Pre-wedding jitters

Glad to get back into field mode after rounds of wedding shopping. I am staying now in a very nice old fieldstation maintained by the BNHS inside the sanctuary. This place is more remote than the IISc base...its closer to the plot - which would give me more flexible working hours. Otherwise it takes me an hour to reach the plot, and I spend 2-3 hours commuting from the base camp to the plot. I am really not sure what is happening about the wedding - the parents are more in "control" of the whole process. The only thing I am sure of is that it is at Regent - and I will have to do the rounds in kanchi silks and kold jewellery. Hope I don't trip and fall. Or worse still, start scratching my many million tick bites...which I am scratching even as I type this mail...

Field-station notes..

Notes from 22nd Sept, 2005 - I guess very little has changed since then! This afternoon was taken up by house-keeping duties - got my room cleaned, and some junk moved out of another spare room (which I can now use for germination experiments). This room I am staying in now has a few windows and is less mustier than the room I was staying in before. With the smoker and the fungus out, I hope I don't have too many allergy problems. Slowly the stories are adding up ...of all the others who have stayed here before. The house I am staying in now used to be Sukumar's house...and then Arun Venkatraman's...and then some other Phd students stayed here with their families. After that it has been converted into a student house - with semi-permanent people using different rooms. And all these people have left something or the other behind - a picture, a magazine or some papers, a tray or some vials, a few bottles of chemicals - and each has its story to tell...and they are never chucked out since the fieldstation manager here (Barnaiah) or one of the assitants will say "oh, that is narendra sir's, he might want it"... But thankfully this house and the other one that we have rented here are spacious enough to be accomodate several people and the junk. We have several rooms just for the junk!

[This blog has been dormant for VERY long. Thought I would stir up something:)]

Q1: How do you kill a blue elephant?

A: with a blue elephant gun

If only life, data and analysis were to be as simple as that. As I see it, my data is the blue elephant. And the blue elephant gun is that miraculous hypothesis that comes closest to explaining the pattern in the complicated chaos called the dry forest. Lesson no. 1: it’s not exactly that straightforward to kill a blue elephant with a blue elephant gun. Reasons? You are not really sure whether your blue elephant is actually a blue elephant or not. What if it is a red elephant. Most likely, it is!

Q2: How do you kill a red elephant?

A: Strangle it till it turns blue. Then kill it with a blue elephant gun

Really? But hey, that makes things better now doesn’t it? So I have a red elephant. A lump of data that does not behave in any civilized fashion, graphically it’s just a mass of spots that are all over the place. Plus, all the great variables that you measured thinking that they were explanatory are suddenly just a bunch of variables. Now what? That thin rope of logic called ‘statistics’ helps you successfully strangle the red elephant. And voila! It is now blue enough to kill with a blue elephant gun. (maybe they should rename this science as ‘sadistics’ instead of ‘statistics’). But what if it’s a green elephant?

Q3: How do you kill a green elephant.

A. You make the green elephant really angry, till it turns red, then strangle it till it turns blue. Then kill it with a blue elephant gun

Phew! And I really thought I was in trouble here. You don’t see your red elephant? Log-transform your green elephant into it! Or do a square root. Or half a dozen other things that can convince the average reader that the green elephant is actually red. It’s fairly simple then on. Repeat steps mentioned in Q2.

Done all that?

Q4: Where is the blue elephant gun?

A: I wish I knew

So in the midst of converting various elephants into various other elephants, one loses track of the blue elephant gun. One must not blame oneself for that should one? After all, turning red elephants to blue elephants takes a lot of work. And that’s when u realize that that’s just the tiniest tip of the iceberg. One has to constantly reinvent the blue gun to kill the newly generated blue elephant. And that loop tends to infinity.

Q5: when do you stop?

A ....

HELP!!

Tigers and leopards

Man! Tiger and leopard sightings galore! It's amazing. Four tiger sightings in five days by different sets of people: me on Saturday (hehe..that's the photo I got); Halan Sir on Monday (he saw 4 tigers in one go!); St. Olaf students Ann and John, Geetha Nayak and 3 volunteers from ANCF on the forest department safari ride today; and the last set by Ashok and Chetan yesterday) and three leopard sightings again by different sets of people: Ann and John at Leighwood (yes, Leighwood!); Vivek; and Bala and tracker Alan on the transect (this one was running towards them on the transect line and they freaked! obviously...) . Mudumalai is living up to its reputation. Wonder if it could be called a leopard reserve too....

