By Bittu Sahgal
Some of my finest life-moments have been spent in quiet wildernesses outside Anchorage in Alaska, the Grand Canyon in Arizona, the Volcanoes National Park in Rwanda, and the exquisite Table Mountain and Kruger National Park of South Africa. Here, more than brown bears, mule deer, gorillas, penguins, sharks or lions, it is the sound of silence that enriches my existence.
I have spent my life struggling, ant-like, to staunch India’s insensible human hurtle towards ecological dead-ends. Some understand why. Others believe that protecting tigers and even the ticks on the backs of tigers is a quirky, irrelevant obsession.
Neither distracts me from the compass I instinctively follow.
In truth, I started out in the 1970s, seeking the wild for the most selfish of all reasons – I was (am) happiest where humans were (are) not. Like a fly on the wall, I would (still do) play games, seeking out landscapes unmarred by the faintest trace of human existence, conjuring time travel images of life as it must have existed before Homo sapiens crashed into the biosphere.
Acutely aware of my own transience, the inviting moan of a tiger seeking the attention of its mate (look… it’s there!) completes the wild and sends a wash of serenity through my being. I did not create the near-perfection around me. I contribute nothing to the magic. And a lifetime spent trying to keep Earth wild, has had nothing to do with altruism. It is selfishness personified.
Nature infuses me with a comforting humility, an elixir that mysteriously enhances my ‘ego’ because I am but a pixel on a planet, whose systems will cycle on when I am turned into yet another perfectly-fitted pixel in the grand opus of life.
