From the tales of Black Panther to White Tiger and many charming variants, explore how melanin colour codes the wild. The Dark Brown Pigment—Melanin Let me start this article with someone whom all of you know: A certain ‘Bagheera’. Yes, the ‘black panther’ from Rudyard Kipling’s masterpiece, The Jungle Book. In the book, it is Bagheera who teaches the feral boy (or ‘man cub’) Mowgli about the ‘ways of the jungle’. You may or may not have seen real-life Bagheeras in your city zoo. The first thing that may have struck you on seeing such an animal is the sheer spectacle: …
Hunting animals used to be central to the survival of most human communities over most of human history, whether it be for food or medicines or to use their fur and skin as clothes and rugs. Communities had developed ways to hunt animals without overexploiting them, such that the animals and humans could survive together. While we try to inculcate the values of sustainability in people today through classes and lectures, such values used to be a matter of common sense. If you kill all the animals this year, what are you going to hunt next year?...
Commemorating the Azadi ka Amrit Mahotsav with a brief tale of our peoples and environment from c. 1872–2022, spanning about 75 years before and after our tryst with destiny. ************************* 'Why was India lost?’ asked Mahatma Gandhi in his famous little book of philosophies, the Hind Swaraj, in 1909. Without any pun intended, he answered some lines later: ‘The English have not taken India; we have given it to them.’...