An ordinary day

17^th September 2009

The day dawned overcast and gloomy. Our plans for leaving early for field were thwarted by various complicated and interacting factors (time of breakfast preparation, fuel filling in the jeep two name two). With absolutely no hope of finishing work in time (before lunch, that is) me and Nandy set out in the invader towards beautiful Tenbere. But not before we had talked to half a dozen forest department employees, and had procured the imminent company of the very voluble Christy Forester. Halan Ranger at Kargudi requested us to deliver a bag of rice to Chikalla camp, and arrangements were hastily made for us to have lunch there too. One problem solved – no need to get back home before lunch! Three quarters of a confused hour later, we had deposited the Forester, his crew of four and half a sack of rice at Chikalla camp, and headed towards our respective transect sites. Chin Boms and Manban (APW, Christy Forester very kindly allowed him to accompany in spite of his help being required at the camp) were my helpers for the day.

It so happened that stream point 782 was about 400 m from the road in a low lying valley. To reach it, we traversed through what can only be described as gentle rolling slope. It was so gentle that it seemed almost apologetic about being a slope and if given a choice, it would have certainly been a plain. The gentle rolling slope was covered in the fresh greenness of year old growth of grass littered only with the bright purpleness of a flowering herb and a few stunted trees. The green continued uninterrupted for miles and miles, into the next hill and beyond. Then we walked into a slope that definitely did NOT regret being a slope, and reached it’s base (point 782) just to find that there was no lantana there. I had found a wonderful place: NO lantana! For as far as the eye could see in all directions...no lantana! Say ‘lantana’ and my instinct is to get down on all fours, to crawl through whatever expanse of this plant lies before. If you’ve ever done that, you would also be familiar with the feeling of claustrophobia that comes free with it. But here was an uninterrupted landscape. Only the grass and the trees. Just the way a forest should look and behave. Unfortunately, and for all practical purposes, this stream was absolutely useless for me, since my objective is to look at lantana variation at different distances from the stream. So we abandoned the picturesque slope (every inch of one’s being screaming somewhat philosophically - “why the hell should there be slopes?” while trudging uphill) to look (very biased-ly) for a stream that did have lantana.

I haven’t walked long distances in a forest for so long that the long walk that followed was one of the most magical things I have recently experienced. The lantana free landscape, unfamiliar trees, silence broken only by cicadas and the tidbits of trivia from Chin Boms (“Madam, the large fruit Phyllanthus is fruiting” or “we use this grass species for thatching roofs” or a long tale of tiger sightings beginning with the words “when I was at the Chikalla camp.....”). The scenic walk (I later discovered on Arc View) was about five kilometres long, and we finally hit a stream near Chikalla that had a respectable cover of lantana around it. By the time we ended the transect, a very angry sky confronted us with an angry outpouring of raindrops. We had to make a dash for Chikalla camp (“it is very close by, madam” Chin Boms had promised). Never has something close by taken so much time to reach. Down slope, up slope, three soaked humans and one very fogged-up pair of spectacles (which, if I may say so, DO NOT help vision at all) later, we finally walked into Chikalla camp to find steaming Kanji and kurma waiting for us. Eating in the forest is an experience by itself. You can gobble up unimaginable quantities of food without noticing it very much, and polish plates till they need no washing. So you really shouldn’t judge me when I tell you that I tucked in a heaped plateful of kanji with a heaped plateful of kurma, and did not even complain about it. After our soul-drenching walk, the food felt so divine, that I almost started believing in God.

Nandi was still at her transect, so Christy Forester very generously took it upon himself to keep me entertained till she arrived. He talked about his family, his cars, his various and diverse jobs, his postings, the charge sheet against him, his family, himself, his son, his son and oh did I mention, his son? For a whole hour. Then Nandi came, and he very generously took it upon himself to entertain her as she ate a late lunch. He talked about his family, his cars, his various and diverse jobs, his postings, the charge sheet against him, his family, himself. He did not get time to talk about his son. Mostly because our day was over and we had to head back. I envy that man for having led such an action packed and thrilling life. And to have the energy to talk about it at his age!! We said our goodbyes and came back to hot tea at the field station.

I don’t know why I thought today was a day worth writing about. It was ordinary. It was full of ordinary sights, the company of ordinary people and the stories of the extra ordinary lives they lead. Today was one of those ordinary days that makes you wish that life was made of all ordinary days.

What's the debate about?????

There was a hype about the neutrino project quite some time ago, and then all went quite. All seemed to have been forgotten. Now I guess not, according to this article that Rutuja sent to us recently. Check it out:

http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090923/full/461459a.html

Sad news...

The baby elephant at Theppakadu aane camp died yesterday afternoon...apparently from a brain hemorrhage.