Junglecast Update #6

NB: Katie is not being crazy and calling me her father; "papa" is what people say in Kannada when they feel sorry for someone (in this case, Katie feels sorry for herself, how selfish).

Sorry about the late posts -- we've just gotten internet and we're working on updating this blog ASAP!

In the next few days, look out for:
- Sweet pictures
- Awesome reflections
- Our finished biodiversity videos

A Discussion of Indian Manliness...

Today, we watched as a dead tree by Pam and Anil’s house was cut down. Sounds like it would be boring, but it was actually the manliest thing I have ever seen. Now in America, this would not necessarily be something that I would watch—it’s the fairly simple use of a chain saw chopping down branches from a large crane. But here in India, it is a totally different story. All of the male servants congregated by the tree and watched as one particularly brave soul shimmied up the 50 foot tree trunk—with a MACHETE hanging out of his pants. Once he was up there, he (his name was Jimmy I later found out) tied a rope to large tree branches and used the machete to cut them down one by one. Not only was he 45 feet from the ground with no safety rope, but he was chopping the very tree he was standing on from under him. Very intense. Then, when the tree was completely naked, he shimmied back down and they started using the ax to cut down the whole tree. Karan, Sandeep and I even got to chop a little. When the tree finally started to fall, it looked promising for a split second and then got stuck on another tree. So of course, they sent Jimmy back up, machete in tow, to chop down the branches that it was caught on. This would be the climax of the movie: Jimmy at the top of a waving tree, chopping as the men continue to pull the dead tree down. Danger zone. But, all was well in India, the tree fell, Jimmy shimmied, and they all went to lunch. And I went to write this blog.
Anyway, this was just one more time where the true differences between America and India showed themselves. Here, a worker is not only expected to tuck a machete into his pants and climb up a 5 story tree, but he is also expected to do it without any sort of protection device. Next time you talk to your Dad, you should ask him if he would do that. My guess is that he would laugh, and MAYBE pull out his cell phone to call a maintenance man to do the job. The crazy thing is that these actions aren’t even considered machisimo—it’s everyday. But it will never feel everyday to me-- I remain as wide eyed as ever.

Leeches

This is a leech. They like me a lot. When it rains and the leaf litter on the ground is moist, they are everywhere -- they crawl up your boot, down your leg, and bite you wherever they can find exposed skin. If they manage to make a cut, then they'll suck your blood until they're full, and then fall off in a food coma. Leeches have an enzyme in their mouth called hirudin, which causes the bite to bleed for much longer than a normal cut would. But leeches are pretty harmless otherwise -- if you get over the creepiness factor and their texture (slimy), they don't really do anything that bad. And if you want to spend any time in the jungle, I learned, you have to be able to cope with a couple of leech bites now and then. Just pull up your socks over your pants, tuck your shirt in (see below) and take plenty of leech checks on your way.

This is what happens when you don't tuck your shirt in:

Junglecast Update #5

Project Update

Trekking with the Forestry College experts, as Sandeep mentioned, was absolutely eye-opening. Next, Sanjay and Payal Molur, from the Zoo Outreach Organisation---founded in India by Sally Walker, a Duke alum!---took us through other parts of the Sanctuary. Working with them was a blast, because together they could identify and tell us about almost any animal we found out there. That also means that if they can't identify something, it's probably a big deal. Sanjay found one unidentifiable frog on our first trek through the jungle, and on one walk from Pam and Anil's house back to the cottage, Katie found two more strange frogs. (Sandeep and I were only a little bit jealous.) The benefit of having scientists like Sanjay and Payal in areas like this is that when they see an interesting species, they're aware of whether the scientific community knows about it, and if not, they have the knowledge and credibility to report it. And we got to see all that happen!

This week, we've been trying to tie together the footage of our films while the sun's still out. We've also started documenting and helping with the construction of a biogas plant for the people who work here. The beauty of these plants is their simplicity: they don't require any fancy machinery or equipment at all. So far all the builders have really used as material is metal mesh, metal rods, cement, sand, and water. The way they work is similarly elegant: people who would have otherwise have used plain cow dung as fertilizer, cooking fuel, or building material can instead put it into the biogas plant, essentially a large cement bubble. Pure methane is then released through pipes and into kitchens as cooking fuel, and what's left of the dung is a clean, nitrogen-enriched slurry that makes a much better fertilizer than raw dung. Methane is a greenhouse gas 21 times more potent than carbon dioxide, so burning it for cooking is a great way to limit the harm caused by letting cow dung sit around. Also, currently, many use timber---which is obviously terrible for the forest---or kerosene, which is extremely expensive, for cooking. So this plant should relieve a lot of pressure on the already threatened forests here, and save the laborers a great deal of money as well---in fact, Anil said the biogas plant would pay for itself in just three years!

