Elephants at Sultan Batheri

Four lady elephants with a baby. A FP lead, double column, colour pix in Mathrubhoomi today. Rama and me waited on the snap taken at Sultan Batheri in Kozhikode. For any newspaper reader, a Front Page human interest story in the morning, is a happy start. The day will go good. Of course, news editors cannot indulge this wish every day; but at least twice a week (Sunday must), helps. News editors of Mathrubhoomi and The Indian Express often delight in FP spreads; others, me is not sure. In 2014, Rama, Ganesh, Vidya and me sighted a lady in thought, in a dense bush; paused the vehicle to watch as forest officials told us to move on as the Lady could turn temperamental.With Krishnan Ananth me roamed Masinagudi some years ago, to be close to elephants in the wild including a tusker. With Kerala temples crowded with chained pachyderms, Malayalis hold elephant tales; elephants have God names; Lord Ganesh is sometimes titled Ayyappa; perhaps, the best stories can be had from mahouts. Me has not heard of any elephant book in Malayalam; maybe there is in the genre of The Elephant Whisperer, My Life with the Herd in the African Wild, by Lawrence Anthony with Graham Spence. Some two years ago had read the 368 pages book over more than a month, rather munching the story. In 1999, Lawrence was asked to accept a herd of troubled wild elephants at his Thula Thula Reserve in Zululand, South Africa. That's the story line. 'The adventure has been both physical and spiritual. Physical in the sense that it was action from the word go; spiritual because these giants of the planet took me deep into their world,...In our noisy cities we tend to forget the things our ancestors knew on a gut level; that the wilderness is alive, that its whispers are there for all to hear -- and to respond to, ' writes Lawrence in a prologue. Askaris, young elephants, aid father figure (old) elephants to strip bark, hand hold them to swamps where the grass is juicy. Better Lawrence takes over:' ...For elephants do not die gracefully of old age, they starve to death after they lose their sixth set of teeth. ....After he has gone they (askaris) will visit his bones for as long as they are there, paying respects to a fallen leader. The fact that almost all elephants which perish naturally do so in the soft-wood wetlands has led to the myth of secret graveyards and ivory troves where elephants instinctively migrate to die. The truth is they all usually die in the last areas where food is soft enough to ingress.' In the Last Rhinos, son Dylan talks of elephants visiting a dead Lawrence. They hung around for two days before leaving. Dylan muses: 'Cynics may say that the animals were merely wandering past. Maybe the grasses were rich in that area at the time; it was, after all, the summer rains. But we know better--dont we?' Okay we know everything. Will we do them away ahead of retirements into marshes?