WE SAW IT!!!

We finally saw it. Yes, we had a close look at a tiger in the wild. For the first time in a dozen safaris in Ranthambhore andCorbett. For a full two minutes and within spitting distance. Boy, what an experience. All we had seen till now was  a fleeting glance at the back of a tiger. 

It was the second and last day of our trip to Sawai Madhopur, the host town of the Ranthambhore National Park. It was the last of four safaris, and we had reached the exit gate of the park. Without success. We had resigned ourselves to continue to belong in that category of “tiger have-nots,” as wife put it. It was so frustrating that I began using up space on my videocam to film langur monkeys. 

Suddenly, the Canter took a U-turn and we were heading back into the forest! A forest guard who was hitching a ride back into town with us received a message on his radio that a tiger had been spotted by other Canters and jeeps. Off we went with the driver negotiating the narrow, rough dirt track as if there was no tomorrow. The drive must have taken no more than five minutes but it seemed like an eternity. Will the animal disappear before we reach the spot? I somehow believed it wouldn’t. My heart was telling me that my date with the tiger had finally arrived.

The Canter now braked and its engine died. And there it was, cooling itself in a small pond just by the side of the track. Head and three-fourths of its body well above the water. It didn’t move but did threw a couple of glances at us. Now, I no longer any had more recordable bytes in my videocam and so furiously began clicking from my still cam. Could have got better pictures, I felt, but I couldn’t care less.

It was still in the pond when the Canter drove down the path to take a U-turn back to the exit. In the one minute it took for us to do this, the tiger had got up from the pond and walked over to the other side. We saw it lazily disappear into the forest. It had made our day.

The guide later told us that it was a tigress.

Off to tiger land

Come Saturday next and I will be off with wife & daughter to Ranthambhore for three days. We have been there twice before and all we could see was the back of a tiger in some four trips into the forest. Hopefully we will do better this time. Last year we did Corbett but the animal proved elusive, although the trip by itself was fabulous. The kid loved it and doesn’t tire of talking about it. Ranthambore offers a much higher probability of tiger sightings than any other reserve. In fact, some compare it to a zoo!

Sighting animals in the wild is quite an experience. Two years back, I was on official assignment in Assam and didn’t lose the opportunity of visiting Kaziranga, home to the one-horned rhino. From the back of an elephant, I got to see several rhinos and wild buffaloes from as close as one could get to them.

Tiger sighting is however the ultimate. So wish us luck!

No T20 World Cup for me

First the admission. Yes, I did watch a few more IPL matches than I did last time. But without exception, they all featured Bangalore. Not necessarily out of parochial considerations but mostly because of two contemporary cricketers I admire most. Anil Kumble and Rahul Dravid. And it was quite a tournament for both of them. Especially for the former. There has never been a player who despite having achieved so much has still not got commensurate praise coming his way. Anil proved his critics wrong for the zillionth time. And there was one on-drive from the straight bat of Rahul in the semi-final that one would find difficult to forget in a long time. 

Form, they say is temporary. Class, permanent. That was the recurring theme of this year’s IPL. The two gentlemen had company from a few others. Shane Warne, Jacques Kallis, Herschelle Gibbs. One more man could have joined the league if only his team had let him bowl once. Glenn McGrath. 

Now, will I watch T20 World Cup? Let me assure you I won’t. The ultra limited over format is ugly. Employing the long handle to let the ball sail over the boundary ropes is indeed a sight to behold but not when it means burly Haydens and Symondses and Morkels  making mince-meat of hapless bowlers on pitches tailored for lusty hitting and all the rules of the game loaded in favour of batsmen.  That’s simply not cricket.

A cheery verdict

It was worth the wait, wasn’t it? For those of us who believe that it won’t do India good to have the likes of Advani and Modi holding the reins of power, this election has brought great cheer. Before 16 May, no one was willing to bet on a single party winning over 200 seats. The consensus was that it would be a messy verdict. But like I had said in an earlier post,  it was eminently possible that we could all get it wrong. The UPA surpassed the best prediction for the alliance by quite a wide margin. And my own score for the Congress was 160!

There is one big disappointment though. My home state has unfortunately contributed the highest number of seats to the BJP’s tally. The Congress and other centrist parties need to get their act together.                                         

Of teddy bears & starvation deaths

D ribbed me no end from the time she walked into my hotel room. I didn’t ask for that room but the manager must have decided that I deserve that room more than her. After all, I looked older which in fact I was. Now let me tell you why my room was the source of such mirth. As you entered it, there was a rather dilapidated refrigerator with its paint peeling off. Now in hotels in small towns, an old fridge in the room is not a rarity. But what caused uncontrollable laughter was the huge teddy bear placed above it. It was almost as tall as I am.