Junglecast Update #4

Stars

I haven’t written in a while because I’ve found it difficult to put the experience I’ve been having for the past few days into words. Everything here is in the extreme. I have never seen so many stars at night, so many different shades of green, such big spiders, so many leeches... on me, so many different colors on a bird, so much wild elephant dung (and no elephants yet, but we’re optimistic). I’ve never tasted such pure water.

I’ve also never felt so homesick before. I thought I would be okay, since I travel to India every year by myself, but that India is so different from this one-- there, I’m surrounded by family and I know how to get around on my own. I had independence there. Here, we have to be accompanied back to our cottages because of the threat of male elephants in musth (among other possible threats, including tigers and leopards). We’re essentially in the middle of nowhere. There is no electricity in our cottages. We have to live by the sun, waking up at sunrise and going to sleep as soon as we get back to our cottages at night. We have little rechargeable lamps at night, but it’s still a huge cultural shock to have to live by sunlight like this. It’s only been a week, but I feel like it’s been forever-- in the good and not-so-good sense.

In good news, though, I think I’ve gotten over my fear of bugs, which has been replaced by a crippling fear of leeches.

We have been learning a lot. For the past few days, two PhD candidates from the nearby Forestry College came and taught us how to identify endangered and medicinally important plants right on the sanctuary grounds. We’re now putting together a report of the most critical trees in the area, including photo, video, and notes. The system we have worked out is nice and convenient-- Katie takes notes, I’m on the camera, and Karan’s taking care of the video. We hope to synthesize something useful from all of these things-- perhaps something that could prove useful for the sanctuary when they apply for scientific grants, a sort of “look what amazing things we have here, so come do research here” thing. The sanctuary is, according to the Forestry College experts, housing an incredible number of plants not found anywhere else in this district. Among these plants include plants with anti-cancer, anti-cholesterol, and edible qualities. In one walk, our experts were able to identify 33 critically important tree species. This is truly an incredible place.

Pam and Anil have been encouraging us to think about the balance of nature all the time, letting it dictate how we act, what decisions we make, and how we live our lives. It’s truly amazing how many examples they’ve provided, here and in the US, of animal species have proved critically important for the preservation of an ecosystem but had been carelessly eliminated through the use of pesticides or poor environmental management. Place like the sanctuary are so important because they represent the last bastions of biodiversity (which, as Pam says, is nature’s “insurance policy”).

Hello everyone,

We've reached the Sanctuary safely and we're all learning lots and having tons of fun. Karan and Sandeep had their first leeches on them and Katie has not.

Our internet connection is not as reliable as we thought it would be -- we're on the cusp of the monsoon season and phone lines are going down daily. We're all safe, though, and working ahead on our project. We've been writing blog posts and emails offline and making videos and we'll try to post/send them as soon as we get a good internet connection. This might be weeks away or even after we get back to the USA in July.

Much love,
Katie, Karan, and Sandeep.

Jetlag (See also: Junglecasts 2 and 3)

An autorickshaw is a three-wheeled vehicle that runs a tiny, presumably two-stroke engine that makes a very loud buzzing noise. There are no doors; there is a motorcycle-like handlebar instead of a steering wheel, and the back seat only has room for three college students. In rush-hour Bangalore traffic autorickshaws are slightly less than a smooth ride---but jetlag sees no such distinctions. Jetlag is falling asleep twice on an autorickshaw in the heat and noise of a Bangalore evening; then, of course, having a hallucination that I dropped something while on the auto and yelling at the driver to stop, jumping out of the rickshaw and running at least 50 yards back up the street to find what I was sure I had dropped, and sullenly returning to the rickshaw when I found nothing. (Meanwhile, Sandeep, forgetting how to say "he dropped something" in Kannada to the driver, told him instead that "[I] fell out.") When I got back, Sandeep and Katie were very understanding but quite sure that I hadn't dropped anything, and there is no evidence that I ended up missing anything. The image and sensation of a white bag falling out of my hands and into the road, however, are still firmly in my memory. This is jetlag.

