Panna

Guest blogger Gretchen Ferrao takes a walk on the wild side as she explores Madhya Pradesh’s hidden paradise, Panna. Share her experience of the Indian wilderness…

I’m going to Panna.’ ‘You mean Kanha.’ ‘No, Panna.’ I’d had similar conversations, my Seinfeld moment, if you will, several times around the time ofthe trip. Owing to its low tiger population, Panna National Park isn’t exactly number one on most tourists’ bucket lists, and is lesser known than the aforementioned reserve that inspired Mr Kipling’s The Jungle Book. In 2009 though, the 543-square-kilometre park clawed its way into the limelight, no thanks to a national poaching scandal that left it without a single tiger. The situation spurred a big cat population revival programme with the translocation of a tiger and four tigresses from Kanha and Bandhavgarh. The tiger count currently stands at 18, making this the first successful big cat revival programme in India. Since then, more so after the recently lifted Supreme Court ban on tiger tourism, the focus has been on ecotourism.

The hour-long drive from Khajuraho International Airport to Rampura, the reserve’s highest plateau,sees a varied topography. Plains ofmustard – about as much Bollywood melodrama as I could handle – guarded by quirky scarecrows clad in corporate fashion. The still waters of Ken River, the lifeline of the park, touted as one of the cleanest in the world. And a bumpy, uphill climb flanked by dried, crumpled-leaved teak trees that make you feel a little dehydrated and oddly claustrophobic all at once. 20 minutes later, the car turned into the gate of Pashan Garh, Taj Safari’s fourth lodge in Madhya Pradesh.

AM: Panna National Park

At 5:30 the next morning, I was greeted by naturalist Yajuvendra Upadhyaya, my guide for the park drive, along with a few of the other staff who are always game for a reserve visit. Armed (more like pampered)with blankets and hot-water bottles, we set off for the Madla gate of the park in an open-top four-wheel drive. Incidentally, Madla is the lowest of the three plateaus that make up Panna National Park and offers a relatively varied topography with a combination of trees, grasslands and water bodies. Hinota, the middle plateau, is quite dry with more grasslands – “like a less crowded Africa,” described Yugdeep. The wildlife on both levels is similar.

We made a quick stopover at the interpretation centre to pick up the tickets and a park guide. “It’s a sort of revenue-generating initiative for the local community. Rs200 from the ticket goes to them; plus we pay them. It’s not easy money; they have to work for it,” explained Yugdeep. Recent limitations on the number of vehicles entering the park have been good for conservation but not so much for the hospitality industry.

It was rutting season, and our first encounter was a clash between two male chital (spotted deer), each trying to herd the females together. As we drove further we saw grazing herds of sambar (Asia’s largest deer), chinkara (gazelle) and nilgai (Asia’s largest antelope), a camera-shy wild boar and playful langurs aplenty. Sloth bear and leopard tracks were everywhere to be found, yet the creatures themselves eluded us.

We’d stopped by a lake for a glimpse of a resident baby ghariyal, when we heard the alarm cry of a spotted deer. Scuttling back to the vehicle, we chased the sound to a firebreak where we sat patiently waiting. As Murphy would have it, a langur sounded off an alarm cry from the other end of the park. The dilemma of which call to heed was settled by a leopard’s cough. Being shy creatures, the chances of us spotting this big cat were slim. Besides, as trichromats, langurs are a more dependable indicator of a predator than deer with their monochromatic vision. We headed to a grassy gorge in the hope of seeing a tiger. There we were met by a line of safari vehicles, each with their own set of inferences on the whereabouts of our striped friend. But it wasn’t in our destiny to see one today. We made our way to the riverside for a consolatory breakfast, spotting along the way, birds like the plum-headed parakeet, kingfisher, jungle babbler and rufous treepie among others.

PM: Nature Walk

A leisurely evening stroll across the 22-acre buffer zone that Mahua Kothi sits on, served to reiterate my learnings of the last two days – leopard tracks, their territory markings, bird calls and all. We finally settled down to a traditional Bundelkhandi dinner. The highlights were bhafori tarkari (fried black-lentil dumplings in a tomato and onion gravy), Bundelkhandi chicken curry prepared with stone-ground bay

leaf and black pepper, dumaari raita flavoured with charcoal-roasted mustard seeds, thaddula puri (rice, lentil and wheat flour with coriander-onion ginger paste), and gehoon ka kheer for dessert. Another speciality at the lodge is mahua kheer, made with the flowers of the eponymous deciduous tree.

