This picture is featured as a full-page spread in Valmik Thapar‘s latest book, “The Tiger – Soul of India,”published by Oxford University Press. I thank my naturalist Mukesh Burman and my driver Vikas for making the image possible.
Month: September 2012
The Last Hurrah
The afternoon of 14 May 2010 remains one of the red-letter days in my diaries, not only because of the utterly spellbinding time we had with Auntie and her cubs, but also because we were beneficiaries of one of the greatest humanitarian acts that must ever have taken place in a tiger forest. We were…
Winner – NDTV Tiger Photo Contest
I’m pleased to announce that this image has been chosen as the winner of the NDTV Tiger Photo Contest from a whopping 6000 entries, and will feature in their 2011 calendar. In connection with this, I was featured in a brief interview with NDTV anchor Swati Thiyagarajan on their mega 12-hour ‘telethon’ yesterday on NDTV…
Singing Her Own Requiem
“Cometh the hour, cometh the friend” should be revised the saying. The grounds for such a demand arise from the timely receipt of benevolence from Harshad Barve when we were driving from the Jhurjhura dam to Rajbehra on the fateful afternoon of 15 May. Having checked the Jhurjhura dam and found it to be free…
The Sole Seed – BBC WPOTY 2010 Finalist
From the precinct of the passionate heart arose a dream to shoot at the stars. The aim was high, the challenge was daunting and the reward not slight. The distance was great but the dream pressed on relentlessly, blissfully blind to the light-years in between, and fuelled by the motto that to pit oneself against…
Black Kite with a Bull Pup
Yes, the bird certainly is “only a black kite” but it was enough to show how excellent the 200-400’s auto-focus performance is, but the exercise, quite in the physical sense of the word, also illustrated how, although black all right, the lens is certainly not a kite, in that it offers not any of the…
Soul of a Cat
Jujju Junior is not just a tiger cub. She is the kitten that resides in every cat, the youth, energy and the spirit of inquest that remains active in every feline soul. Mediocrity is not a standard that satisfies her, and knowledge incompletely gained is to her a totally unacceptable compromise. It is her life’s…
Eyes of Innocence
Past the rocks that flank the road Dawn by dawn I pass her abode Whose visage adorns the tendrils and leaves Through them her form beams and sieves. In the eyes that glitter There is an eloquence atwitter – Unspoken but unrepressed, It presses on me the trying test. And I on my part, with…
A Friend Called Banno
She sits on a rock gazing into the hollow, and in her eyes flashes the story of not one but two lives. A true survivor herself, she hails from a place where her sisters’ voices once resounded in the marshy meadows, but in the now quiet grasses she remains restfully as of the type whom the…
Sangfroid
On the bridge at the stream at Siddhbaba, Vikas halted our hauler, guided by the belief that Chorbehra Female slept in the damp, cool marsh of the meadow. The sambar, who seem to love standing in the cool current here and chomp their way through the succulent botanical victuals, were scarce in attendance. Only the…
Idol Worship
In all my limited wisdom, I claim to be secular, and that is not by the connotation that we Indians have conjured for our political furtherance, but in the actual unalloyed lexical sense as known in the Occident. I concede that, during embattled times, as the unveiling day of the frighteningly ugly exam results drew…
A Candle to Keanu
So here is the bottle-brush-tailed queer-call-making generously-sized vivid rodent in a rare uncluttered moment, enticed to condescend to the lower branches by a succulent clump of fruit. Otherwise in his true element he is a tenant of the high canopy, carrying his brush everywhere like a house maid on a cleaning spree, mostly busy…
Splicing the Extremes
A one-time father would have felt the pangs of nostalgia in the abyss upon the sight. The hearts of police constables would have turned wistful, and night-watchmen would have pitched in relating to the situation, for we paced up and down a jeep path in Badhaini Patpar as though our lives, or someone else’s, held…
Trick Boxing
In contrast to the glamorous sports of the human world, which erect stardom, fuel passions and ignite effigies, break backs with frayed tempers, weld relationships and engender scandals, halt countries and drive lucre under cobwebbed wooden tables, there is in this much pecuniary labyrinth yet a sport that is untouched by the wand of fame…
TIGGA TALES 