That’s not all. The fridge, it seemed, had stopped working several years ago. Upon a closer look, I found the wire connecting the contraption to the mains ripped off. I opened the door gingerly to find not water or cool drink bottles but a small cake of soap of an obscure brand and nothing else. The hotel must have decided that since the fridge had stopped working, it should be put to good use. And what better way than to convert it into a storage rack!

There was more to that largish room as I discovered a few mintues later. The bathroom  which could have done with at least a couple of litres of perfumed disinfectant contained what appeared to be a brand new bathtub and a huge one at that. It was caked with dust but it didn’t look like it had been used ever. I couldn’t see any water pipe connecting the tub. Which explains why it looked unused.

Much as I rack my brains I can’t recollect the name of this hotel in Bhawanipatna in the district of Kalahandi in Orissa (this episode goes back four years). D and I had arrived in the town late afternoon after an exhausting eight-hour drive from Bhubaneswar in the sweltering heat of May. Despite the very effective air-conditioning in the brand new SUV we had hired for the journey, a few minutes of stepping outside during refreshment breaks had had its effect. 

Kalahandi (and Bolangir and Koraput –KBK)  has over the years been in the news for its starvation deaths, and during our interactions with the tribals there we found that the deaths occurred mainly because of the food they ate. In the summer months, the poor had little to eat except dried mango kernels. They have the practice of burying the kernels in pits in the earth and at times the kernels get infected with fungus which when consumed can prove fatal.

The district is home to the lush Niyamgiri hills which today is in danger of degradation because of mining activity.These hills are a reservoir of bauxite which when mined and processed turns into precious aluminium. Tribal communities and a plethora of NGOs — some with agendas which are not necessarily altruistic– are fighting what appears to be a losing battle to save their forests and hills. 

After three days in the district, we drove back to Bhubaneswar and to the luxurious comfort of a swanky hotel. We flew back to Delhi the next day leaving Kalahandi and starvation deaths far behind us. There was a report to be written and a presentation to be made to the client. That was the priority. Tribals be damned.

Can’t wait for 16 May!

D-day is thankfully only four days away. The suspense has been killing. Although elections have been long drawn-out affairs for a decade now, I have always wished polling is held throughout the country on one day and the results are out the next. It is now seven years since I haven’t been in the thick of an election, but my excitement hasn’t waned. As a journalist covering an election, I had to get into the nitty-gritty of it all constituency-wise.  Since I am no longer a journalist, I have the luxury of framing my own big picture. 

So, what is the big picture as I see it? It is as hazy as the one I saw it at the beginning of the exercise. The only thing every poll pundit has been saying is that there will be no clear winner this time. You can’t but disagree. But as I said in an earlier post, elections have that quality of making absolute fools of those know-it-alls who impose themselves upon us on prime time television.

Having said that, I can’t wait to switch on my TV set on the morning of 16 May for two things. One, to see who all went horribly wrong and derive vicarious pleasure. And second, to figure out how I have fared in my own assessment which is a secret. Now that I am not a journalist anymore, I am under no obligation to share it with the world. Ha, ha.

The freshness of new sounds

It has been some time since I “discovered” Raghu Dixit. But it is only recently that I have started to hear him seriously. Without doubt, he is one of the most exciting voices from Karnataka to have emerged in a long time. He has introduced a whole new genre to listeners of music written in Kannada. While folk rock has been around for some years in India, Kannada folk rock has made a beginning. And how! What impressed me enormously is Raghu’s use of Santa Sishunala Sharif’s sufi poetry in his music. His tunes do full justice to Sharif’s philosophical outpourings. I don’t know how many more he has set tune to and I hope he has, but I have been hearing two of Sharif’s well-known songs — Soruthihudu maniya maligi agnanadinda and gudugudiya sedi nodo. And believe me, they rock.

If you haven’t heard him, do it now.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMpo1HKQf7I

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIMRTWp0VV8

Back to my blog

I have been away from here these last few days and doing some blogging elsewhere. In the interregnum, IPL-2 has started but like last time don’t really like watching this version of the game. I did watch the Bangalore vs Rajasthan Royals match though. It wasn’t bad after all, thanks to great leg spin from Warne & Kumble and copybook batting from Dravid. Class is permanent and form temporary, they say. Great wisdom, isn’t it?

