cement over his shoulder casually as if it were no more than a sleeping bag. This was the training that made him so tough in the field; it enabled him to walk most of India's entire coastline, more than 4,000 km, over the next few years looking for sea turtles, their tracks and nests! He loved going to remote places which few Indians have the stamina or stomach for. "To him, swimming in shark infested waters was the most normal thing to do," declares Shekar Dattatri, who has known him since the early Snake Park days.

Old Jungle Saying: Satish is incredibly kind to people. If he has anything that someone wants, he gives it away.

In 1977, Satish conducted the first surveys in Lakshadweep and zeroed in on an uninhabited island, Suheli Valiyakara, as the place for a focused green sea turtle study. The only problem was that the main nesting period is during the monsoon and no one goes there when the sea is so rough. In 1982, Satish left his young wife and three month old daughter, Nyla to maroon himself on Suheli for the whole monsoon, from May to September. It meant making elaborate preparations, like calculating the amount of food he would need. We sat with Satish and talked about things that could go wrong during this isolation - chronic toothache, appendicitis, malaria were just a few sobering thoughts. The Coast Guard provided some signal flares and there was talk of a two-way radio but eventually Satish just set sail and that's the last we heard of him till September.

Actually that's not true. A few months later, his wife Brenda back in Madras, received a loving letter from him. He had launched his message in a bottle on July 3rd and 24 days and more than 800 km later it was picked up by a Sri Lankan fisherman, Anthony Damacious, who very kindly posted it to Brenda along with a covering letter, a family picture and an invitation to visit him in Sri Lanka. The 'bottle post' was very romantic, but of course Satish's spin was that he was trying to see if he could study ocean currents using this technique!

An emergency situation did arise on the deserted isle, and one that none of us could have predicted: a huge dead whale shark washed up on Satish's little island and started rotting. The nauseous stench became so overpowering that our intrepid sea turtle man had to move to the extreme other end of the tiny island to a somewhat precarious, wave lashed spit of sand.

That year the monsoon abated late. So though Satish was packed and ready to go home by September 1st, (after 3 ½ months with only turtles and a radio for company), the relief boat from Kavaratti Island, over 60 km away did not arrive. Satish had run out of rations and legend has it that he survived on milk powder, turtle eggs, clams and coconuts for weeks. Fortunately, the lighthouse on neighbouring Suheli Cheriyakara needed servicing and a Lighthouse Department ship, the MV Sagardeep, arrived on October 11th. As Satish clambered aboard, Capt. Kulsreshta's first words were, "Take him to the galley!"

For a person with a gargantuan appetite, Satish could live on very little. On a trip to the Nicobars, Indraneil Das and he ran out of rations and water and they still had a day's walk ahead of them. The former was half-dead when they ran into a party of Nicobarese who tried to feed them but Satish politely and firmly declined saying they had just eaten and didn't allow Neil to eat either. Later he pointed out that they had nothing to repay the poor people's kindness! (This trip yielded five new species - two frogs, two lizards and a snake.)

On another occasion, on Little Andaman, Satish had again run out of rations and was surviving on "only biscuits and vitamins for 4 days." He came upon an empty Onge tribal camp with some freshly barbecued turtle meat. He took some of the meat and left two biscuit packets in exchange mainly to avoid a spear through his back! Just counting the number of times he ran out of food in remote areas, we suspect that he deliberately starved himself to see how far he could take it.


Photo: The village of Kondul, Great Nicobar (2001). Satish first visited the Great Nicobar island in 1979, and then subsequently in 1981, 1992 and 1994.
Photo courtesy: Kartik Shanker

Old Jungle Saying: Satish always travels with a kerosene stove and a pressure cooker. The former is to avoid burning wood as it is bad for the environment and the latter for cooking efficiency. He also carries an automobile inner tube to raft his supplies from canoe to shore and vice versa.

Through the 1980s, again thanks to WWF and other funds, Satish visited many of the islands of the Andamans. His were the first recommendations on sea turtle nesting beach protection. These helped give the Andaman and Nicobar Islands Forest Department a solid conservation basis to resist the efforts of big business and other Government Department interests in "developing" beaches for tourism.

Amongst all this serious work, he had time for research of another kind. Writing in Hamadryad, the Croc Bank Newsletter, he wonders if the sea krait was attracted to light, feigns dismay that this may be true and proceeds to try to make one climb his leg by playing with his torchlight!

By this time, Satish's work was being appreciated by sea turtle biologists worldwide. Papers on the species inhabiting this region were very scarce indeed and his publications helped to fill that big gap. In 1979 Satish was invited to give a paper on the status of sea turtles of the eastern Indian Ocean at the World Conference on Sea Turtle Conservation, in Washington D.C. In recognition for his contributions to sea turtle conservation, Satish received a fancy watch and award from Rolex in 1984.

