In the dead of the night great orange visions formed in the mind that I couldn’t but shrug off. A big handsome bloke filled the scene and stole the show. He had stocky arms, a trunk-like neck and a great mane for his kind. Withal, he seemed to have invoked the pause button, for this…
Tag: Tala
In the Good Books
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.
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…
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…
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…
Indignation in Paradise
When a cheeky jackal paced up and down the opposite side of the lake by which B2 was resting, the latter’s reaction was not what could be described as “mild and passing” by any means. His reflexes were swift, the emergence of disgust to the face prompt and the action immediate. He rose with a…
The Light of the World
Just the other day I read astounded the report of a ‘dead’ baby “coming alive” after his mother put him to her bosom and told him her grand plans for his future. Doctors were suitably gobsmacked as they saw the very infant they had pronounced as being in an eternal rest hours before, coming…
She Grabs You!
I have always believed in the power of dreams. I dreamed in school, for example, snoozing in class and it saved me the uptake. I then dreamed straight through the laboratory periods at college and that did me a lot of good too; saved me the malodours. When my liaison with tigers…
TIGGA TALES 