A village gets connected to the world

Its just another Sunday morning, things are easy and slow; a bit laid-back, a bit purposeful and a bit hungry. So, I got my bike out, eat a heavy breakfast, ride up to the lab I work in (almost never on Sunday, but there were things to accomplish!) and since its a Sunday with a slow start, I open Facebook. And something that I have been noticing for a while seemed more real.

During my field days in Upper Siang Arunachal, where I spent the best part of the year for four years consecutively, we never had phone network and only sometimes had electricity. There was a satellite phone in Bomdo village, which as expected, never worked too. In the initial years of my phd, 2010 - 2012 the BSNL tower could be accessed for sending messages or a rare phone call at certain angles. The signal from the tower bounced off at least a couple mountains, took a dip into the valleys between, perhaps even took a swim and reached Bomdo, very reluctantly. I remember speaking to my girlfriend while my friend Army held the phone for me on the speaker mode (that's the only mode that worked!), and everything we spoke got out a nice reaction from Army and there would be huge laughter at the end of the conversation from all three of us! There were even other times I climbed up a raintree near the helipad and reached out my hand to dial my mom's number and it would ring twenty times and she wouldn't pick since she didn't hear it. That is worse since she cannot call me back and there is no guarantee that I would be able to connect to her again.

Then, another time, I had a lux meter with me that looks very similar to a mobile satellite phone. My field assistant asked me what it was and I told him that I will demonstrate to him what it was. I dialed a number on the lux meter and held the light sensor up and pretended to speak to my mom for a minute. And then I told mom to speak to Agar bhai and passed the phone to him. He was so happy that we had network and took the light sensor from me and said 'Hello, Maa!'. This was funny due to two reasons: 1. Agarbhai himself is about ten years elder to me, so him calling my mom 'Maa' was really funny and then of course, he started roaring into a laughter too once he realised, 2. It wasn't a phone.

Once every two weeks, I would ride up to the nearest town Yingkiong, 50 km and 2 hours away to speak to my family and friends. Sometimes, that was tough too, due to heavy rain and landslides or the bridge over the Siang river from the right to left bank was being repaired. And then again, sometimes the network was down in Yinkgiong! Desperate times! Well, but that was back then.

These days Upper Siang is a different story. There are two networks available in the village I worked in and my friends from there even 'video' call me! I even get sent pictures when Solung and Aran, their festivals, are celebrated. Its really good to be in touch with them. I even completed some of my interviews speaking to folks there to complete my article. Besides, having a phone, half the village is also now on Facebook! So this Sunday, when I turned my laptop up am looking at some of the posts from them, mostly selfies and wondering if it would have been nice if I had network in those days, I quite swiftly concluded, 'definitely not'! Its amazing that things are changing so quickly over a duration of a PhD. Wonder what else is up in that landscape, I would like to remember that landscape in the way I've posted photos and stories from there. I'm glad I wrote up my experiences on this blog!

A couch potato in the forest

The crossword puzzle cuckoo continuously calls, intermittently a green pigeon sings or perhaps tries to sing; melody for some, closer to cacophony for others. I am sitting below a pine tree that even has pine cones. The leaves clumped together looked like a thousand flowers on a tree. They make the ground slippery too, for they are round and cylindrical. The leaves are like the ones I used to play with as a kid, made of small fragments that can be detached and reattached. I have a mat on the ground and some time to kill. Due to some turn of logistics, it so happens that I am the one to lie down on a mat below a pine tree on top of a hill somewhere in Meghalaya with a 360 degree view of a horizon jagged with the lining of pining trees, and a ticket to a symphony of several birds. I take it all in.

I don't even bother fetching my binoculars to know what bird that is that looked like hurried feathers onto a shrub far-away. Its okay, today I will be a couch potato in the forest.

A great barbet calls continuously; its like the orchestra conductor instructed, 'you play rhythm today and hold the beat'. The brainfever cuckoo fills in a one-second monotonous lead, out-of-beat too! Its that time of the year in the north-east when so many cuckoos call, its the end of April and the pre-monsoon showers are due.

The wind is now roaring and sounds like a jetliner flying low. I have been sitting on this mat for an hour and no one and no vehicle has passed, nice! This was a time to switch off other voluntary senses and just take in the sights and sounds.  I also now hear the puff-throated babbler, its a higher-frequency version of one of the calls of a Magpie Robin. I remember my friend G V Reddy Sir who used to say, the Robin calls 'Mr. Reddy' and I think the babbler says 'Come on Mr. Reddy'!

At my 10 O'clock direction, I see a forest cleared for jhum and perhaps a week ago was burnt, for the patch stands out in a background of verdancy. There is also a temporary jhum hut where I would love to stay in for few nights. For once, the entire landscape, inspite of all the heterogeneity fuses into one. Below this hill is a beautiful stream where lots of butterflies were fluttering. There were also tadpoles that were perhaps feeding but it looked like they were practising synchronous dancing.