When Ed Moll came to India to do a freshwater turtle study, Satish became a key collaborator. He surveyed extensively for a highly endangered Batagur baska which nests on coastal beaches along with olive ridleys. Sadly the Bengalis have eaten the terrapin to near extinction and there are no known wild nests in India. It was at this time that he was nicknamed "Batagur Bhaskar".

Old Jungle Saying: Satish has no sense of direction. He gets lost easily.

He spent many months, over several years, studying the hawksbill and green turtle nesting biology on tiny South Reef Island on the west coast of North Andaman. He described this island as "one of ten sites most favoured by nesting [g]reen turtles in India". Saw Bonny, a Forest Department Range Officer stationed on Interview Island, regularly risked his life ferrying supplies to Satish on South Reef Island, even during stormy monsoon weather. Bonny deputed a department staff member from his camp to assist Satish who was working alone. Emoye spent a few days on South Reef, got fed up and wanted to return. Since the currents were strong and Satish was an accomplished swimmer, Emoye requested him to go along with him.

Over the years shark fishermen regularly hauled in sharks from this very channel. The sea was rough, it was after all the monsoon season. Being a modest and understated narrator, Satish rated his swimming skills as "below par" and claimed that his snorkeling flippers gave him confidence. To keep warm during the more than two kilometre swim, he wore two shirts. Emoye rested frequently on Satish to catch his breath and together the two of them swam across the channel.

A party of shark fishermen were camped on the beach in Interview when our intrepid swimmers landed. One of them remembered meeting Satish earlier and enquired, "Still loafing around? Still jobless?" He thought Satish was an ambergris-hunter. It was already dark when Satish and Emoye set out across the island to the forest camp. Half way, a bull elephant in musth trumpeted his warning from just 30 metres away and started to chase them. The two men ran for their lives. Later Satish would recount, "I had done some distance running in college but the penalty for losing was never as dire." Already exhausted from their long and arduous swim, they couldn't continue running and the elephant showed no signs of relenting. Remembering a Kenneth Anderson story, Satish threw his shirt down while continuing to run and was gratified to hear the pachyderm squealing with rage moments later. With the animal distracted, the men could finally stumble onwards to the forest camp. They made a pact - if the shirt was intact, it was Emoye's; if not, then Satish's. The next morning they found the shirt in three pieces completely smeared with muddy elephant footprints, while one bit had to be recovered from a tree. He later posted the pieces back to Brenda with a reassuring note.

Old Jungle Saying: Satish trusts people implicitly and they, in turn, don't let him down.

In the mid 1980's WWF-Indonesia contracted Satish to study the huge, intensely exploited leatherback sea turtle rookeries on the beaches of the Vogelkopf, the western most peninsula of the island of New Guinea, in Irian Jaya. This was a logistically tough place to work. First of all, there was no access from the landward side and one couldn't even land a boat on the beach. This was why it had remained protected for so long. Then the people from neighbouring areas started taking tens of thousands of leatherback eggs. People swam ashore with jerry cans and sacks and floated the eggs back to boats.

However, Satish found a way to keep in touch. He would swim 100 m out to a passing longboat that was headed to Sorong, and hand his letters to someone on board with enough currency for stamps. There was one boat every 20 to 30 days. By late Aug 1985, he had tagged about 700 leatherbacks almost single-handedly.

Rather uncharacteristically, Satish never wrote up his report for WWF-Indonesia. I have no explanation why this happened nor did we ever discuss this. After a year had passed and there was no sign of the report, I was embarrassed as I had recommended him for the job. The document was sorely needed to put some laws in place very soon. I had my sense of justice as well so I wrote the report in his name.

Sadly, the 13,360 nests that he recorded in 1984 was probably the highest ever in recent years. Ever since then, the average number of nests has hovered way down around 3200. And this has resulted in yet another 'Satish myth' - the local people believe that Satish tagged the female leatherbacks with metal tags, and using a giant magnet drew all the turtles to his country! The local elders have refused to permit any more tagging of turtles on this beach.

Old Jungle Saying: He doesn't like to crawl into a sleeping bag on cold nights; instead he wears all his clothes. Sometimes, he buries himself, except his face which is covered by a mosquito net, in the sand to get away from inquisitive island rats, mosquitoes and sand flies at night. He usually sleeps out of sight of others at camp, after playing a few riffs on his harmonica.

In 1993, while chugging past Flat Island, a small spit of land off the west coast of the Jarawa Tribal Reserve in the Andamans, Satish and his companions saw a pair of human footprints emerging from the sea and disappearing into the vegetation. Satish had evaluated this island as a prime green turtle nesting beach, and despite the others cautioning him of Jarawas (the hostile tribe who routinely finished off trespassers with arrows), Satish swam ashore. His companions watched in horror as he followed the footprints into the forest. While his friends feared the worst, he emerged from another side crouching behind a green turtle carapace, holding it like a shield. The fearsome tribals never showed themselves and Satish returned safely.

