March 6, 1999, Saturday, sunny, 19-33C

 

[22:45 @ Rm.111, Kanha Jungle Lodge]

     Today’s group of Panchayat leaders were 9, of whom only 5 could go in the Gypsy for the park drive.  Thankfully, the power almost miraculously came on early, so Anne showed the other four the Champions of the Wild video meanwhile, alongside the children.

     The solar cooker demos worked perfectly, both the small and large models.  The male villagers were mostly impressed by the cookers’ physical prowess.  But when Anne later asked the female sarpanch whether she would use the device, her initial reply of “yes” later changed not only to “no”, but “impossible” when she began to consider various other social factors. 

     Also, it seems that even villages are subdivided into castes, and where the communal cooking idea is concerned, there seems no way the higher castes would eat the food touched by the untouchables, nor cook for the untouchables.  So, the solar cookers’ problems are not physical, but social, which is usually the tougher of the two to solve.

     “They can build as many solar ovens as there are castes,” I answered on the spur of the moment, after countering the earlier objection as best I could.

     The woman moved back from “impossible” to “maybe”, perhaps only out of politeness. 

     During the park drive, Faiyaz revealed to me the nature of his phone call with Pradeep yesterday.  It was largely an Anthony-bashing session on Pradeep’s part, saying that I was “media crazy” (and he is not?), trying to be a “one man tiger saviour” (and his father is not?), that I “know nothing about India”, and that I aim at “eliminating India’s cattle”.  He was also being extra nice to Faiyaz, calling him “my dear boy” (which he also called me), among other things.  It seems now that Pradeep considers me an enemy, and aims to drive a wedge between Faiyaz and me, as well as win Faiyaz as an ally, however temporarily.  I predict that Pradeep will also be extra nice to Anne for the same purpose, and perhaps also to Kim, but these niceties would end as soon as I leave.

     Another thing Pradeep told Faiyaz was to forbid me give any more slideshows to his tourist clients.  The reason is that tour operator Peter Harrison complained that I praised Ranthambhore too much, which is not on his itinerary and his clients asked him why not, and that I discussed with his clients about raising park fee. 

     Come to think of it, isn’t “Survey of Visitors” an item on the Tiger Trust side of the CIDA project?  What more pertinent a question to pose to the visitors than this?  Didn’t Pradeep himself once said, “Ask the tourists about this.”? 

     Pradeep is now opposed to our proposed park fee reform, saying that it may negatively impact upon tourist volume.  By how much?  1%?  5%?  Fine.  Let’s say 10%.  But the other 90% will each pay ten times more.  The park revenue will still increase nine fold, and the villagers will get half of that.  The only people losing anything are the very few tour operators and hoteliers, like Pradeep and Peter Harrison.  But of course.  Indeed, of everyone I’ve spoken with about the idea – panchayat leaders, villagers, park personnel, government officials, the tourists themselves – Pradeep and Harrison are the only two people opposed to it.  Some conservation partner.

     This is yet another illustration how non-profit conservation work and for-profit commercial enterprises do not mix. 

     In the middle of all these vexations, I cannot help but bask now and again in the beauty of India.  Just moments ago, it was the beauty of the Indian night.  Night after night, when we emerge from the school house after the slideshow to walk our guests back to the Gypsy with Amar waiting to drive them back along the long, bumpy and winding road, I cannot help but be star struck all over again. In the almost complete darkness in which the leader of the line has to grope his way towards the tail-lights of the Gypsy, the moon, stars and planets glisten brilliantly overhead, and unique to these nights in this fabled land, fireflies flicker off and on all around us, and where the earth and sky meet, I couldn’t tell whether they’re fireflies or meteorites.  And then, when the village elders have seated themselves snuggly in the Gypsy, the cool night would be warmed by the hand-grasping farewells.

     When we were cleaning up the conservation centre, I said to Faiyaz and Anne, “Within the next ten minutes, you will see the most stunning interlevel parallelism of all, something of which you otherwise would have no idea in another month or year or decade.”

     “How do you know we don’t know it?” asked Anne, lawyer fashion.

     “Okay.  Tell me what OSES means.”

     “Just to prove you wrong, I should wait eleven minutes before admitting to you I have no idea,” she said.

     So, I drew the end view of a spiral on the black board, which expands in the clockwise direction six times.  I then superimposed a cross representing the X and Y axes on the spiral, whose intersection 0-point is at the centre of the expanding spiral.  And finally, in the four quadrants of the diagram, I wrote O, S, E and S, each on one adjacent quadrant.  “Mean anything to you?” I asked them.

     “Well, the six repetitions of the spiral are telling,” said Anne almost spontaneously.  “It probably represents the six levels of organization achieved by the Earth up to this point.”

     “Excellent guess, Anne.” 

     “So, the spiral represents the six cycles of transcendental integration, or integrative transcendence, from the Molecular to the Cellular to the Metabion to the Tribal to the Cityan to the National,” said Faiyaz

     “Go on.”

     “You’re saying that each cycle of transcendental integration or integrative transcendence has four quadrants?  And that each quadrant is represented by a word, and the acronym of the four words spells OSES?”

     “Exactly.”

     “So, what we’re stuck on is what O, S, E and S stand for,” said Anne.

     “Try the ‘O’.”

     “Well, the existence of a certain level begins with the formation of the first organism on that level.  So, the letter ‘O’ probably has to do with the word ‘organism’?” Anne ventured.

     “What word would you use for the formation of the first organism?”

     “Organism-ization?  Organismization?”

     “Bingo!”

     “Really?”

     “You are exceeding expectations, Anne.  So, the first S?”

     “It is something the organism did after it was formed, obviously,” Anne pondered,

     “Well, what it would do would be to reproduce, and its offspring would migrate divergently into different environments.  This would force them to evolve into different species…” said Faiyaz.

     “There’s the S!” exclaimed Anne. 

     “Makes sense.  The formation of a range of new species.  Speciation,” said Faiyaz.

     “Excellent!  And the E?”

     “So the new species would migrate some more, and speciate some more…”

     “And?”

     “Oh, I know!” exclaimed Anne again.  “They would converge upon one another at various locales, where they will form ecosystems.  That’s the E, isn’t it?”

     “I think you’ve got it, Anne,” said Faiyaz.  “And the word for the formation of ecosystems is…”

     “Ecosystem-ization?  Ecosystemization,” said Anne.

     “And the last S?”

     “I know it now,” said Faiyaz.  “Out of some ecosystems will evolve social species, which will build societies.  Some of these societies will eventually organismize into the first organisms of the level above.  So, the second S stands for Socialization.”

     “So, what would be the caption for this diagram?”

     “I would say: ‘the OSES Cycle of the TI/IT Spiral’,” said Anne.

     “If Wheeler and Miller could see it now,” said Raminothna.