A Short Tale of Love & Devotion

Real-life pics of Hachiko

A man brings in a two-month old puppy. Showered with love and care, the puppy grows – and the bond between man and dog develops. Each morning the man leaves for the city to work; the dog accompanies his master to the local railway station every morning to see him off and then again, comes in the evening when the master returns, welcoming his master by the station turnstile and walking home alongwith him. The familiar sight of the man and his dog setting out for the station in the morning and returning home together at night, warms people’s hearts. One day the man suffers a stroke at work and dies; the dog dutifully waits for him by the station at 4 o’ clock in the evening. And does so for the next 9 years and 10 months till it breathes its last on the streets.

The story of ‘Hachiko – the Akita’ is a magnificent tale of the boundless love and loyalty that exists, inspiring books and 2 movies. Hachiko’s story inspired a nation through the turmoil and vicissitudes of a war. For how much time did man and dog actually live together, I hear you say? 18 months.

Wiki's Stub on Hachiko

Short piece on the real-life Hachiko

Who says barter is dead?

Barter very much alive at Jonbeel Mela!

Barter is trade without using money. We all barter sometimes; my uncle regularly barters with his 3-year old son during the kid’s meal-time, and the exchange rate is “you-eat-your-food-now-and-later-I’ll-take-you-for-a-car-ride.” In Assam, an annual mela (fair) founded entirely on this barter concept by the erstwhile Ahom kings perhaps in the 15^th century is still going strong today. This fair called the Jonbeel Mela is held every winter at a historic place known as Dayang Belguri in Morigaon, around 32 kms away from Guwahati. The name Jonbeel comes from 2 Assamese morphemes – ‘jon’ meaning moon and ‘beel’ meaning wetland – because this fair is held beside the eponymous beel which is shaped like a crescent moon.

This fair is a 3-day event commencing when the tribes from nearby hills come down to this place in the plains to barter their goods with the local populace. The hill people like the Tiwas, Karbi, Khasi and Jaintia trade in their indigenous items like ginger, wild honey, turmeric, etc. for the traditional pitha, sira, akhoi, muri (local Assamese delicacies made of rice flour, puffed rice, etc. which are conventionally prepared in this season). In the olden days when trade and commerce was intermittent and scarce, I suppose that this fair must have played a more than symbolic role in the sustenance of the people. In todays age, the Jonbeel Mela must be upheld as a showcase of the cultural landscape that exists in the region, and the simple joys that people engage in, adding gaiety and colour to their lives.

My mother tells me that when she was a small girl living in a place called Jagiroad very close to Jonbeel, she used to go to the mela every year. The local kids used to call the hill tribal traders ‘mama’(uncle) and ‘mami’ (aunt), and it was a grand opportunity for the young ones and the old too I suspect, to partake of fresh-tasting food items from the hills and have fun. The mela is interspersed with colourful activities like communal fishing on the beel, performance of various tribal music and dance forms, cock-fighting, and descendants of the erstwhile Rajas mingling with the people to conduct a puja, collecting taxes and finally, arranging a grand communal feast on the banks of the beel.

The Jonbeel Mela seeks to serve as a living bridge among the various tribes and communities scattered in the region, and this noble ideal together with the alter-purpose of serving as a cultural showcase, has to be appreciated and carried forward.

Every January the hill people still come down to mingle with the people from the plains. Every winter the Jonbeel comes alive with joy and songs. And yes, the young ones still call their hill neighbours mama and mami.

For more info and colourful pics of the Jonbeel Mela, you may visit the following 2 links. 

Link #1

Link #2 

About the Common House Lizard & how it brings out the worst in little boys

The house lizard in my younger days was a ready source of amusement and convenient prop for naughty tricks. Lizards were always to be found in plenty in all the houses we have lived in till now. The earliest instance of a predator stalking its prey that I have seen must have been the lizard sneaking up on its prey (bugs, flies, moths, etc.) with all the finesse and stealth of a natural little hunter. As I remember though, the lizard was seen as something of a pest in our society. This must have something to do with its ‘detachable’ tail falling down upon unsuspecting people and people’s food, and sometimes even the whole lizard spiraling down onto least-prepared human presence. To top it, the lizard was also viewed with suspicion – it was rumoured that killing a lizard would bring bad luck, and of course, we all shared in the uneasy though misplaced idea that a lizard coming into contact with your food would poison it.

So all in all, the lizard was fair game for me and my friends when we were little. To be sure we could not kill it but we could conjure up all sorts of devilish mischief designed to leave it half, but not fully dead. The simplest trick was this.

Step 1: Get hold of a broom with a long handle, and search out the house walls for prime lizzy specimens. Note: Lizards are found in plenty under tube lights and bulb holders where they wait patiently for the moths to show up for the ‘grand illumination’.

