Furious Aila and prescient Amitav

The minutes crept by and the objects flying through the air grew steadily larger. Where first there had been only twigs, leaves and branches there were now whirling coconut palms and spinning tree trunks. Piya knew that the gale had reached full force when she saw something that looked like a whole island hanging suspended above their heads: it was a large clump of mangroves, held together by the trees' intertwined roots. - Amitav Ghosh The Hungry Tide 


Ghosh makes the spectacle of the whirling wind seem as enchanting as in The Wizard of Oz but infinitely more threatening. His writing is magical - as if he has seen it all. Or perhaps, as people of the Sunderbans might say, if you have seen one cyclone and lived to tell the tale, you have seen them all. In these parts, do they measure the longevity of their lives by the storms they have survived? The Sunderbans and their neighbourhood have been battered time and again by the most furious and bloodthirsty of storms. Each cyclone whips up a seemingly unending wave of suffering that generation after generation of people must endure. Their wretched homes torn asunder, their emaciated livestock drowned, and their meagre savings gone to seed, the survivors are perhaps unluckier than the victims. They are faced with the crushing and intimidating prospect of beginning their lives all over again. As if this were not sorrow enough, they are encumbered by the absence of family members who were once their sustenance and stay. 


Number-obsessed statisticians are auditing assets gone to waste and counting bodies - human, mostly. Environmentalists are mourning the loss of habitats, which have either wiped out or displaced the region's fauna: dolphins, gharials, tigers... and these are only the charismatic species. How much has been lost forever we can only tell when the hungry tide is satiated. Of these sinister storms, Cyclone Aila was the most recent. And she certainly won't be the last. Despite all the technology at our command (and our consequent hubris), we will never be capable of stopping natural disasters in their tracks. Meteorologists can issue warnings. Governments can cry out for aid. Relief workers can mop up the mess. And the media can weep and wail, insinuate and blame, and generally prolong the suffering for as long as public sentiment lasts. But despite all of that, we cannot predict the weight of nature's wrath. We can only measure its aftermath. And count our dead.

When a tiger couldn't bear it

The tiger and the sloth bear are two major predators of the Indian jungles. Between them, it's clear who's boss. Some people know that tigers hunt and eat bears. Others don't. And then, there are people who can't bear to think about either possibility. The acclaimed wildlife filmmaker Shekar Dattatri has captured an intriguing and amusing interaction between a tiger and a sloth bear in Nagarahole, Karnataka. Looking into a patch of forest from a watchtower, the filmmaker and his companions (one of whom was wildlife biologist and tiger expert Dr. Ullas Karanth) saw a large male tiger pursued by a sloth bear. Knowing well the equation between the two animals, they expected a bloody confrontation resulting in the end of the bear as we knew it. Instead, what followed was comedy. The tiger lay down, yawned and regarded the bear's threat displays with apparent amusement. Once finished, the bear went away. And the tiger returned to his nap. Grand stuff. And lucky are those who witnessed it and caught it on film. The insight: Tigers, we are led to believe, are not interested in their prey when they are not hungry. That's a good lesson for little children: Eat at mealtimes and never in between. Text and pictures here

100 tigers, but where's the forest?

The Chinese, in all their ecological ignorance, have reason to be proud. After systematically decimating all things living from their once-bountiful land, they now expect to be felicitated for their 'conservation' efforts. China announced on May 22 that it expects the birth of 100 Siberian Tigers at the Manchurian Tiger Park in the city of Harbin. The cats, bred entirely in captivity, are likely to have limited or no hunting or survival skills (a publicity shot shows a young tiger relishing a chicken). But even if some of them survive, where is the habitat available for their successful reintroduction? Wildlife biologist and noted tiger researcher Dr. Ullas Karanth showed, in his documentary 'Tigers: Fighting Back' that though the tiger is adaptive enough to change its millennia-old habits -- such as the need for large territories -- it still needs undisturbed habitat and plentiful prey in order to survive and successfully reestablish itself at the apex of the food chain. There are, at present, about 400 wild Siberian tigers in the wild, and nearly all are at risk from poachers who hunt them for their hide and for their bones and sexual organs, which Chinese quacks covet for supposed aphrodisiac properties. Captive breeding and reintroduction may work in the case of smaller mammals, which are less territorial. But in the case of the tiger, this is a dubious achievement. Case in point: at a lecture following the screening of 'Tigers: Fighting Back' in Bangalore last year, Dr. Karanth was interrupted by a middle-aged man who claimed to be a senior veterinarian. He earnestly offered to set up 'farms' where he could help breed the tigers. He imagined that tigresses, like heifers, would be injected with fertility hormones to breed faster and more prolifically. He was confident that he could solve the crisis within a few years. Dr. Karanth heard him out and responded that merely bloating the tiger's population would not solve the problem. It is more important to preserve its habitat, allow it to return to its winning ways and settle itself once more at the top of the food chain. Are the Chinese 'conservationists' listening?