February 27, 1999, Saturday, sunny with clouds, 15-28C

 

[21:59 @ Rm.111, Kanha Jungle Lodge]

     This morning I got up at 04:30 to make sure that Anne would get on her way to Seony for the woman’s issues conference on time.  Within minutes, Faiyaz and Tarun both appeared.  We saw her off by 05:30, with Tarun accompanying her in the Tata Sumo driven by our usual Sumo driver who also drove Christopher to Gondia.  Anne is still not back.  Tarun and Faiyaz are sitting at a dinner table, planning on driving to Baihar to perhaps call Balaghat to see what is going on.  I’m not beginning to worry yet.  You may think that I worry too much, but if you’ve experienced Indian highway traffic, you’d understand.

     At 10:00, while Faiyaz was out visiting villages with Amar, the carpenter came and, with the very limited translation help of Deleep, I conveyed to him (I hope) what I wanted done, which is a wooden frame for the double-glass lid of the large communal solar oven.

     Tarun was supposed to stay with Anne all day, but he returned around noon, looking not well and feeling maybe worse.  He said he threw up several times in the course of the morning.  He went straight to bed.

     As usual, I put on the rice into the solar oven around 12:30.  Around 13:00, I went to the school house to prep the place.  When I was about finished, Faiyaz’s Gypsy with Amar at the wheel pulled into the parking lot, with 7 panchayat people on board.  It was about 13:15 – they were 45 minutes early.  Still in my shorts, I was not exactly properly attired for a conservationist-panchayat summit.  Faiyaz explained for me, and the villagers said no problem.  I went to get Kim and Chris (Cook), both being also in their shorts.  Kim to wrapped a cloth around her waste, which went down to her ankles.  In the absence of Anne, I asked Kim to take notes and Chris to man the video cam. 

     The meeting went about the same way as the first two, and the villagers’ concerns were also about the same, which made it clearer and clearer that a multi-panchayat conference will be extremely powerful.  The emphasis of this group was irrigation.

     Since there were 7 villagers, we needed two Gypsies for the park drive, so I drove one and Chris drove the other, and we had room enough for 3 Manjitola village kids.  Sightings included the usually chital, barasinger, sambar, but no tiger.  At one point, while rounding a curve, we came face to face with a huge gaur bull in full fighting trimming standing right in the middle of the road, facing us, four-square, snorting, legs stomping in the dirt, raising a cloud of dust in the slanting streaks of morning sunlight.  It looked as if he was trying to pick a fight with the Gypsy which, if he charged, would not stand a chance.  This struck me as being more the normal behaviour of an African cape buffalo than the more peaceable Indian gaur.  Tarun deemed it prudent to back off, but upon looking behind us, we found another bull, same size, same stance, same apparent ill intent.  It seemed that we got right in the middle of a rutting battle between two contending top bulls.  Even a big male tiger would have to slink away under such circumstances.  All we could do was to pull over to the side of the road and let them get at it, quite prepared to take some collateral damage.  Thankfully, they moved off the road to duke it out in the forest.  Still, the sounds they made behind the thick under growth was awesome. 

     This and other sightings set the panchayat members in the proper mood for the slideshow and for some serious post-show discussion.  All in all, another successful meeting, and the number of villages that signed up for the conference went up to 33.

     “It does seem that your social medicine is already doing some healing,” said Faiyaz while we were cleaning up the conservation centre.   

     “And on more levels than one, hopefully.”

     Faiyaz thought for a moment.  “True.  If your outreach programs achieves its objective, it could change India on just about all the levels I can think of.  If it changes cooking from wood to solar, it would reduce air pollution, for one thing, and clean up the air of India – on the Molecular level; it would preserve India’s forests and wildlife on the Metabion level; it would also save the termite mounds as well as change the villagers’ way of life and economy, both on the Tribal level; it could generate new industries such as solar-cooker manufacturing on the City level; and your petition to reform the park system would be to reform India itself on the National Level; and even, the tiger being a global treasure as you say, saving the tiger would be a contribution to the Earth on the Planetary level.  It does seem that there are interlevel influences at work all around us.  If we pluck one strand of this multileveled 3D web of life on any level, and the whole web vibrates.”

     “A new view of the proverbial ‘interconnectedness of all things’,” said Raminothna.