Gretchen is the editor of Time Out Explorer India. Get a chance to be featured in the magazine by participating in our “Share Your Travel Secret” contest on Facebook!
https://www.facebook.com/events/303551666455034/

Literature to cinema – breaking the code

Undoubtedly we are a culture of storytellers. Our day to day living, our performing arts, our literature all are filled with fascinating stories that take us on journeys, uphold values, preach morality, pose riddles and also offer profound philosophy questioning the very nature of life and living, and mirroring the purpose of our existence.

Story telling is as old as civilization itself. Our need to connect with our world is linked to our need to tell and listen to stories. With as primary a function as this, it is unlikely that the art of story telling will ever die. Like a tough gene it will survive with mankind. It may mutate and change its form depending on the needs and resources available to the tellers but its basic characteristic will remain.

Story came to us even before the word or probably even before speech. Primitive man felt the same urge to narrate as we do today maybe in a bar or under a banyan tree when the fields have been ploughed. But before speech the primitive man relied on sounds, gestures and pictures. Very soon these sounds, gestures and pictures developed into symbols. With greater sharing these symbols then evolved into a language. It is because of our need for story that we have the gift of speech and the gift of the written word. Language and literature are not inventions of man but a part of his evolution.

Stories come to us from childhood.  Not just the ones we hear from our grandmothers but also the accounts from our peers about what happened on the way, or what we did on vacation. They are all stories because we choose to listen to what we consider worth listening to and we choose to tell what we think might impress or entertain. There is a natural evolution in story telling. Through a process of elimination, we know which stories work and which don’t.

Very often we love to listen to the same story over and over again. I remember as a child I loved to hear my sister narrate the stories from Chandamama, a magazine that brought out a collection of stories from the Panchatantra, the Ramayana and Mahabharata. Stories that were all too familiar to me but I didn’t mind hearing them over and over again. My sister would encourage me to read the magazine but I would much prefer her narration. She would bring in her own description of Sita and Rama in the forest. I would wait for the moments of great emotions. The exile of Ram, the abduction of Sita. When these great moments arrived my sister would improvise. One narration would have Ram crying with tears as big as berries when Ravan abducts Sita. Another would be from Sita’s point of view. A third would have Jatayu weeping at his own failure to save Sita. Same story with different punctuations.  That was indeed my first introduction to dramatization but I didn’t know it then.

Our fascination for stories stays with us even as our intellect matures. As young adults we are encouraged to read. In some ways it is a kind of weaning process. As we form memories of the stories we heard, we choose to read what evokes those memories in us. Our engagement with story has a lot to do with our memories. Just as an actor relies on sense memory to evoke truthful emotions, the reader relies on the memory of images to evoke a response to reading. It is interesting that the word ‘imagination’ has the same source as the word ‘image’. From the Latin ‘Imago’, used in psychoanalysis for a mental image of an influential person.  Very often, as young adults and even as children, we reject the pedantic approach to literature because it fails to engage our imagination. What is imagination after all but evoking a memory of an image that existed in our minds?  It is surreal and subliminal. All our senses recall stories and that is why we attach emotions to it through association. A gentle touch may remind us of the incident when our mother caressed us during our sickness and alleviated our pain. We may not be aware of it, but subliminally we are connecting a present stimulus with a past experience. Similarly, the fragrance of cooked rice comforts us with the memory of the delicious lunches that were served every day to us.  Virginia Woolf said that words by themselves are not a single entity. They are a part of other words. It is only in relation to one another as in sentences that they gain some meaning.  I think that may be true of sentences too, at least in story.  They only find meaning for us in relation to images.

We can read and enjoy a great work of literature like Dr. Zhivago without having been to Russia.  Indeed, the time and place of a great work may be completely alien to us. And yet we make the connections because at the heart of these great works is a story we have heard before. If Dr. Zhivago was only about the October Revolution in Russia it would interest only a few who have some interest in that period. But it is a great love story. Love is something we all have associations with.  Love, loss and longing. We are familiar with those through the stories of Radha and Krishna. Stories we have heard for hundreds of years.

It is these images that bind us to works of literature. We make a good story our own when we read it, because literature is a code of sounds, gestures and pictures, the very primitive expression from which civilization has sprung. Our very primeval forms of communication, codified like strains of DNA with our genetic history deeply embedded in them. And every writer presents us with the code and our imagination provides us with the key to break that code.

