Old Man and Me

Jerdon’s Courser, Admiral… Jerdon’s Courser, it is! The name of the bird you were trying to recall. That was my last message to him which he did not see.

I was at INHS Asvini visiting Vice Admiral Manohar Awati (retd) VrC PVSM who was admitted there for a cardio check-up. I had the good fortune, unfortunately, of meeting him whenever he came down to the naval hospital in my neighbourhood. I had just returned from a holiday in Coonoor-Wellington-Ooty and had come to meet him as promised. He had desired that I return with news of Nilgiris, a destination steeped in nostalgia for him.  “I used to go on field trips in the hills with the Old Man,” he told me. ‘Old Man’ was the great ornithologist Dr. Salim Ali with whom he went on numerous nature jaunts and explored India’s flora and fauna. 

Our association went back several years, to the days when I was a Journalist in Mumbai covering defence and environment beat; I used to bump into him at events such as commissioning of naval ships or the Golden Jubilee of National Defence Academy. Though we did not meet often, we corresponded via emails, oftener. Ours was a relationship based on our mutual love and respect for nature and wildlife.

Not many may know that the veteran naval officer was an avowed naturalist and conservationist. He was an honorary member of Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS) who campaigned for the cause of nature conservation at the drop of a hat. He even penned few books such as, “The Vanishing Indian Tiger” and “Homo Sapien and Panthera Leo”, the latter on the Gir lion. After retirement, he had settled in the back of beyond Vinchurni, “nice countryside blooming with ripening jowar and maize”, a perfect habitat for him. One November (2013), he wrote in response to my blog on birding: “A pair of Great Indian Horned Owl came my way as I almost walked past them in the shadow of a spreading Pimpran (Ficus reticula) late one evening here in Vinchurni. I was snapped out of my reverie as their eyes followed my movement, past them. I thought the horns quivered a bit testifying to they being two large erect feathers atop their heads imitating horns (hence the name). Now that our tank is full after a lively Monsoon, there are a huge number and varieties of water birds upon it. The last time in a similar situation seven years back there was a small flock of flamingos here. They were obviously reconnoitring. I did not see them again. This year there will be a goodly number of ducks from the north come to winter on my tank. I look forward to a busy cool season.”

On another occasion, in the peak of summer, he wrote: “I am back in good old, drought-stricken Vinchurni where there is a brown, dusty desert with nary a sign of even a blade of green. It is very upsetting, but who can fight Mother Nature, certainly not those who have despoiled her so heartily.” Even in his 80s, the Admiral was on the move attending conferences, talks and events where he was invited to speak. On return to Vinchurni he would catch up with communication unfailingly.

I would keep him posted of my sojourns in Kenya/Africa through my blogs and he would respond promptly. He told me once that he was offered the post of Wildlife Warden of Serengeti in Tanzania which he had to, obviously, decline. I could well imagine this tall personage with flowing white beard at home in a safari jeep as in a sailboat! On my verse on Olduvai Gorge, the cradle of civilisation in the heart of Serengeti, he commented: “Evocative, endearing and effervescent!”. He said that it was the nicest poem he had read on Africa. “Keep writing. You may yet write a new chapter in the relations between India and Africa, the oldest continuous civilisation on earth and the progenitor place of Homo Sapien Sapien,” he prodded me on in his inimitable way. When I shared my ‘Mombasa Msafari’ (Safari in Swahili) with him that was published in National Geographic Traveller, he took me back to Mombasa of 1950’s that he visited.

“I first went there in June 1950 in the (destroyer) old RANJIT (emphasis his). The new Indian Navy having just dropped her Royal patronage, was showing the new flag around the Ocean! The Mombasa Club would not have us. So, our very British Rear Admiral Geoffrey Barnard, RACINS, as he was identified and addressed in naval parlance and signals, quarantined it. They relented and let the brown Englishmen in (!) in an imposed, post-colonial egalitarianism. The wardroom returned the compliment. The old harbour then known as the Dhow Port was crammed with Indian and Arab Dhows much as the northern Bunders of Bombay used to be, the Lakdi, Koyala, Hay and numerous other Bunders of old Bombay Harbour. I witnessed a busy scene in Mombasa Dhow Port, shiny black, sweating muscular bodies clambering up the main sail yards to make or furl those massive cotton sails. It must have been hard work entrusted only to the most able-bodied. I last visited Mombasa in TIR, in command in 1965. It had not changed much in the interim fifteen years.”