And of course, the elections are one phase done and there seems to be no escaping a hung verdict. There were violent disruptions from the Naxalites, and now we hear of plans of jehadi groups to set off bomb blasts during the next phases.

That’s it for now with the promise of being more regular.

A psephologist’s nightmare

 

 

As we come closer to dropping our ballots in the box,  the only one thing that pundits and laymen alike can say with certainty is that there isn’t going to be a clear winner. Election 2009 is turning out to be the toughest ever to predict. Surely a psephologist’s nightmare.

Assuming that the results prove popular perception right, this election would have definitively told the story of the  dramatic marginalisation of the two biggest players on the Indian political circuit, the Congress and the BJP.

The run-up to the election has already demonstrated the failure of the two parties to shore up their individual spheres of influence as well as those of the coalitions they lead. In the manner of the tail wagging the dog, the smaller parties have shown them their place. This has resulted in the emergence of four distinct sets of players – the Congress and whatever is left of the UPA, the BJP and its feeble NDA, the Third Front, and for the first time a Fourth Front.

Historically, a third front has time and again had its share of fame on the national stage.  But what has really spiced up this election is the coming together of the two Yadavs – Mulayam Singh and Laloo Prasad – and Ram Vilas Paswan to challenge the rest in two of India’s biggest states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar that make up a total of 120 Lok Sabha seats out of 542.

In recent years, Laloo had been one ally whose support the Congress could take for granted. Then why did Laloo choose to slam the door on the Congress for now, if not for ever?

The trio, products and beneficiaries of the Mandal era, has remained relevant for close to three decades now in the respective states as well as on the national stage. They no longer want to be kingmakers and are aspiring to be kings themselves.

There are more wannabe prime ministers. Mayawati, Jayalalitha, Chandrababu Naidu and Sharad Pawar, the latest to flirt with the Third Front,  are all eyeing the post. Not to forget the humble farmer from Haradanahalli who wouldn’t mind a second innings as prime minister, or may be even a go for President when the vacancy arises.

It would be simplistic to suggest that prime ministerial ambitions of the regional satraps alone are the reason for the pre-poll arrangements of the two so-called national parties to collapse. For decades, the Congress has been the only party to have had some sort of a presence in every nook and corner of the country. Through the eighties and till now, regional parties have eaten into its bases. The BJP, even if it never came close to the geographic footprint of the Congress, is a more recent national player. While the Congress continuously ceded ground to new entities including the BJP, the latter itself was never able to extend its sphere of influence southward. Karnataka has fallen to the saffronites only recently.

What we are seeing in this election is an interesting play of the rapidly declining fortunes and relevance of the main parties, ambitions of smaller parties and leaders coming to the fore as never before, and a further localisation of issues and concerns on the basis of which voters make their choices.

There is of course a caveat to all of this. What makes Indian elections such a delight is the ease with which voters make fools of self-appointed experts including yours truly. If we indeed get fooled, either the Congress or the BJP will come to power with its respective allies, pre or post-poll. If not, we may well see a third/fourth front government. Whether such a government is good for the country or not is a separate issue.

Music for the soul

Living in Delhi, and that includes Gurgaon where I live and work, has its bonuses. Getting to enjoy good music, for instance. Bhakti Utsav over the weekend gone by was a treat for the soul. The theme was devotional and the forms as varied as it can get. From sopana sangeetham to sufiana qalam and nirgun to gurbani, abhanga and more. And there was young T.M.Krishna, arguably Carnatic music’s best brand ambassador today, who had the audience craving for more.

I don’t know if any other city in India promotes classical and folk music the way Delhi does. The ”Music in the Park” concerts have been immensely popular — some years ago an estimated 5,000 people were there to hear Bhimsen Joshi! The experience of listening to music in the open is qualitatively different from that of a performance in a concert hall. And Nehru Park, which is usually the venue, is a riot of colours this time of the year.

Bhakti Utsav made a powerful political statement as well. It may not be that the organisers wanted to make one, but a Ramesh giving mridangam “saath” to the Fakirs of Nagore Dargah who sang in Tamil had its own significance on Ramanavami. Then you had the Manganiyars, who are Muslim by faith but traditionally sing both Hindu bhajans and sufi poetry. 

It was nice to see Shiela Dixit taking the time off from electioneering to be at the concerts. Varun Gandhi couldn’ t make it though; he found himself in jail for threatening to chop people’s hands off or something to that effect.

Click on the link below to listen to the Nagore Fakirs.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRbe-UqeEzU&feature=PlayList&p=3EADF580E38D7851&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=14