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31.01.2014
31.01.2014
Rs. 2.00
Daily
Andaman Sheekha
Issue::25
EDITORIAL.....
Yearning bright T he fo r est o fficials o f Ranthambore crouch in the undergrowth, whiskers twitching for the slightest hint of their ‘prey’ as i sit down to this column. The missing Machli gets her name from the pattern of stripes on her face. So it is an apt if unhappy coincidence to be writing this in my fish-loving home state presided over by another Bengal tigress. The death of every tiger diminishes us, but fear has been more tremulous than all the forests of the night in the weeks that Machli hasn’t been spotted. She is already legend. And, please, not because Russell Brand ‘gave’ her as a wedding present to Kate Perry saying she t o o was t he ‘epitome of beauty’. Unlike their short-lived celebrity marriage, ‘solemnised’ noisily in this very forest, Machli has spawned more than half of the st r iped po p ulat io n o f Rajasthan’s national parks. The frantic search in Ranthambore sends me scurrying for Valmik Thapar’s Tiger Fire. The leonine-looking authority launched it at our last TOI Literary Carnival, and it is a tome befitting the magnificent beast whose 500-year Indian sojourn Valmik has captured. Alas, i am also reminded of two earlier Decembers of karmic disappointment.The tiger dwells in the realm of mysticism, and there are two types of seekers. Those who are granted a darshan and those who aren’t. Perversely, the former don’t catch merely a glimpse; they get a full frontal command performance. They also consider it their pious duty to rub their anointed status into the darshan-denied. Trust me, for us poor unblessed, it is no tiger balm. In 2005, anticipation embraced us as soon as we got o ff t he t r a in a t S a wai Madhopur, and then roared out from every humble lodge or luxe tent in Ranthambore. At Vanyavilas, we got a preparatory talk from the claw-scarred
Fateh Singh Rathore, the ultimate Tiger Man who had given Machli her moniker; her official name is simply T16. Jungle lore may be littered by the record number of cubs she produced and their progeny but in those three days in the wilderness, all we ‘saw’ was the illusion of the twitch of a st riped tail in the dappled grass. As we sat in our jeep, dr y-t o ngued and clammypalmed, Satish, our guide, spoke of the certainty of a tiger’s arrival as if it were the 9. 1 7 t o Chu r chg at e. He po int e d t o t he sk ysca pe painted by a flock of exotic birds, to the rare sight of a bear in the distance. We were not beguiled. We wanted only one boon. And we were turned away – denied bliss, or at least a story to dine off for years. The darshan-getters return to be twice blessed. The darshan-denied come back for one more chance. Either way it is mo ne y- s pinner fo r Rajasthan. In 2012, Machli received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the global Travel Operators For Tigers; in the past 10 years, she had raked in an estimated $10 million per annum for the local economy. But, if in Ranthambore the tiger is opportunity, in the Sunderban it is threat. Visiting those surreal mangroves two Decembers later, there was no escape from the ubiquitous wayside temples to Bon Bibi, slayer of t he t iger demon Dokkhin Rai, the clusters of ‘tiger widow’ villages, the painted masks worn on the back of the head by the gatherers of forest produce so as to fool the tiger into thinking that they were facing it, and so deter it from surprising them from behind. Death here is an integral part of livelihood. Having sailed into this fluid shoreline in the hope of breaking my tiger jinx, i came away almost feeling that NOT sighting one was a boon.
Daily
Port Blair
17 Trinamool supporters injured in road accident HOOGHLY: Seventeen Trinamool Congress supporters, on their way in a bus to attend a party rally in Kolkata, were injured in a road accident due to poor visibility at Guptipara in Hooghly district on Friday. They were injured when the bus, carrying 35 Trinamool support-
ers from Nabadwip in Nadia district, dashed against a tree due to dense fog this morning, superintendent of police Sunil Chowdhury said. While the critically injured bus driver was rushed to Kolkata, 16 others were admitted to the Chinsura Imambara hospital, he said.