Back in India, at the Naval War College in INS Mandovi, I wrote to him about the riches of the naval base, an ecological niche that was million years old. In that April of 2013, he urged me to explore Goa further. “By now you would have done the Mandovi-Kumbharjua-Zuari cruise and would therefore be aware of the beautiful marshes around Kumbharjua and their inhabitants, both avian and reptilian. If you have not done that trip please do it now during the dry season because once the rains set in the whole region is flooded, the birds have flown and the reptiles washed away, probably. Nature, as always, will recover fast. The point is will we? We must, to prove an important point that we belong to this earth.” Love and concern for nature poured through his writings thus; his sense of seasons and places was spot-on.

When I was stationed in Visakhapatnam, the Admiral, who was visiting for the International Fleet Review, had set out to meet me at my residence, unbeknown to me. Unfortunately, he couldn’t reach me as he had my old phone number. I was deeply touched and honoured to know that he had come all the way up the Dolphin Hill hoping that he could track me! By now, our interactions were getting stronger and I could see I had a well-wisher in him. So when I wrote about Dolphin Hill – about the Cyclone that hammered us into submission and nature’s regeneration, a year later, in “Daydreaming and the Art of Living”, I was delighted by his spontaneity.

“What does Paddy do, what has she been up to? She does a lot and has been up to a good deal during a day on Dolphin's Nose. The devastation wrought by Cyclone Hoodoo or whatever it was tabbed, has passed and the earth and Nature are restoring themselves, as they always do, bringing happiness, even gaiety to her humans wherever we are. Paddy has that rare quality and power to observe this gentle restoration through her fellow beings all about her. A rare advantage, used so beautifully to acquaint us ordinaries with Nature's pervasive beauty, kind and gentle ways. Paddy is Her messenger to us, unnatural Hedons. Sit up and take note of Paddy's doings if you wish to be Natural, get a little out of this, otherwise, meaningless existence”! He made everyone feel special endearing him to all who were awed by him. 

He did not stop at encouraging words, but urged me to send my articles/blogs for publishing. The one on Dolphin Hill’s Purple fountain grass had him raving. By now I was knee-deep into photography, apart from writing, and ‘50 shades of Red’ was a perfect marriage of both. “A poetic essay about seemingly insignificant weed. You have given it a romantic palaver (is that an apposite word?). Should go to BNHS for Hornbill for the amusement and appreciation of a wider readership. You will miss this in Bombay, in the concrete jungle of NOFRA. Borivali National Park is not far; maybe it awaits your magical camera,” he wrote when I was all set to come to Mumbai on transfer.

It was here in Mumbai that I got to meet him face-to-face again, on his medical sojourns to the naval hospital. The last time I saw him before he moved on, like I mentioned earlier, was on my return from the Coonoor-Ooty-Wellington. I had taken my camera to show him birds of Nilgiris on the LCD as I narrated my experiences. That is when he was trying to recall the nearly threatened bird endemic to Nilgiris. Awati had a photographic memory that stowed away all manner of information in neatly stacked compartments to be recalled at will, irrepressible raconteur that he was. This was just one of those stray occasions when he couldn’t summon the name of the bird that he and the legendary Salim Ali had tracked in the Blue Hills. Jerdon’s Courser was the bird he was trying to recollect, I realised later.

Soon he was discharged and I shared the edited pictures via email. On 10 October, he wrote back to say: “You really are a wonder, a gift of Nature to the Navy. The latter has yet to appreciate that. It will, one day”!

On 3 November, 2018 he breathed his last passing away in sleep in his beloved Vinchurni. He was 91.




 

NOTE 1: Since I had the camera handy, I shot this portrait as he was being discharged from the hospital on 1^st October.  This may, possibly, be his last portrait. 

NOTE 2: His emails are quoted verbatim and are italicised.

Take a Bow, Wangari Maathai

Wangari Maathai is no more. 

When she won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2004, the world sat up and noticed her and somewhere in my consciousness, she registered. But it was not until I came to Kenya and read about her work and saw first-hand the legacy of her tireless crusade against environmental degradation that I realized what a phenomenon she was. 

I was pursuing my Master’s degree in Environment and Ecology and had to appear for my second and final year examination from here and chose her Green Belt Movement (GBM) as the topic for my thesis. The title of my thesis was: ‘Wangari Maathai’s Green Belt Movement in Kenya – A model for climate change mitigation for poor and developing countries of Africa’. I was secretly hoping that I get to meet my idol under the pretext of doing the thesis, and engage with her more often, as I went along. I wrote a letter to GBM seeking permission and asking if I could get a guide from their organization for my thesis. In a prompt reply, I was told that they would have loved to do so but did not have adequate personnel to undertake such an exercise, expressed regret, and wished me well.

