Agumbe Blues!

Long ago, during a conversation with a primatologist friend of mine, I discovered one of life’s simple truths. It began with him saying that he and two of his colleagues were following a troop of macaques in the forests of north east India, exploring questions for behaviour studies on these macaques. While they observed the same troop for days, each of the primatologists saw something different in the troop. One ended up observing the dominance hierarchies amongst the individuals, the other looked at their foraging behaviour while my friend looked at their conflict with humans. Each researcher ended up studying aspects of behaviour that interested him or her and at the end of the day each had a wholly different set of observations although they were all looking at the same thing.

It made me realize that for different people, the same event or phenomenon can mean different things and what we interpret out of an event or experience is up to us. Agumbe, I’m sure meant a lot of different things to all those present there; this is about what it meant to me: (I have not dwelt much on the deeply personal part and kept all that emo jazz as much out of the picture as possible.)

This trip was something my body and mind has been in need of for almost 6 months now with all that jazz about the new job and my new scary boss, missing my old job almost like missing a lover, missing my old boss and his gyan and guidance, missing my friends and colleagues, going crazy with the challenges of research work, getting used to the new routine involving so much travel, feeling utterly lost most of the time and then of course the giant break up. So a trip away from life in general was very much the need of the hour. And Agumbe was just perfect. It had everything I needed, the perfect ambiance of the rain forest and the perfect bunch of nut cases for company, and we also ended up having the perfect field co-ordinator who gelled so well with the group, which was an added bonus. But the fact that I was in Agumbe, an ecologist's paradise, put me in a dilemma. Do I treat this as one of my field excursions where the ecologist in me goes all data hungry and gathers all the information around me by walking around in the forest day and night with pen, paper and camera and takes down rigorous notes on all the new species I see and updates checklists at the end of each day or do I treat it like a “vacation” and just shut myself off and just “be”?

Just be....... or not.

So as I oscillated between being on holiday and being a professional knowledge hungry sponge, I thought the dilemma was making me go even more crazy and finally at the end of the first day, I missed the evening session and after that I ended up missing quite a few sessions, especially all the morning ones. Yes, I didn’t hear the frogmouth and I missed the Malabar whistling thrush calling out in the mornings coz I was snoring away to glory, but I got the well deserved rest and break I needed and I guess that is what counts at the end of the day.

I also ended up doing more “timepass” at the dining hall than any actual serious field trip, but perhaps that refreshed me more than anything else. It was great to be with a bunch of people whom I know in general but had never spent so much time with. There were two things that brought us together - 1. Anupamaa (coz she was the common denominator among us all) and 2. our love for nature. I was amazed and profoundly touched at the sheer amount of curiosity Jeroo showed in learning about all the plants, birds, insects, arachnids and snakes. And this from a so-called senior citizen who isn’t even professionally related to the natural world. The same goes for the Gowri-Vidyanand duo who not only relished in hearing the elusive frogmouth but also loved the super common lapwings. That I think is very important, to not only be crazy about the rarer wildlife but also the more common ones. There was that one time however, where we acted like run-of-mill tourists and begged Dhiraj to try and search for the king cobra. I think our cool-visitor-quotient must have dropped down several notches because of this!

There is however, one more thing that brought us together and helped us gel so well - our love for food. I still can’t believe all that ginormous amount of food we ate! Its incredible, our enthusiasm to first buy all that stuff; carry it all the way there and to devour it with so much zest!

A major credit for this detox-therapy-for-my-mind vacation of mine also goes to the random humour that surrounded me ALL THE TIME. Every time i think of those crazy moments, I just crack up! I mean, remember that time when….

...Jeroo walked out of the snake taxonomy class and almost instantly walked back in?

...Dhiraj's said  "I will tell you later”?

...Sam wished Dhiraj happy diwali and only Nandu and I saw that priceless expression on Sam’s face when he said it and we cracked like never before?

...Nandu did that fantastic maggi wala imitation n then everybody else did crazy imitations as if on Que?

...we walked into the stream for the first time and Jeroo thought we were going somewhere to see the King Cobra?

I will also never forget Gowri’s expression on seeing the yellow wattled lapwing, her maggi and the back massage she gave me, Vidyanand getting into his old groove and starting to bully me as if he was back in his 20s and I was 10 again, Anupamaa tying her hair like a school girl, Sam “knighting” himself with the telemetry antenna with the pink flower in his hair, Dhiraj pulling our legs countless number of times and Jeroo actually falling for it, Abhijit refusing to get into the water, Dhiraj doing the imitation of the dancing frogs...the list can go on.

Oh yes, and the profound enlightenment that girls fall for Captain Jack Sparrow coz he doesn’t have a bath for days and so we can smell his pheromones!!

And amongst all these hearty laughs and tears of joy and major bonding among us mixed nuts, at the backdrop was the forest itself. For we were not 8 in the group, we were in fact, 9. For every tree, every blade of grass, every croaking frog, every snake that slithered in the undergrowth, every mass of moss that hung from every tree, every flower that bloomed and every decaying leaf...they all came together as one entity. The forest had a mind of its own, its own moods and its own personality. Sometimes it closed itself around you and engulfed you in darkness with the dense canopy while some other times it opened up suddenly into a grassy meadow like the open arms of a dear friend. It just had to be Agumbe. My much awaited trip couldn’t have been anywhere else or it couldn’t have been with anyone else.  It just had to be Agumbe.

It is time now that I woke myself up from this Agumbe reverie and move on with life. As Robert Frost has said, I have miles to go before I sleep, miles to go before I sleep. I have my job to do, my larvae to feed, my paper to write, my train to catch, my office bitching to catch up on, my polluted air to breathe, my traffic jam to get stuck in, my boss’ quirks to endure, my......my miles to go before I sleep.

Till then, Wow Wow Beautiful Beautiful Wow!!!

Article by: Yashada Kulkarni, Mumbai

Workshop participant: 20^th to 24^th October 2014