UPDATE: I finally found my bags this afternoon, after being tossed from airport employee to airport employee like a rugby ball (at 7 a.m.) and delaying our plans to travel to the Sanctuary by a day. So now we're going tomorrow. On the bright side, now I can take a shower!

Junglecast Update #3

The first post

Flight was good. I promised myself that I would make the most of the 18 or so hours I had in transit-- reading Gandhi, listening to audiobooks, and watching great films like Milk and The Reader, stuff like that. But I ended up reading light things like the in-flight magazine (great tips on my next trip to Aruba) and listening to light music like early 2000s pop-punk, and watching light movies like Marley & Me. I’m determined to avoid making any of my time here “light” but I’m worried that I won’t be able to. I think I’ll get better once we get to the Sanctuary and my focus is renewed.

Also, I am a language geek. I’ve been reflecting a lot on airports and the languages used in different terminals around the world. Bilingualism, trilingualism, or more than that in airports has made me really think about English’s place in the world-- and ours, as first-language speakers of English. Learning English as a first language has made us profoundly lazy; we don’t need to learn other languages because everyone wants to know ours. In the business world, to be at all internationally successful you must have a great grasp of English.

We already have that. Now what? One used to have to know French, but now English is a lingua franca (or lingua anglica, as the case were) unlike anything seen before. So where do we go from there? What’s the point of learning another language? The most practical answer is that there isn’t. We already have the key to international success, first-rate English skills, in our hands. Any reason to learn a language different from your own (except maybe one that your parents speak), one could argue, is just fluff. Maybe I’m just being overly practical and reductionist.

I had bilingualism on my mind because as I look forward to the trip, I wonder just how much my Kannada skills will come in handy. The mother tongue of the villagers we’ll be working with is Kodava, but Wikipedia and my parents tell me that most of them will be bilingual in Kannada. But the use of any language except Kodava -- whether English, Kannada, Hindi, or anything else -- is so culturally loaded. English, of course, is a foreign tongue. Hindi is a North Indian language, and its use isn’t regarded too favorably down south where we are. Kannada might as well be a foreign language, too. It is the state’s official language, and so to the Kodava villagers, the use of Kannada could be an embittering reminder of the fact that they speak a minority language in their own home state. So whatever any of us speak-- me, Kannada; Katie, English; Karan, Hindi -- we have to be mindful of what the language we choose to speak means to them. Translators will help, I hope.

Language! Plus, our GPS unit is working.

After Flying

Birds are singing from the modern concrete and glass architecture inside Bangalore International Airport. It’s 4:30 a.m. here; Katie and I are waiting for Sandeep to arrive. Apparently my bags were lost in London, so I won’t have them till tomorrow. But, unusually wisely, I packed my mom’s cookies AND a change of clothes before coming here. Those two comforts, coupled with these airport birds, tell me that I’m going to be okay.

What I did while flying:
Watched The Bourne Supremacy.
Read Esquire.
Talked to Katie about her chick flicks. Also, regretted that they made her tear up, but I suppose that’s success.
Read Katie’s Cosmo.

What I learned (brace yourself for the English major here):
Jason Bourne is on a quest to assert his identity and agency after having been the US military’s man-Swiss-Army-knife for far too long, but his former bosses still think they can control him. Esquire represents a Bourne-esque struggle to wrest male identity from the grips of the mainstream, the mass-market, the bureaucratic, and, of course, the effeminate. I’d have to do more research, but I imagine this trend may be common to a lot of man-culture. Now, as Katie explains it, a chick flick is resolved when the (unusually attractive) female lead is accepted by the (muscular) male despite all her (endearing) quirks. Cosmo, like the chick flick, strives to satisfy male standards rather than creating an identity apart from them. I think this is sad. I think we need a female Jason Bourne. Although perhaps she should be less muscular than Jason.

Junglecast Update #2

Summer Junglecast #1

We're live!

Welcome to the Jungle Blog-- we're online and live!

The three of us Duke students-- Sandeep, Karan, and Katie-- are going to be spending the next two months in the rainforests of southern India working on a series of environmental projects, including but not limited to:

- filming a documentary
- constructing biogas plants
- identifying and photographing rare animals and plants
- fighting leopards
- wrestling elephants

This is where we're headed. Isn't it beautiful?















We depart on May 12, so wait for the adventure to begin.

--Sandeep