Shunya's Notes

Numen Inest

A slideshow of my landscape photos set to music (7 mins).

The Orangutans of Sumatra

In May 2009, Usha and I visited the Gunung Leuser National Park in north Sumatra to see orangutans in the wild. We hired a guide in the gateway village of Bukit Lawang and hiked several miles into a dense primary growth forest. Heavy rain on the previous night made the hike rather treacherous and we had to grab on to branches and roots to go up and down the hilly terrain. But the forest was beautiful, abundant with tropical flora and fauna (some of it unique to the island), rushing streams and animal sounds, and we did get lucky: we saw about ten orangutans on our daylong hike. One middle-aged female—rescued years ago by the orangutan center in Bukit Lawang and reintroduced into the wild—even came down and held Usha's hand! Other primates we saw include gibbons and Thomas's Leaf-monkeys.

The orangutan (“person of the forest”), whose habitat has shrunk to parts of Sumatra and Borneo, has cognitive abilities that rival those of the gorilla and the chimpanzee, the only primates more closely related to humans. Placid, deliberate, and mostly vegetarian, orangutans are known for their ingenuity and persistence, particularly in manipulating mechanical objects, and for their "cognitive abilities such as causal and logical reasoning, self-recognition in mirrors, deception, symbolic communication, foresight, and tool production and use. In the wild, orangutans use tools, but at only one location in Sumatra do they consistently make and use them for foraging, [defoliating] sticks ... to extract insects or honey from tree holes and to pry seeds from hard-shelled fruit." We saw one juvenile male using a stick as a tool.

Here is a slideshow of my best orangutan shots set to music (2 min, 25 sec). Check out some more pictures and a primer on orangutans.

The Omo of Ethiopia

(Photography by Hans Silvester. Link via Maniza Naqvi @ 3QD)

Happy Holi!

More pictures from the Shunya archives here.

Indian Vistas: A Calendar

Indian Vistas -- 2009 Calendar  by Namit Arora (US$16 + S&H)

A couple of friends recently suggested that I make calendars out of my travel photo archive on Shunya. So I made one! The effort was a breeze; the hardest part was choosing the 12 images (click to preview).

The new year is a-comin'. Go ahead, buy one! All proceeds will go to Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF).

Dholavira: A Harappan Metropolis

(A longer version of the article below appeared in the Dec 2008 issue of Himal Southasian.)

The road to Dholavira goes through a dazzling white landscape of salty mudflats. It is close to noon in early April and the mercury is already past 100F. The desert monotones are interrupted only by the striking attire worn by the women of the nomadic and semi-nomadic pastoral tribes that still inhabit this land: Ahir, Rabari, Jat, Meghwal, and others. When I ask the driver of my hired car to stop for a photo, they receive me with curious stares, hoots, and giggles.

This is the Rann of Kutch, an area about the size of Kuwait, almost entirely within Gujarat and along the border with Pakistan. Once an extension of the Arabian Sea, the Rann ("salt marsh") has been closed off by centuries of silting. During the monsoons, parts of the Rann fill up with seasonal brackish water, enough for many locals to even harvest shrimp in it. Some abandon their boats on the drying mudflats, presenting a surreal scene for the dry season visitor. Heat mirages abound. Settlement is limited to a few "island" plateaus, one of which, Khadir, hosts the remains of the ancient city of Dholavira, discovered in 1967 and excavated only since 1989.

Entering Khadir, we pass a village and find the only tourist bungalow in town. It hasn't seen a visitor in three days; I check in and head over to the ruins. I've planned this for months; even the hottest hour of the day cannot temper my excitement for the ruins of this 5,000 year-old metropolis of the Indus Valley Civilization. While hundreds of sites have been identified in Gujarat alone, this is among the five biggest known to us in the entire subcontinent, alongside Harappa, Mohanjo-daro, and Ganeriwala in Pakistan, and Rakhigarhi in India.

At the site office, a caretaker and his friend are playing cards on a charpoy. They offer me a chair and a glass of water, cooled in an earthen surahi. On a wall are the mysterious inscriptions from the famous signboard of Dholavira, painted above contemporary motifs to suggest a continuity of sorts. I learn from the caretaker that the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) still excavates each winter, alongside researchers from overseas. Hundreds from the local village are then employed on site. He says he has learned directly from the experts and offers to be my guide. I readily agree but hope that as part of the deal, he will overlook the "Photography Prohibited" injunction I had noticed earlier—a perfectly exasperating habit of the ASI—else I would have to attempt a bribe. I am relieved when the caretaker does not press the issue.

A Child of God

I ran into her in Dharamsala, home to the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government-in-exile. She was a pilgrim at the festival of Buddha Purnima, which celebrates the Buddha's enlightenment.

I don’t know her story. I regret not speaking to her, or even inquiring about her. I confess I was too dumbstruck, able only to take this photo from across the road, approach her to drop some coins in her bowl, and slip away.

Her teeth and hair suggest she is young. Is she a victim of fire or chemicals (accidental or criminal)? Does she have a family? How does she regard herself? What is a typical day in her life?

Postcards from Zihuatanejo

More here.

Happy New Year!

From the Big Easy, where jazz is king, hurricanes rule, and the Creoles cook up a storm.

Bihar

The State of Bihar, in the eastern part of the Indo-Gangetic Plain, is amply watered by the Ganga and its tributaries, and there is no denying that the landscape here—particularly during the early monsoons when we visited—is among the loveliest in India. So many views of the land, rich in untapped mineral wealth, are crossed by broadly curving, slow rivers. Roads and fields are fringed with palm trees and a profusion of wild, tropical vegetation. Rural vistas end along the curves and jags of low, green hills under a soaring sky, blue in the sun or darkening with the promise of rain.

This land also claims an illustrious history as the onetime center of the subcontinent's culture and politics. Its name, Bihar, is derived from the Sanskrit vihara (Buddhist monastery), and it was here, 2,500 years ago, that the Buddha is said to have achieved enlightenment sitting under the Bodhi tree. His Jain contemporary, Mahavira, the quintessential master of non-violence whose teachings reach into modern times in the form of ahinsa (ahimsa) and Gandhi's ideals, also originated from this region.