The WABA (Wear A BeArd) Foundation

People everywhere keep asking me why I have a beard. My extended family, friends I haven't met since high school and even new acquintances, all wonder about it. The answer is I have a beard because most men naturally have a beard! What's so complicated about that to understand? It's just like hair on your head; it's already there, one doesn't have to do anything for it. Why don't people shave their heads as well, as a corollary? The beard, being a great insulator, also keeps my face warm during winters and cool during the heat. It's also totally eco-friendly because it can be maintained simply with a pair of scissors, without having to use and dispose metal and plastic razors. Also, it makes me look wise beyond my years. (I think!) :-)

The talk about 'alternative development' or 'sustainable development' is quite interesting these days. The NGOs that usually make recommendations to governments about what can be done so that rural communities continue to lead their relatively simpler lifestyles that are directly dependent on the wilderness areas around them as a means of promoting the protection of these wilderness areas through stakeholdership will recommend that funds be donated/allotted and/or legislation be passed to secure that community's way of life, and they will lobby for rights to the community over the forest that they are stakeholders of. The point that they miss completely is that even though current stakeholders might be interested in safeguarding their forests and making sure only sustainable quanta of NTFP is harvested from them, there's no guarantee that future generations who inherit this stakeholdership will do the same. Another moot point is also that if an ad-hoc village committee is in charge of the forest around their village, it is a possibility that bad management decisions can be made with the best of intentions. Unlike the evolved system of centralised and state-owned forest management, village committies will not have access to research and data to base their decisions on (this is not to say the centre doesn't screw up. They do, and big time at that. But there are certain safeguards and corrections can be made with higher intervention). And even if they do manage to set limits to NTFP harvests in the name of sustainability, it is only so that humans can continue to sustainably harvest material with nary a care for the wildlife inhabiting the forest. (A good example would be honey collection from wild beehives in southern India. Even though there are ancient laws passed on from father to son about what kind of hive to harvest and what kind to leave untouched, most of the extractable honey is collected and sold into the free market with little of it left to bears - whose main diet during the nonfruiting season happens to be honey. Bears are also further affected by collection of deadwood. Deadwood is essential for the existence of termites in a forest. Termites feed on the dead and fallen wood and return organic matter back into the soil. Termites also happen to be another major part of bear diet. No deadwood, no termites, no bears.) Beyond all this talk of sustainability, one also forgets about the people concerned. Do they want to continue with their way of living or do they want healthcare, schools, electricity, food and water security, toilets, pukka roofs that don't need to be replaced every year, insurance, access to the internet and telecommunications, news, information and entertainment? Why should someone who has access to (and is a user of) all this make recommendations that basically dictate the absense of these very things from a community of people who happen to be physically and financially far off from these things? Why not ask them what they'd like first? As long as human communities continue to have access to the 'free' market of the open world (most 'tribals' do, only a few like the Jarawas of the Andamans continue to live disconnected from all but the most primitive technology - one reason why their population hasn't exploded like the rest of the world and they can actually be said to be living 'with' nature), continue to change their environment to raise animals and crops, get diseases and need cures, get bitten by snakes and need antivenin, they cannot be given special permissions and rights to the forests they live in. With the little forest we have remaining, we cannot continue to add infrastructure and services into it. People can adapt to a change in lifestyle but animals and the forest cannot. I sit in a coffee shop as I write this, a place where I can buy the cheapest item on the menu and meet with a dozen of my friends until it's closing time and use the internet for free. I can walk down a few blocks into a multiplex and expose myself to a plethora of cinema from various corners of my country and the world. Why would I not want the 'tribal' people to have access to the same if they chose so?

Tallying pollution

When calculating total greenhouse gas emissions of a country, (the majority of which are emitted by industry), the emissions by export oriented industries have to be debited from the emitting country and credited to the countries who are importing these products. Perhaps they should seriously start thinking about the stuff they consume and the quantity in which they do so, these 'developed' nations.

Waiting at the Ramnagar railway station for my train to Delhi. I'm in the waiting lounge, facing the door with my back against one wall that has been decorated with a 12x8-foot print of a tiger. (It's very obvious that Corbett is the reason for Ramnagar's current state of finances.) The tiger has me in its claws and it's hard to escape.

The toilets for men and women are right next to each other with only 'stree' and 'purush' written in Devnagri script on their doors. If I couldn't read Hindi, it'd not be unlikely to find me walking into the women's loo, only to be chased out by overweight sardarnis brandishing sharp stilettos.