The mat is now vigourously blowing from all sides due to the wind, but I perhaps have an hour more here! And then, I realise, all the physical and the mental effort I put in throughout the year is mostly for this, to spend time hearing and looking at things in a forest closely; its good to take a step back and laze about in a forest once in a while.

Lazy Sunday afternoon

Its been a month since I have been here in Bomdo, but it just sunk in, Bangalore is now not just physically away, its mentally a long way away too. This Sunday was unlike others. The day began late for me since all night the hum of rain falling on the tin roof of this 'bungalow' I stay in kept me. I woke up thinking its too much rain so field work is not a possibility and I can sleep in. The kid whom I recently employed to cook for me came in late too, at 6 am. I hear him chopping some wood to make the fire and very slowly I wake up. I was still hungover with the cold that I caught with the onset of the winter, four days back. The rain refuses to stop, so I sent my friend Army to pick up lots of seeds of a Castanopsis species. Small oak like fruits, that remind you of the fruit the squirrel would not let go of in the movie 'Ice Age'. These are quite tasty too, and the species fruits only once in two years, so I had to get some soon for my experiments, since many animals and birds make a quick meal of it. In fact I ate some two years back too; roasted on fire, they make a sumptous snack. So Army has left to bring back the seeds by himself since I am still a little sick and the walk to the place where these trees and seeds are is more than 5 km to and fro in the hills.

After the morning meal cooking, I put in more wood and decided a bath is due. So I made some hot water and just finished with a rejuvenating and a (a word that always takes me two minutes to remember!) therapeutic bath. For the rest of the day, I plan to read a couple scientific articles, do some data entry and plan the field work for the next few months. I can't help but remember how it used to be in Bangalore when I was even a little feverish. Amma would prepare a peppery concoction we call 'kashayam' and a peppery pongal (rice and lentils) breakfast. I could read the newspaper and then contemplate life the whole day! Here, I would miss her caring but hey there is warm ginger tea and I could do the latter but contemplate not just life but my Phd too! But a bath did me real good; I feel fresh enough to make an entry on the blog and perhaps to get well soon enough to continue field work.

Blog's not dead, long live the blog

Since its been a while since I've written and since I've been in the north-east, I thought I'd post at least something I wrote sitting in my field site three months ago. 

'The Hindu means home to me

Waking up at 7 am and smelling the coffee and breakfast cooking was a schedule for me everyday in Bangalore. The newspaper would be dropped anytime between 7 and 7.15 am and I would be eagerly waiting to pick up a cup of coffee and read 'The Hindu' newspaper. With a grandfather who worked for the newspaper for half a century and a cousin who writes for the Hyderabad edition, we always subscribed to the Hindu. Saturdays and Sundays were even more special with the Young World and Sunday Magazine supplements, and sometimes better still, Book Reviews. The Editorial, the crossword and the Calvin and Hobbes strip will remain my all-time favorites.

Working in north-east India on wildlife for the last year or so, I haven't had access to the Hindu, although for a month I subscribed to the pdf version of the paper which was quite expensive so couldn't follow it up. The website version was not the same as reading the paper although I often browse it. But this time when I got back from home I brought few copies of the paper.

My schedule here is quite different. In Arunachal Pradesh where I work on birds, plants, and shifting cultivation, one can't afford to wake up at 7 am; I wake at 4.30 most days and cook my breakfast and then head to field. They say the early wildlifers get the birds! I come back few hours later and then settle down and today on the 30th of January still enjoy reading the Hindu copy of January 3rd I picked up from home! Paul Krugman says the republicants have started complaining in the days before Obama has taken power, LTTE have been blown in Kilinochchi in Sri Lanka and the army is headed further north, beef slaughter houses in Bangalore are going to be closed temporarily and so on and so forth.

The point being that sometimes when I miss home, reading this paper I catch a glimpse of the leisure hours at home when mom makes coffee and breakfast and my chore is merely to wake up, fuel up and then head to college. Here it's quite different, much more independent and sometimes a bit tiring. But when I read The Hindu, it still feels different; I take a leap three and a half thousand km back home sitting on my sofa with a cup of coffee! Maybe, I will ask my parents to post me the Sunday Magazines copies too! Sunday magazines are the best for relaxing on a holiday'

Postscript: Now, the Hindu has a north-east edition, YAY!

Gone fishing!

Sundays are supposed to be lazy and I did not look forward to it really, another boring day in the office, or so I thought. Lakpa Tamang in our office was going fishing and suggested I join him, I did.

Tamangda has ealier discovered new fish species and records for the State. He also has detailed information pertaining fish ecology, including what each species eat, where and when it breeds and has about three years of data about fish populations in streams around Itanagar. I suggested he publish a book since he has collected and preserved specimens of 48 stream fish species.

But one thing he does not have is formal educational qualification; a degree, and he happens to be our office clerk! The world is full of paradoxes indeed.

This fish seemed to be stuck to this pebble, we released it back in the stream, hope it lives on.

This was the fish catch for the day; Tamang da often returned individuals which were young and also did not catch species that were relatively small. In all he caught about 35 individuals of 7 species. We returned back, and it was not a boring Sunday afterall!