Cinema is considered to be a modern form of story telling. Actually what is modern is the technology. But the form of moving images is as we have seen among the oldest forms. Sounds, gestures, pictures. Today the world is ruled by moving images not because we have discovered something new. It is because we have re-discovered something old. By changing words back to images, cinema uses the tools that we started off with.

Some great filmmakers look to literature for inspiration. Satyajit Ray, Alfred Hitchcock, Rituparno Ghosh, David Lean have all made memorable adaptations of novels and plays.  In one sense they are breaking the code for us when they provide us with startling images that stay with us forever. That is why they are called auteurs, the French word for ‘author’.  In one sense they are doing what our imagination does for us when we read. But what they provide in return is just as valuable. While they fulfill our desire to revisit the stories we believe in, they also give us new sensory experiences that stretch us beyond our imagination. They rouse our curiosity and wonder. They make us children once again receiving new images.

Mahesh Dattani

Taking the Graphic Route

With Man of Steel running in theatre screens near you, the superhero blockbuster of the season has arrived! As an audience, we love films depicting noble and righteous heroes battling against insurmountable evil. A superhero story is a concentrated, distilled version of this proven trope. For as long as these characters have been in the public consciousness, they have become personifications of the belief that with strength of purpose, good will triumph over evil.

The message of these comic book stories has a huge impact on the minds of young audiences, seeing as it contains simplified, easy-to-digest morals. This appeal to the younger generation is what has ensured the longevity of the comic book format. Children absolutely love the colourful pages with loud captions and lively characters. Man of Steel has a scene where it features a young boy dashing around trailing a red blanket behind him like a cape; art mirroring reality. Kids absolutely love living the fantasy of being a superhero, a modern demi-god.

The power of young minds is undeniable. The dreams of children shape the future, and their thoughts become the ideas of the future. Broadening children’s horizons through a medium they easily understand is an important task and this where the beauty of the comic book lies.

At AVID we want to help the next generation continue patronising the arts, and making the world a more inspired place to live in! The AVID Children’s Series looks to bring Inspired Learning to the kids, offering them a chance to spread their creative wings and soar high. We want to connect with the children and with our latest workshop, we are meeting them on their turf. With Create Your Own Comic, we want to trigger a transformation from reader to illustrator. Reaching out to young minds is a journey we are embarking on, and our first step will be to take the graphic route!

Name(required)

Email(required)

Comment(required)

Submit

Δ

Read On!

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies; the man who never reads lives only one.”

– George R. R. Martin

The quote above was picked out of a plethora of platitudes about the joys of literature. Indeed, so many great thinkers and influencers of modern thought have praised the discipline as integral to personal and social development that it would be easy to fill a book (let alone a blog post) with their sayings.

Such is the power that literature has over the human imagination. For as long as we have had written communication, someone has been producing literature. Epic stories like Homer’s Iliad as well as academic manuscripts like Kautilya’s Arthashastra have endured for millennia, and have become cultural institutions.

History has proven that great literature often outlasts even the civilisation that birthed it. That is the reason that even in a world where Twilight and Vampire Diaries are a pop culture phenomenon; Bram Stoker’s Dracula is still considered the archetype of all horror literature.

Inspite of this apparent tradition of permanence, the art form is constantly evolving. Like a living thing, literature grows and adapts to the demands of its world. The ancient epic led to the Victorian classic which made way for The Great American Novel. Today, a new voice is establishing itself. Writers from the Third World now have eager audiences willing to pay to read their work. Penning a bestseller is no longer the exclusive domain of privileged authors in developed countries.

India is also surfing this literary wave. Being an author in this country is not a thankless job anymore, with a host publishers and a booming market. Just ask Amish Tripathi or others who have tasted similar success in recent years. Even the readers themselves are growing; with the attendance and interest in literary festivals skyrocketing over the past five years.

AVID is proud to have been associated with the boom in Indian Literature, partnering with platforms that celebrate this trend, such as the Jaipur Literature Festival and Literature Live. We aim to reach out to the literary minded Indian and get them to jump in and join the fray. We want to turn spectators of the Indian literary scene into participants.

Our literature faculty comprises of some very prestigious names, all of whom are happy to share their expertise and prowess with students at AVID workshops. We aim to cover the entire writing gamut, with topics as diverse as Comedy Writing and Travel Writing and many others, in both the fiction and non-fiction categories. For example, our next literary offering is a Poetry Writing workshop with veteran author and the chronicler of Mumbai, Jerry Pinto.

Don’t procrastinate, participate! Join AVID on our journey to Indian literature’s promised land!