Sense of a Forest

We leave Bangalore one rain-soaked morning and somehow find the stars and the traffic signals aligning in our favour. This lush, post-monsoon countryside is the world of our nostalgia, however delusional. We live in the urban crush of the city, working in tall towers without sunlight or fresh air, but when we travel for a ...

Six life lessons from Rhinos 1

Six life lessons from Rhinos
[This piece was published in Nature inFocus on 1st May 2017, for Save the Rhino day. ] I will admit this. It was not love at first sight. As our jeep rounded a corner in Kaziranga National Park, we caught sight of a large gray box in the grassland. It had long since struck me ...

The Old Man and the City 3

The Old Man and the City
  [This piece was published in Nature InFocus on 28th February 2017. ] 1986 I was about 10 years old when my family moved to Guwahati, Assam, from the desert-town of Bahrain in the Arabian gulf. If Guwahati was a bustling urban space at that time, my mind did not register it. I’d wait for the ...

A Hampi Kaleidoscope

A Hampi Kaleidoscope
It is raining as the factories of Bellary rush past our train window. And as the train pulls into the little shanty town that is Hospet, it is hard to believe that the ruins of an ancient kingdom lie not far away. We drive to the green oasis-like Sloth Bear Resort, situated at the edge ...

All the world’s a stage 11

All the world's a stage
The Old Magazine House at Ganeshgudi is the stuff of birdwatching legend. If you believed the stories, all you had to do was grab a cup of tea, take a seat in front of the birdbaths, and watch. It all sounded so fantastic that my husband, Kumar, and I had to go see it for ...

Agumbe on my mind 29

Agumbe on my mind
Agumbe had been on my mind for months. I nearly signed up for one of Darter‘s Agumbe tours last year but regular life intervened and, as it does, made a mess of things. So, when the tour was announced in April this year, me and K decided to go. After a pleasant overnight bus ride ...