The Hindu Business Line : Back to reality

A QUESTION, which bugged one walking some of the pleasurable stretches of grasslands in Sailana, Ratlam district, and Nanaj, Solapur district, was whether the idea of modern city civilisation is workable or even necessary. Ratlam, Indore and Solapur are dirty, unlivable medium-size towns with the local population quite immune to the dirt piles in front of their homes and in the streets. Spitting, gargling, breaking driving rules, and wanton abuse, spice and salt the air, and none cares, as if extolling the virtues of mediocrity. Seemingly, human beings migrating from nearby villages have lugged along with them as baggage an impossibly disgusting lifestyle.

Villages and towns smell; one bumps into something unclean all the time. There is nothing romantic about either the Indian village or town. If one is not sure, one should not cross the roads in Indore or Ratlam as frenzied two-wheelers may fell you without even a sorry from the young riders. Apartments in these towns run into each other with little holes for sunlight; tiled, brick abodes in villages rest on each other sharing common walls as if the citizens dislike privacy.

In villages, one can see men relaxing on charpoys spitting chewed paan a few feet away, like Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore firing on his gun to win gold medals, and not bothered a whit. Indeed, they are proud of their spitting prowess. Women, including five-year-old girls, do all the work, including carrying water in metal pots from hand pumps located near pits where buffalos wallow. Shops in Sailana town sell torches made in China at Rs 200 a piece with batteries free; at grocery shops, one can never land on quality biscuits or chocolates; Ratlam, Indore and Solapur are better even if one is sure that the best of all goodies are reserved for Mumbai and other big cities.

Residents at Sailana and Nanaj village wonder why someone should come from Mumbai to see the Lesser Florican (kharmor) or the Great Indian Bustard (maldhok). At the stock broking office of my friend Dinesh Kothari in Indore, an ophthalmologist was placing buy orders for shares of unknown companies.

Everyone plays see-saw on a lurching Sensex, and the local Hindi newspaper Nai Duniya regularly carries stock news on the front page. For now, it is casino time, in a dirty, packed casino. Here, they do not talk of bears and bulls; the market is either teji (fast) or mandi (slow).

Can this dismissive way of living (except when it comes to making a few lakhs) help preserve wildlife? Yet, some of the endangered birds such as the Lesser Florican and Great Indian Bustard manage to be around. There is very little to suggest that our past, present and future have anything in them to help us relish Nature - the tremble of the grass at a passing wind or the early morning call of the painted partridge.

The villager and the city-bred do not miss out on the language of the wild; there is nothing to feel guilty about; it is just a process of living off TV screens, growing ugly and tech smart. The call of a painted partridge took me off the bend.

Dinesh and myself were moving down a cart path, when Dinesh spotted a painted partridge (Francolinus pictus) vocalise from a machan. One had never seen the bird, brownish black and profusely spotted and barred with white, this close, and we spent about 15 minutes admiring the show.

Of the bird's call, Dr Salim Ali writes: "Almost indistinguishable from those of the Black partridge, the same harsh high-pitched chik-cheek-cheek-keray, rendered in Hindustani as Subhan teri qudrat." The bird pulls back its neck a bit before coming up with the first chik, and then moves it forward and holds it high to emit the following notes. Off we went the same morning to Amba grasslands near the Amba village, to take pictures and record the calls of the bristled grass warbler (Chaetornis striatus). We saw two of them as they raced each other, and Dinesh brought out his tape recorder to capture its calls.

At Nanaj, one had a long look at the black-winged kite (Elanus caeruleus), a particular favourite of mine. The raptor caught the wind flows, as it hovered in the air, and one could see its sharp beak with the binoculars; it dipped down, missed its quarry to turn away in a wide arch.

Perhaps, the best moments were when B. Ranjani called me in the morning at the rest house to see a common grey hornbill (Tockus biostris) resting on a forked branch of a neem tree. As one watched it flew away chased by two common crows. A top forest official asked us for our bird list, which we rattled off: large grey babbler, spot billed duck, ashy crowned sparrow lark, singing bush lark, and a few others.

The spotbill or grey duck is pretty, and it was Jaya who sighted it first, as we were driving past a depression. We halted the car to have a near look of the yellow-tipped dark bill with two orange-red spots at the base. It flew away before we could click it.

On the Siddheshwar Express back home, one dreamt of the birds and their calls like a 100-mobiles going live at the same time. At Dadar station, the call of a porter broke the dream.

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