It is my pleasure and privilege to welcome you to the H Y Sharada Prasad Memorial Lecture, today’s being the fourth in the series, and the first being organised by the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library. I thank you all for joining us on this occasion, which, had he been here, would have been Sharada Prasad’s 89th birthday. Also on behalf of my mother, who unfortunately cannot be here, due to her fragile physical condition.
Sharada Prasad, or Shouri, as family and old friends called him, had a wide range of interests, and was involved with a large number of institutions. I am happy that thanks to the efforts and support of Prof. Mahesh Rangarajan, we are holding this year’s lecture at one of those institutions to which he devoted a significant part of his life. And in this building designed by a dear friend of Shouri’s, Mansinh Rana, whom we lost some months ago.
Our conception of the annual Memorial Lecture was to celebrate the diverse engagements of my father – the freedom movement, the Indian nation, media and journalism, language and literature, Kannada, Design, music, culture, and so on. In 2009, Mukul Kesavan spoke on “INDIA AND REPUBLICAN VIRTUE”; then Sanjaya Baru on “MEDIA, BUSINESS AND GOVERNMENT” and last year, Sugata Srinivasaraju on “NEGOTIATING TWO WORLDS: BILINGUALISM AS A CULTURAL IDEA’’.
This year, we have the noted conservation scientist, K. Ullas Karanth, who will speak on “Recovering Nature in a Crowded Subcontinent”.
Ullas has received the Sierra Club International Earthcare award, the Paul Getty Award for Conservation Leadership and the Padma Shri. He has written books such as The Way of the Tiger and The View from the Machan, where he emphasizes how science, knowledge of both mathematics and biology in particular (something which our education system seems to consider two different worlds), can help us understand and save our endangered environments. I knew that Ullas was instrumental in getting us to change the techniques used to count tigers, in particular using camera capture. But it was a revelation to me, when speaking with him and reading his books, that these estimation techniques were based on the solid mathematical foundations of random sampling, a tradition dating back to Laplace in the late 18th century. The other striking thing about Ullas’s viewpoint on the future of wildlife in India is that unlike most conservationists who tend to prophecy doom and gloom, he finds reasons for optimism, and sees in them opportunities for creating a sustainable action plan for conserving our environment.
There also is a personal dimension. Ullas represents for us the continuation to the next generation of a close and remarkable friendship between Shouri and Ullas’s father, the polymath Kota Shivarama Karanth. As many of you know, Shouri translated into English some of Karanth’s novels and his autobiography: The Headman of the Little Hill; Woman of Basrur; Ten Faces of a Crazy Mind.
Karanth used to stay with us whenever he visited Delhi, and was to Ravi and me, a grandfatherly figure. We used to go on long walks in the Lodhi Gardens and play ridiculous word games with him, one of which involved keeping a poker face and answering “Tomato” to any question, no matter how silly. On one of these walks he was stopped and asked by someone (who perhaps recognized him) if we were his grandchildren, to which he answered, “No, but they are grand children”.
This year we celebrate one of Shouri’s lesser-known interests, that in Nature. In fact, the last book that Shouri wrote, sitting up long hours and combating Parkinson’s, was a coffee-table book with Ashok Dilwali, on Life and Landscapes of India, part of the 12-volume series Incredible India published by Wisdom Tree.
Shouri’s wasn’t a scholarly knowledge of plants and animals, but an easy, ingrained familiarity with the trees, flowers, birds and animals around him. He could identify a bewildering number of flowers and trees in parks such as Lodhi Gardens or Lal Bagh, and knew the names of all the birds that we saw in our garden and wherever else we went. And when in doubt, he would take care to ask someone who knew, usually his younger brother Prof. H Y Mohan Ram. To him, knowing these things was perhaps part of being a culturally rooted person.
Two animals that fascinated my father were tigers and elephants. Perhaps this came naturally to anyone from Mysore state. There was that wicked witticism about the Wodeyar weight – maggoo idu aane, adu maharaja (child, this here is the elephant, and that is the maharaja). On a different note is Shouri’s description of Karanth: “The King Elephant of the Southern Forests”, a lone tusker who sought no followers.
And tigers. One of his favourite anecdotes relates to when they were in a convoy of cars with Indira Gandhi, driving back to Delhi through Sariska, when a majestic tiger strolled onto the road and settled himself there, making the Prime Minister wait a good 40 minutes before he sauntered off. The vahana decided what Durga should do. Ullas will tell us more about this magnificent animal.
Let me once again welcome you to the Memorial Lecture. Prof. Rangarajan, himself a conservationist of note, will now introduce Dr Ullas Karanth.
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