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 ?