Final day notes. Its sometimes good to start at the end and then go back to the start. When I get home I will give the trip some context. 0945. Sunday. Homeward bound. At last. Now sitting on the bus home waiting for a glass of plonk. Its been a challenging and difficult 48 hours since the euphoria of the ride looking for tigers. A period which I have struggled with at times. Yesterday afternoon was spent poking around one of Indias largest cities. Scanning the markers for those little gems I like to keep my eyes open for. Found some excellent stuff, but none that would enrich my world enough to buy. Its easy to accumulate gadgets and trinkets from all the different places to which we go, but do they really add a lot to our lives other than to act as another momento for the lounge room cabinets and the like. Im pretty tough on things like that. Do I really need it is the question I always ask. Life is about more than things in the lounge room. The city has a good vibe to it. Like everywhere in India the people are wonderful and friendly. It is a hive of activity. Tempus, rickshaws, bullet-proof yellow taxis. No road rules, or ones at least that are enforced. Vehicles driving down the wrong side of the road everywhere you go. Masses of people. Even cows in the middle of the city. We saw two parked up in the middle of a flyover yesterday buggered totally as to what their next move was likely to be. No grass up there guys. But like anywhere theres that dark underbelly. The kids begging in the traffic. Some farmed off at birth: many illegitimate. Parents desperate for money. Sometimes both. Purchased by child traffickers that feed them for the first three years of their life and then send them out onto the streets to bring home some bacon. A brutal existence whichever way you look at it. Last night, on the way to the airport, my guide Anurag reflected on our trip and what he had learned. Hed been excellent from start to finish. Nearly always had gone beyond the call. Im not necessarily the easiest guy to work for. Demanding. I push hard and go flat out until we get to what we have set out to achieve. He told me that hed learned to look beyond initial perceptions of risk and hed learned how to work in very difficult areas. If someone tells me our safety is at risk, I believed them before I met you. You taught me not to believe them. To see for myself. No, you should go and check. You should see for yourself. You see, it can be done. You showed me that you were so dedicated to your job that you go into rural areas that are not safe. But you managed to make them safe. You taught me how to mix with local people. How to make a difficult area safe. Your dedication to the task. A (another photographer) didnt stay at XXX. I explained to you the risk. You said no, I have to go. You make the area safe. A went only for one to two hours. You stayed three to four days. ZZZ. We went because of your encouragement. B (another photographer: and one whod survived a kidnapping in Libya two years ago) went for one night. You went for three to four days. You taught me how to deal with any type of risk or security. You are the first person I have dealt with like this. Your routines. Your way of work. You are very much punctual. I learned that if you are given a time by someone then you should be ready 15 minutes before then. That you are very much dedicated. Even in your spare time you are researching on the internet to clear things in your mind. In XXX, I told you that the road blockade would finish at six in the morning. You checked for yourself and showed me that it would finish at five. When on assignment you use your time very wisely. I saw you relax only after we came to XXX. Other days, you are only focused on the subject. No distractions. Very keen to find out new places that are unknown. You do not compromise your safety. Instead, you manage your safety. Even if you dont know a place at all, you work such that if you try, you can manage everything. Even if people say: no, it is not safe. But in between my discussions with Anurag about the trip, my mind kept swinging back to the events of the morning before. My sleep of the night before had been poor. In the early part of the morning I struggled. The awful visions of yesterday, like a battlefield of war - I cant imagine that could be any worse - were still front of mind. A heaviness of mind and body that would not leave. What did it mean? What was it telling me? What was I to draw from it? Were my feelings for the child that had died. Were they for the family left behind. Or were they for the gruesomeness of the scene. If it was the latter, why did that make me want to shed a tear. The inevitability of death. Our own mortality. The callousness of death. The meaningless of our lives. The gap between our perceived position in the universe and the stark, harsh, callous and brutal reality. The real reality. Not one written by some self-help guru in a book. As the day moved on, the weight started to lift. I could start to face the scene without wanting to shed a tear. I became glad that I had not been spared from what had taken place, though not glad for what had happened. That all of us are just another cog in our universe. That we are all one. The plants, the animals, the birds, oceans, the air. That was what I had learned from the trip. That the trip would come with such a tight and parallel bookend was one I could never have foreseen. At the start of the trip, Id spent eight hours with a most incredible man: a genius if ever I had met one. A celebrated international peace prize winner. A tiger, elephant and leopard hunter. Now retired. Author of countless books. An environmentalist. A man who had devoted his life to the cause of the country and the people in his area of the world. Wed hit a pretty heavy point within ten minutes of our conversation having started. A man Id never met. I struggled with the apparent paradox between his life as an environmentalist and his ability to kill one of the most beautiful animals on the planet without so much as the blink of an eye. How can you do that? Life means nothing to me he had said. It was a conversation without judgment. A conversation of listening and understanding. I told him that I would pause our conversation at that point. I wanted to return to my hotel to get my recorder. Much of what he was saying was profound. Our meeting and conversation so unexpected. Good he said. For much of the rest of the morning we pushed and challenged one another. I challenged his logic. He evolved his. I developed mine. We are all one we both agreed. The plants, the animals. Everything around us. Life of its own does not matter. He took me to his office. To show me paintings on handmade paper by one of the few remaining genuine tribal peoples left on the planet. Life is a waste of time I said. Isnt it. You have learned that very young he responded. It was a day that had turned out almost completely unrelated to the people I had come to photograph, but it was one that wasnt wasted. The trip had run its full circle. Two unrelated events - a conversation and a road accident - with the same outcome.
Posted on: Sun, 10 Nov 2013 10:37:47 +0000
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