I decided  to go ahead with my thesis without a guide, but in the course of pursuing it, I read a lot about her work and talked about it to people around. I read her memoirs, “Unbowed – A Woman's Story”  in which she narrates how her tree planting mission came about. In 1977, Wangari’s husband was campaigning for election and one of his prominent election promises happened to be employment for people in his constituency. It became an article of faith with Wangari to help him fulfill his promise and she decided to do something about it. She translated her ever-abiding love for nature and environment into a practical solution to  provide livelihood options for local communities. She started a scheme whereby people would plant indigenous trees and start tree nurseries to reverse forest degradation while making them productive. She involved women from local community; there were stumbling blocks in that people planted trees alright but did not care for them enough or did not have the necessary expertise to make them flourish. She paid stipend, introduced monetary incentives and had local experts monitor plantations in a sustained manner to achieve better results. After trial and error, she finally succeeded and her campaign took off in a big way such that a localized experiment became a nation-wide campaign. In nearly three decades, the grassroots model of GBM extended to other countries in Africa and even protects the Congo Basin Rainforests, today.

Thus, GBM actually started as a project to generate employment to fulfill an election promise which is often empty bait by politicians to get voted into power. Subsequently, Wangari Maathai, herself, had a tryst with politics when she became the Assistant Minister for Environment and Natural Resources during 2003- 2005. In the course of her green movement, she often set on a collision course against vested interests of private land lords, land grabbers in the Government and corporate companies. She also crossed swords with then President Daniel Arap Moi when nobody dared to oppose him. She had become a threat to people in powerful places.

Here was a woman who had a pulse on the people of her country, had boundless energy to tackle problems and find solutions, and who had her heart in the right place, I gathered from what I read. But, ironically, it is here, in Kenya that I heard very little of her. She did not figure on the pages of any newspaper and in the three years that I have been here I do not recall any footage or sound bytes on TV Channels, either. It was almost as though she was a 'spent force' who had lost her relevance in the current scenario. I only heard of her from the pulpit of Copenhagen Climate Change Conference or from the virtual pages of her Green Belt Movement e-zine. With an achievement such as hers - she fought for sustainable development, democracy, livelihood and women's rights - and an active public life during the peak of her green movement, I often wondered why she did not shine on the political firmament.

I strongly believed that Wangari Maathai was "President material" as she had the makings of a true leader. Moreover, seeing the vacuum in political leadership and governance here,  I felt doubly sure that Prof.  Maathai could be that Messiah  the country is in dire need of. I couldn’t fathom the reason why she merged into the background and I started enquiring about it asking anyone – from the media to environment lobby, who would have something to say about it. I encountered many reasons for this “non-performance”. One, an extreme and cynical view was that she had sold her soul for money; the Nobel Prize went to her head! I straightway discounted that; nothing that I had read about her work and character seemed to suggest that and canards like that simply reeked of idle insensitivity. When I posed the same question to an environmentalist friend, a Kenyan, she said: “She is not prominent in political life because she is a woman.” And I got my answer. She is not just a woman, but a conscientious woman - morally upright - capable of upsetting the political applecart, of being a real threat to the power-hungry. 

I tried to seek a meeting with Wangari Maathai, many times, but was often told that she was out of the country. (I almost wondered if that was one of the reasons why she wasn’t active politically anymore.) An opportunity presented itself, when Karura Forest – an urban forest - was thrown open to public for recreation, recently. This was one of her success stories when she had protested against the degazetting of the  land by the government and the construction lobby priming for residential projects in this rare indigenous forest in the heart of Nairobi, in 1999. She was beaten by the police and was severely injured during a dramatic protest. This evoked public sympathy and stalled the destruction of Nairobi’s green lung. This time, nearly 12 years later, she was to be the Chief Guest to inaugurate the public opening of Karura Forest and I was hoping to meet her. Unfortunately, she did not turn up as she was sick. I had missed another opportunity to meet her.

Like many in this country, I did not know that she was ailing in her final days, fighting her own private battle, that she had cancer. Not many cared. The country of her birth and karma gave her a raw deal even as the world, thankfully, looked up to this great woman. 

Kenya is going through tumultuous times; some of the top leaders are being prosecuted by the International Criminal Court for 2008 post-election violence. The country is embroiled in corruption controversies and MPs are demanding reimbursement of tax arrears when a large part of the Nation - North Kenya - is undergoing one of the severest droughts in several decades. The atmosphere for the forthcoming elections in 2012 is surcharged with passions. In such a claustrophobic and chauvinistic atmosphere, Wangari Maathai, the woman, did not stand a chance, perhaps.

But, I still feel Wangari Maathai could have been the answer; she could have been a great

Chief executive to steer the nation to greater heights, but alas, Kenya has now lost its chance.

“Planting a tree for me is a sign of hope and a sign that as long as we are taking action, we can make a difference.” Prof. Wangari Maathai