I will no doubt have more to say on this subject but for the record I have yet to see one here in Kanha after four safaris. I can live with that and here is why. Those four days have coincided with ridiculous numbers of visitors in the park. The scenes in the morning have been chaotic with people arriving at three in the morning just to get in. The admin staff at the park entrance at Khatia have shown extraordinary patience and resilience given the crush of people wanting to get in. The demand is now so great that there is a Ticket Verification counter in an attempt to stop the resale of entry tickets. How is that for a model of the basic economics of scarcity. Sadly this is both the future and the reality of Tiger Tourism – ever increasing numbers chasing (and I mean physically chasing ) ever decreasing numbers of charismatic megafauna. I watched a gypsy jeep chase two Gaur calves off the road today in their haste to get a better view. I was mildly inconvenienced as I was trying to take a photo of them at the time but I wondered about why would you bother coming to a National Park if you evidently aren’t that concerned about wildlife except as a backdrop to a nice day out ? Is it all about the tiger? Probably yes. there are an awful lot of visitors who feel that they want their money back if they don’t see the stripes. I don’t which is a good thing as I’m now booked for another two weeks of safaris. I’m very glad to be here and just watching the birdlife or even the light on the sal forest is reason enough to be so. If the next two weeks brings tiger then so be it. I’d just like actually getting inside the park to be a bit less like Pandaemonium which the literate of you out there on ‘tinterweb will know was Milton’s Infernal City from Paradise Lost.

I’m currently in India with the rather obsessive plan to get some better tiger photos than I managed last time I was here (January of this year). I’m in the far southeastern corner of Madhya Pradesh on the border with Chhattisgarh a (relatively) newly minted and mostly tribal state sliced off Madhya Pradesh in 2000. Kanha is along with several other parks the old Kipling country, which is usually meant as an allusion to The Jungle Book. I don’t suppose that Rudyard ever made it here, and the ‘real’ Kipling country (if that phrase means anything) is Lahore and parts north. I grew up on Kipling as my great grandfather collected first editions, the red leather bound ones with the elephants head and swastika seal on them. I was fascinated by the juxtaposition of the two images as a child. Even now Kanha is described as ‘the country about which Kipling wrote so vividly’ etc etc. The core of the tale of Mowgli is of a small child reared by wolves(which appears in the early short story In the Rukh) and certainly there are anecdotal reports from the old hunters in Central India, but we are clearly in the realm of myth here. And a very deep well of myth it is too from the hairy man Enkidu in the Babylonian saga of Gilgamesh through Romulus and Remus (the founders of Rome ), and the foliate heads or Green Men that decorate some older English churches to Tarzan of the Apes. I’m struck by the potency of these myths, largely because having been (intellectually) reared by anthropologists at an impressionable age I’m inclined to ask what function does the myth serve. If the Arch Druid/Tribal Headman/Grand Inquisitor of anthropology as a science, Claude Levi-Strauss is correct in his claim that ‘myths are good to think’ , then why this myth and what does it tell us about what it is to be a human being ? Or as Gaugin put it ‘Where do we come from ? What are we ? Where are we going ? Actually the English doesn’t scan as well as the original French which is D’où Venons Nous / Que Sommes Nous / Où Allons Nous. It also omits the question mark and if I was to proffer a semi-poetic translation it would be ‘From Where We Come/ What We Doing/ Where We Going. Aren’t these the questions that we must all of us live ?

It’s been a few weeks since my last post; a rather frantic rush to finish work before I left for India, with the aim of getting some better tiger photos. I did make the promise to cyberspace to let he/she/it know how I got on with the new motion camera. The first one proved to be a dud and had to be sent back; after much grinding of teeth and checking that I hadn’t misread the manual. I hadn’t- this one was atypical and a model of clarity but I had a faulty unit. Back it went and it was another week before I could get it up and running. There are two settings for still photography – timed exposures and motion detection. I tried the former set rather ambitiously at one minute intervals as well as setting the motion detection. I now had 800 near identical shots of a badger sett but nothing animated. I wasn’t much better myself after scrolling through them so managed to set it for the following night with motion detection only. Success – three badgers and a very startled looking fox. I had one more try with again three badgers before I left for India. The aim is to get an idea of how many are occupying the sett and figure out a way to get some proper photos, by which I mean ones that I can blow up and decorate the walls of my storage unit (he says only a trifle ruefully!).