15 September 2009

Pune airport security takes away your water bottle during security check and then there's no water dispenser all the way until you board your flight and the stewardesses roll out the food cart (which can be anyhwhere between 45 minutes to 3 hours in my case). You can buy bottled water at shops in the lounge, but I would rather not buy something that is every living being's birthright. Why not a drinking water filter? The Lohegaon airport also has an abysmal system of announcing flight departures. Although they have multiple large display signs giving information on arriving and departing flights, information about which gate to board at and when is only announced over the PA system and never displayed on the screens. A very serious overlook, inconveniencing people with hearing disabilities.

Monitoring Tigers, Co-Predators, Prey and their Habitats

Y.V. Jhala, Q. Qureshi and R. Gopal, 2005

Published by
Project Tiger Directorate, New Delhi and Wildlife Institute of India, Dehradun

This is a handy little field guide with information in simple English and Hindi on how to record signs/sightings of carnivores and their prey beginning all the way from how to set transects in your census area and going on to explain in detail what to watch out for, some easy field techniques and a short description on the operation of a basic GPS unit with illustrations, pictures and sample data entry tables.


One complaint/confusion I have with this is that in describing the two procedures of sampling carnivore sign encounter rates and ungulate encounter rates, there is a marked difference in the kind of area chosen for the transect. For the carnivore sign encounter rate, it describes selecting "Areas within the beat that have the maximum potential for tiger occupancy will be intensively searched." and "Since tigers & leopards have a tendency of using dirt roads, trails, foot paths, river beds and nullahs, these landscape features within the beat need to be searched intensively," whereas for the ungulate encounter rates, it mentions, "Care should be taken that a line transect is not located near a busy road nor should it run parallel to a river or other features of the landscape which may bias sighting of ungulates."

Why should the transect be unbiased for the ungulates and biased for the carnivores? Looks like a recipe to get a skewed prey-predator ratio in favour of the predators.



I couldn't find any copyright notice on the field guide and have taken the liberty to reproduce four pages here illustrating carnivore paw prints and ungulate dung types. Download as PDF.

Green green flowers of home

Found these weird-looking green flowers in the front yard. Ever seen anything like these? Wonder what they are...

Update on September 04, 2009

Thanks to Vikram Gupchup, who sent me this link:

http://www.flowersofindia.net/catalog/slides/Blue%20Fox%20Tail.html

It's probably the Blue Foxtail / Blue Justicia Ecbolium linneanum. The difference in colour could be down to various factors like soil, rainfall, climate, altitude, etc. Still don't know for sure. Can you help?

So, Earth Hour wasn't enough, now we have an Earth Day that has been commercialised to the core. Shutting off your lights for an hour saves the earth, it seems. Looking at the official Earth Day website, you'd think it was very simple to save the planet from its downward spiral due to our exploitation. It seems, changing all your lightbulbs to compact fluorescent lamps, planting a tree, recycling, lobbying for all of Greenpeace's projects and signing 'No Coal' petitions will do the trick. It's like a train one has to catch to be ecofriendly and "green". If you didn't shut off your lights during Earth Hour, you're an enemy to the planet, are insensitive and don't particularly care about it. If you don't oppose whatever Greenpeace opposes, the world is doomed. Isn't it a bit like capitalism, where every organisation pitches for you to take up their cause, just as every corporation wants you to buy their product? In all of this media frenzy, the fact that a simple lifestyle by itself can be more helpful to the environment is forgotten and ignored. Instead of only consuming what you need, the trend is to buy all that you want, and by simply recycling your trash you will be a green warrior. For instance, we've been told to switch from tungsten bulbs to compact fluorescent lamps so that less electricity is used up. What is conveniently ignored is that CFLs contain mercury in the coating inside, and once their time is up, they simply can't be thrown away into the trash and into a landfill because the mercury then leaches into the soil and into groundwater. One or two bulbs won't contaminate it enough, but when everyone uses CFLs there's bound to be huge amounts of mercury entering into our water and soil. Mercury is a neurotoxin and is fatal, especially to foetuses and children. Even the Americans don't have a proper CFL recycling programme, forget here in India. We don't care. We have too many people. It's nothing strange. If you have too much of a resource, you don't care about it. In India, we have too many people. So some will die. Big deal.

Do they want me to register or not?

Was trying to register at Mail.com and this is what I got. Tried refreshing the captcha image but it kept spewing out incorrigible ones like this. I'm sure it's a not very subtle way to say they're not accepting new registrations right now.

Of fools and gold

If an alien civilisation were to visit earth and observe our goings on, they'd be quite amused by the fact that all trade and finance on earth happens on the basis of gold - a metal quite useless apart from some limited use in the electronics industry. It's amazing how gold developed as the de rigueur measure of monetary exchange across various peoples all over the globe, all independent of each other. Shouldn't we be elevating the value of something else to the level of gold, something that is much more precious? Say, clean air, clean water, fertile soil, healthy forests and freedom of speech, thought and being?