March 18, 1999, Thursday, sunny,
22-34C
[22:55 @ Rm.111, Kanha Jungle Lodge]
A
day of rest.
Morning
chat with Tarun and Sucheta, mostly about the Indian caste system. At one point, Tarun went to the dining
pavilion to get something. On his way
back, he came across the chicken in his path and threw something at it. I shouted, “Hey!” When Tarun sat back down, he said, good-naturedly, “I may throw a
stone at the chicken, but you people eat it.”
He’s a vegetarian.
At
Breakfast, we (Sucheta, Tarun, myself and Anne) had a big debate on
conservation. Sucheta said that foreign
countries should not meddle in India’s affairs, that India can solve her own
problems very well, thank you very much.
This is classic Sucheta. I was
just about up to here with her. So I
let loose something I’ve been holding back for days, “Then why did Tiger Trust
accept program funding from CIDA? Your
own salary comes from it.”
Sucheta
must have been expecting this for just as long. “No, it is not. It’s from
Dynamic Tours.”
“If
you’re paid by Dynamic Tours, what are you doing with a WCWC/TT project? Is Dynamic Tours above Tiger Trust? If you want me to I can show you it’s in
Tiger Trust’s budget proposal to CIDA.
It will or should also show in Tiger Trust’s year-end financial
report. If you’re paid by Dynamic
Tours, why are you here to monitor a Tiger Trust project? ”
One
thing is telling. She told me that as
far as she knew, Tiger Trust had not yet received a single Canadian cent from
WCWC or CIDA. Pradeep distinctly told
me around the 10th of February that he just had a phone conversation
with Paul when Paul told him that the first installment of CIDA funds was being
wired to Tiger Trust almost as they spoke.
Pradeep himself told me shortly after that that the money had indeed
arrived. So, where is the money?
The
debate continued. I asked Sucheta
whether the Amazon rainforest could be saved if managed by Brazil alone. She said, “It is not up to us to say. The Amazon belongs to Brazil and nobody but
Brazil should meddle with it.”
“Obviously,
Sucheta’s awareness is stuck on the National level of consciousness,” Anne
whispered conspiringly. In another
discussion with Anne, Sucheta made it sound as if India was the most civilized
country in the world at any point in history, and at one time the richest. “That was why the British chose India to
plunder,” she said. She also seemed to
be of the opinion that every thing good in the world today had originated from
India some time in the past.
Thankfully,
not all Indians share Sucheta’s Indo-centric and nationalistic view point. “Now, I see,” Faiyaz said. “Not until all people on Earth have
transcended the National level of consciousness would the Earth be
transcendentally integrated into a full Planetary organism.”
“By
the look of it, it’s going to take a long long time,” said Anne.
“It
could be worse,” I said. “Her
consciousness could be stuck on the metabion level, which would make her very
selfish and ego-centric, or on the cellular or molecular levels, where she
would be entirely run by her hormonal and other desires.”
“Are you saying that, like matter, consciousness is multileveled?” asked Faiyaz.
“Yes.”
“So
then, you’re also saying that this multi-leveled structure of consciousness is
also a product of Transcendental Integration?”
“Yes.”
“But
surely, you can’t call whatever atoms and molecules have as ‘consciousness’,”
said Anne.
“No,
below the cellular level, I call it ‘proto-consciousness’.”
“So,
you would give an amoeba credit for having what you probably call cellular
consciousness?”
“Just
as I would a neuron in your brain, whose multi-neuronal collective
consciousness is the transcendentally integrated consciousness of Anne
herself,” answered Raminothna.
“And
higher up?”
“Transcendentally
integrating human consciousness produces the consciousness of tribal cultures
or corporations, then of cities, then of nations, and then, at the point of
planetary organismization, the transcendentally integrated consciousness of
planet Earth itself.”
At
17:00, we (Faiyaz, Anne, Sucheta and I) went to the free school to see the
kids. Yesterday, for the first time in
this third visit to Kanha of mine, Kiran came to the free school. She was the girl in my slideshow at the
spinning wheel with my hand on her head.
She was also the one I took for an elephant ride once. Now she is noticeably taller, and just as
pretty. Anne whispered to me at one
point, “She is in love with you, Tiger Uncle.”
“What
are you talking about?” I whispered back.
“She
hasn’t taken her eyes off you since she came in.”
After
school, she beckoned me with a hand gesture and led me over to her village
across the road. Her people brought out
the Georgia Straight article with my picture on it and it was in pristine
condition. She kept on trying to tell
me something in Hindi, and made the hand gesture of her right and left hands
alternatively holding her left and right wrists, which I could not
decipher. She made another gesture that
I could – to take photos of her and her friend Mena. But by then the sun had set, so, with the help of Punkesh, a
smart kid of about 12, who said that he would like to be an engineer, I asked
her to come to the school at 17:00 today, which she did.
When
we got to the parking lot, the boys were playing soccer, so Faiyaz and I joined
it on opposite sides, I on the side of Punkesh. I noticed that Kiran was there and out of the corner of my eyes,
I was indeed the person she was watching.
Before we went, I asked Faiyaz what the hands on wrists gesture meant,
and he also was mystified by it, but he cautioned me against getting close to
Kiran, citing that her mother was a “loose woman” and Kiran had adopted a
certain untoward code of conduct. Well,
she was not for me to judge on hearsay, and I treated her just like any other
kid. After the soccer game, we all went
to the school courtyard to take photos, and I brought the Polaroid cam. A good photo session was had by all. After that, we all went into the school and
I made the announcement to the kids, about 25 of them, of my impending
departure. They looked sad. Punkesh said that I should stay for good,
“at least for 5 more months”. Then it
was Anne’s turn, with tears in her eyes.
She said, “You can be whatever you want to be. All you have to do is to go for it.”
The kids each sang us a little Hindi song, including the anthem of India. When our turn came, Anne and I sang the Canadian anthem back for them. So, the farewell has been said. I will not go back to the school tomorrow yet one more time. I will miss their innocent little faces and hearts. I hope they will not be corrupted like so many of their adults. I hope they will all dare to dream, and have their dreams all come true. If I ever come back to Kanha, to see them again would be one of my main reasons.
This
evening, when I emerged from my room to the dining pavilion for dinner, Sucheta
said, “Anthony, you’re now a superstar in MP.”
She showed me the new Hitavada article titled [Save tiger from
extinction - Marr], complete with photo of me standing beside Bara Bacha’s
entrance/exit letting kids in. A very
respectable as well as respectful article by the reporter who asked me to keep
him posted with the progress of my campaign.
WCWC, for once, received its due share of mention. Tiger Trust got its mention too, together
with the names of Sucheta Tiwari and Faiyaz Khudsar, but only in the last
paragraph. I hope Sucheta is not too
disappointed, because after all, all the honorable mention Anne received was “a
white woman”, and she’s the one to have done her share of the work, pro bono
yet. A good white woman.