August 2010: When city claustrophobia closes in, and an escape to one or another natural wonderlands is not written into my fate, I turn to my friends, the thinkers and poets who give voice to my deepest contemplations. Tennyson’s Brook: “For men may come and men may go, but I go on forever.”

June 2010: Why do so many of us believe that this Bengal Florican Houbaropsis bengalensis might survive despite the double dose of bad news that confronts us daily from grassland habitats such as Kaziranga… and Manas where Ramki took this incredible series of images? Are we delusional? Or might we be aware of something most ‘lay persons’ tend to miss?

April 2010: … and our dholes, and our birds and termites and…

I have seen tigers, lions and leopards just metres from me while walking wild India. I once found a snake in my sleeping bag. I have been chased downhill by bees, swum with barracudas and sharks and gingerly picked a scorpion off a smoking log on a cold Gairal night in Corbett.

February 2010: What is it in our rootedness that virtually forces us to stay fixed to what has been ‘home’ long after the qualities that define home – comfort, safety, security – have vanished? Why do we persist in living in neighbourhoods or cities long after they have ceased to be friendly and nurturing?

December 2009: “Believing as I do that man in the distant future will be a far more perfect creature than he now is, it is an intolerable thought that he and all other sentient beings are doomed to complete annihilation after such long-continued slow progress.” – Charles Darwin

October 2009: The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would suffice to solve most of the world’s problems. – Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

August 2009: A remarkable piece of science is at work here. This tree aglow with fireflies is just one among millions in Kerala’s Western Ghats that support a bewildering diversity of living creatures, many yet to be recorded by science. The light comes from bioluminescence – light produced from within the bodies of living organisms.

June 2009: When the king says there is darkness at noon, the wise man says: “Behold the Moon.” – Anonymous. When the next election takes place in India five years from today… Tigers will continue to pad the forests of Kanha, Sundarbans, Nagarahole and Corbett. And whale sharks will swim the blue seas off the Saurashtra coast. Konark, Hampi, Khajuraho, the Taj Mahal and the Qutub Minar will continue to remind us of the greatness that was India.

April 2009: Anyone might be forgiven for falling in love with this slow loris Nycticebus coucang and what it represents – thick rainforests, silence, purity and the kind of harmony that humans can dream of experiencing only if they travel far from other humans!

February 2009: There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. – Charles Darwin