Fifty Two

Three times last year, Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose vanished into thin air from Delhi’s India Gate. Officials blamed the wind, and the Trinamool Congress blamed the Bharatiya Janata Party. A drone show and projections lit up one end of the Central Vista for Republic Day celebrations. An empty canopy at the other end remained in the shadows.

B orn in 1937 in the Jine area of Pasighat, Talom Rukbo became interested in promoting the language and culture of his Adi people early in life. In the 1960s, his passion became a profession when he was appointed as the Pasighat Language Officer. In 1962, during the war with China, he worked for the Sashastra Seema Bal, the border forces operating on Indian boundaries with Nepal and Bhutan.

“ Separation is a death knell—whether it be between two lovers or two rivers,” said Zahid Kumbhar, a tall poet who’d composed a book on the history and geography of the Puran. We were talking about the Left Bank Outfall Drain project. This is a drain built in Sindh province between 1987 and 1997, using funding from the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. Its purpose is to collect saline water, floodwater and industrial effluents from the land located in the river basin of the Puran.

T he thing was squatting off a narrow road, hunched and lumpy, black wings splashed a dirty white, as though another bird had relieved himself from above. His head was shorn and feathers dishevelled, like an eagle with a terrible haircut wearing a rumpled coat. But when he stretched his wings—thrust them once, twice, three times toward the ground—he transformed into an entirely new creature, powerful and light.

W hen Lal Bahadur Shastri became India’s prime minister in 1964, he diverged from his predecessor Jawaharlal Nehru’s economic views in two key respects: he wanted to focus more on agriculture and in the Gandhian tradition, he “disliked controls and the corruption they bred.” At the time, trade liberalisation had already started unlocking growth in East Asian economies like Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan.

Z amindar, a Persian word, translates to “landholder.” At least since the Mughal period, zamindars had been a fixture in Bihar. They did not own land but had hereditary rights over a portion of local produce which they collected as tax. Their estates contributed one-sixth of the state revenue during Babur’s reign. In his grandson Akbar’s time, there were two or three hundred local chiefs who exercised varying degrees of power.

Being a mother to a toddler had become my prime identity and preoccupation over the preceding years, and I couldn’t meet friends to catch up anymore without making an exhausting effort. I was jabbering about this to Sujit when he remarked, casually but sweetly, “You know, I never imagined you’d be such an involved and preoccupied mother. I thought you would be a lot more chilled out.” It wasn’t a critical remark at all. He meant well. But I didn’t know how to respond.

On a morning in May 2009, the people of Athara Beki village in West Bengal received an alert about a cyclone that had been named Aila. The village is about 25km from Canning town, the gateway to the mangrove forests of the Sundarbans. As the skies darkened, they untied their cattle, picked up their children and headed to the schools that double up as cyclone shelters.

“ Without a knowledge of Adil Shahi texts, we can’t expect to know our own history,” said Krishna Kolhar Kulkarni, director of the Dr. P.G. Halakatti Research Centre in Bijapur. Kulkarni is an expert on Kannada literature, particularly the Dasa poetic tradition. “Bijapur was one of Karnataka’s largest kingdoms, ruling most of Karnataka and Maharashtra at its peak, and its courtly literature has largely been ignored by local historians,” he lamented.

Planter Punched “ The situation has gotten so bad that they’ve started feeding on coffee beans,” said B.S. Rohit, a coffee planter in the Hassan region. “Can you imagine that? Elephants eating coffee?” Rohit is a fifth-generation planter and an active member of various associations—such as the Hassan District Planters Association—that meet frequently to deal with the human-elephant conflict situation.