Memoirs Of An Ardent Wildlifer

Memoirs of an Ardent Wildlifer

S. G. Neginhal IFS (Retd) commenced his forestry service in 1951. He also underwent specialized wildlife training at the FRI Dehradun during 1971-72. He drafted the first management plan for Project Tiger, which was ushered in 1973 at Bandipur. He discovered Kokkarebellur Pelicanry in 1974. He came into close contact with national luminaries like ornithologist Salim Ali, and renowned wildlife and nature photographer M Krishnan and others. He got declared Biligirirangan Hills as a Sanctuary in 1974 and created a new Sanctuary for Wolves at Melkote. He administered most of the wildlife sanctuaries of Karnataka from 1972 to 1980 and kept visiting them to study wild animals and birds even after his superannuation. He was responsible for the massive greening of the Bengaluru metropolis from 1982- 87 by planting 15-lakh saplings. He was a pioneer in introducing Urban Forestry. For his successful planting of trees in Bengaluru city, a national award, the Indira Vriksha Priyadarshini Award, was given to the Forest Department in 1988. Planting of trees in all the cities of India was later included in the country’s five-year plans. From Bengaluru nurseries, a thousand tall saplings were also sent to New Delhi for planting at the Shakti Sthal, the Samadhi of late Indira Gandhi.

Memoirs of an Ardent Wildlifer

Rama Bhima Soma: Cultural Investigations into Modern Karnataka

CULTURAL ENQUIRY AND LITERARY EXPLORATION, A HISTORY OF POLITICAL ACTIVISM AND OF SOCIAL AND CULTURAL MOVEMENTS—THIS IS A COMPLEX, NUANCED AND OPEN-MINDED INVESTIGATION INTO MODERN KARNATAKA. Karnataka is one of India’s most diverse states, as rich in literary and cultural traditions as it is in democratic struggles and political churns. The twentieth century witnessed the birth of a modern Kannada renaissance, accompanied by the emergence of a powerful social conscience. One young man’s desire to explore this vibrant historical backyard, born out of a feeling of being linguistically unmoored, compounded by worries over an increasingly opaque political direction, leads to an ambitious—no, audacious—attempt to unpack the region’s social and cultural histories. Rama Bhima Soma is an enterprise of translation and rediscovery, packed with stories and conversations. The life and times of legends like Kuvempu and Shivaram Karanth; the fall of Socialism and the rise of the Hindu Right; the intellectual ruminations of U.R. Ananthamurthy, D.R. Nagaraj and M.M. Kalburgi; the wildly popular television serials of T.N. Seetharam and the community-centred one-woman theatre shows of Du Saraswathi; a brief history of Naxalism in Karnataka and glimpses of other complicated legacies of the 1970s’ Left—the book explores a dizzyingly wide sweep of Karnataka’s contemporary history, seeking, above all, to forge new connections and begin fresh conversations. Marshalling a diverse range of literary and scholarly resources, framed through biographical sketches and immersive reportage, Srikar Raghavan’s genre-bending work of narrative non-fiction reanimates some pivotal moments in the making of modern Karnataka. The result is a sizzling dish of ideas rescued from the deep freeze of historical amnesia. ‌‌‌‌‌‌‌‌