Step 2: After target acquisition, creep up on the lizzies with your broom and give that section of the wall a god ol’ sweep.

Step 3: “All fall down” and now the lizzies are at your mercy. Take hold of a tong (I used my mother’s old forceps) to pin down the lizard’s tail. Watch the lizard squirm and struggle, until it sheds its tail to flee.

Step 4: Long after the lizard’s gone, watch the still-squirming tail with fascination as it writhes in its own dance of detachment. (Taking the tail to show to your mother at this point, may not be the best way of attracting parental approval, as I found out painfully on one occasion).

An older cousin brother had his own novel idea for tormenting the lizard. He used a long stick, applied the top end with some lime (calcium hydroxide which is a white chemical used in preparing 'paan'), and raise it up to the wall where lizards would be seen. He did not have to wait long before an unsuspecting lizard crept close to the white end and thinking it to be a moth/ bug, tried to bite it. Lime can cause skin irritation and skin burning and the poor lizard after his attempt, would writhe in agony from the burn, fall down on the ground or just plain disappear from the scene as fast as it could run. We never did find out if the lizard would die from such a nasty trick.

Another fav trick was collecting lizard’s eggs (tiny white round replicas). Lizard laid eggs in plenty, and we would gather up the pretty, fragile-looking things with their soft shells and hide them away. Again after placing them in a hidden spot only to forget about them in the burst of other childish activities, we never did find out if the eggs ever hatched.

In our present house, lizards are rare and we hardly hear the loud ‘tik-tik’ as the lizards call out to each other in the night. Perhaps too many lizards have already provided game for mischievous, unmindful boys like my younger self. As I recollect my own pranks I feel sad somehow that I could not or did not care about nor understand how I was hurting a small creature. 

Leopard in the City

I had been meaning to write on ‘Urban Wildlife’ for some time now; an urge driven mostly by my experiences in our national capital, Delhi. It was in 2000 that I remember being astounded by the sheer number of squirrels traipsing on trees, buildings and on the pavements in delhi. I was staying near Connaught Palace at that time, and squirrels were omnipresent; with their cute brown fur, their tiny forelimbs clutching at food. Years later when I was staying in South Delhi, we had a tract of protected forest right behind our college – an extrusion of the Delhi ridge. Peacocks, foxes, Nilgai (blue bulls, a type of antelope) and squirrels of course, were to be found in plenty in the forest, which is open to public. We used to roam in the forest sometimes, looking out for peacocks with their majestic plumage all fanned out and collecting their pretty feathers from the ground. Once when I was climbing down a small ridge in the forest, I must have startled a family of nilgais for they burst out from behind a thick green wall of foliage, and galloped right down below me, not more than 10 feet away. Congested Mumbai too, has its share of wildlife and a large protected forest in Sanjay Gandhi National Park, home to an astounding range of flora and fauna.

Guwahati located along the southern bank of the Brahmaputra, is bounded by hills on the other sides. The expanding city corridors and the main city itself now form the largest metropolitan area in north-eastern India. For a city that has 11 forest reserves, including 2 wildlife sanctuaries in its vicinity, Guwahati may very well boast of the highest concentration of wildlife.  Guwahati and Greater Guwahati are home to several rare mammals like the elephant, tiger, leopard, primates etc. With shrinking living spaces and a tentatively-shared habitat it is common for these animals to stray into the city sometimes.

The latest such incident occurred this January 7^th, when a male leopard strayed into the city, mauling and injuring 4 people before it was tranquilised by Forest personnel and whisked away for rehabilitation. What happened that day is a stark reminder of the sad drama that gets invariably played out in man-animal confrontations. The animal cowed and unsure of a city environment, wants to pass through and finding his escape difficult, attacks the first thing he sees, in this case, humans. People on the other hand, being informed of such an animal in their vicinity, congregate and surge towards the spot where the animal was seen. The unsure animal now further cornered and feeling threatened by human sounds and sights, becomes more aggressive and goes into a frenzy. In this case, the unruly crowd that had assembled to see the cornered animal, made the task of tranquilising the leopard all the more difficult. A procedure that should have clinically taken 5 minutes took 45.

Some days back, a tiger was killed by police bullets outside Kaziranga. The tiger has strayed out of the park and was resting in a bamboo grove by the highway when it was spotted. Predictably a crowd gathered at the spot and a media photographer trying to get a good picture of the tiger, got in the way of the animal trying to escape. The tiger finding its way blocked lunged at the photographer, and the armed police beside felled the animal like a mad dog. A wildlife personnel said, “Point a camera at a tiger or a leopard and it thinks it is being attacked. After that it will lunge at you. That is cat behavior.” It is pertinent to note that where Nature has given the leopard claws and teeth, it has given us humans, the brain and the demeanour to think and act sensibly. The leopard stays true to its nature but do we?