On a subsequent trip, some Jarawa came aboard the canoe. Satish later recalled admiringly that the Jarawa were powerful swimmers and he had been very impressed by the bow-wake their breast-stroke created. Everyone else cowered in the back while Satish calmly interacted with the tribals. The crew had already hidden the machetes and other metal objects that the Jarawa coveted for making arrow heads. Eventually the tribals left without harming anybody but did take some spoons.

Old Jungle Saying: Satish likes to catch everything.

Local intelligence was that the Galathea river, Great Nicobar, had a lot of crocodiles. After dark one night standing on the bridge spanning the river, Satish played his torch over the water. Suddenly his flashlight caught some small eye shines along the waters' edge and he got very excited thinking they were baby salt water crocs. So he crept down to the edge of the river to catch them, but they turned out to be large spiders!

But he did have encounters with crocodiles. Once while lying asleep on a beach on Trinkat Island, Nicobars, he woke up to a rustling noise. He found a young croc looking at him through the mosquito net. In mock seriousness he later wrote, "I'm overlooking it this time but if the crocs that wake me get any bigger I'm headed back to Madras."

The Karen of the Andamans are particularly fond of Satish. He earned their respect by treating young and old with courtesy and respect, and also with such exploits as swimming from Wandoor in Middle Andaman to Grub Island (a distance of about 1.6 km) and back, walking the entire coastline of Little Andaman even crossing swift streams such as Bumila and Jackson Creeks and doggedly surveying beaches no matter how big the obstacles. But that didn't stop the Karen from teasingly nicknaming Satish, Cheto (Karen for 'basket', as it rhymes with Bhaskar!). Several older Nicobarese remember "the man who came looking for turtles" even today, many years after his last visit. He was perhaps the only man to ever find a reticulated python on the tiny island of Meroe (between Little Nicobar and Nancowry). The Nicobarese, who frequent the island, had never seen this species there before and were duly impressed. This python was later handed over to the Forest Department in Port Blair.

Satish notched identification marks on the carapaces of turtles that came ashore to lay eggs. Later, a bunch of titanium tags was sent by the Australian National Parks and Wildlife Service for tagging hawksbills on South Reef. In Vogelkopf, he tagged more than 700 leatherback turtles. There is no information on tag returns from any of these turtles. One reason may be that subsequent night surveys (after Satish left) were inconsistent on Andamans, Nicobars and Irian Jaya. Secondly, the English lettering which provides the return address means little to local people. Karen tribals have mentioned finding tags on turtles they ate but not knowing the significance of the metal, simply threw it away into the bush.

For not being a religious person at all, he has the morals of one. He doesn't like anyone to tell him what to do, which made my job as boss difficult. (But he was conscientious about sending reports so he didn't need to be reminded.) I clearly remember once when I suggested that he store his things in a tin trunk as they were being destroyed by termites, he took umbrage. "Would I tell you what to do, Rom?" he asked in his low pitched gruff voice with a touch of menace. I never made that mistake again! He is a perfectionist - wanting to do everything right and better than anybody else. He also has an exaggerated sense of justice - always rooting for the downtrodden (probably why he got along well with tribals, villagers and field people). In many ways, he is very un-Indian.

Old Jungle Saying: Nothing is useless; anything "useless" was just something for which you haven't yet found a use.

Once while running to catch a bus to Mayabunder, his chappal broke. On being asked if he'd like to buy a new pair, he responded, "Only one broke - surely another one will wash up with the high tide". He tried very hard to keep South Reef clean of trash. On one occasion, he arrived in Madras with two sacks stuffed with rubber chappals that had washed ashore on the island. Legend has it that he took it to the recyclers.

After twenty years of doing some of the first baseline sea turtle surveys in the country, Satish retired to spend more time with his family. Soon thereafter, an UNDP (United Nations Development Program) - Wildlife Institute of India project did a more extensive survey of turtle nesting beaches. But since then, the 2004 tsunami has changed the profile of many Andaman and Nicobar beaches and we don't yet know where new beaches are forming, or how the turtles have responded to this change. We desperately need a new Satish Bhaskar to continue the work.

Satish now lives in Goa with his wife Brenda (who was by the way, the Snake Park and Croc Bank's secretary for many years!) and their three children (Nyla, Kyle and Sandhya). Satish is the man who kicked sea turtle conservation in India into high gear. There's a strong lesson in all this and an inspiration to young naturalists who wonder, "What can I do to help?" Satish's single-minded quest for sea turtles in his quiet, often unorthodox way, set the stage for the major conservation efforts being made today. Here's a prime example of how one person's passion for an animal and its habitat can help make the difference between survival and extinction.

Inputs from Aaron Savio Lobo, Allen Vaughan, Arjun Sivasundar, Atma Reddy, Manish Chandi, Manjula Tiwari, K. Munnuswamy, Nina and Ram Menon, Shekar Dattatri are gratefully acknowledged.

And the man actually exists. Thyagu remembers that he would casually run from IIT Madras to the beach, go for a swim and then run back to campus!