Thirumurugan

     In January 2025, as part of the Incubation Centre program visits, I happened to spend time at the Salem's Bengal Fox incubation centre. At the centre, the interactions I had with Dr Brawin Kumar, Biologist, Mr Alaguraj, technical assistant, and other researchers  regarding the incubation centre program and outreach activities was insightful. The main agenda of the Incubation Centre was to create awareness of the significance of Bengal fox amongst school and college students. As a result, I understood the centre was well-designed and highly focused on conservation education with miniatures and information boards about Bengal Fox  Vulpes bengalensis  (Shaw, 1800) and many more innovative facilities such as selfie booths, herbarium and various digital tools were incorporated.  Figure: Habitat, Distribution and Ecology of Bengal fox Conversations with the forest officials, helped me to understand the distribution records of Bengal foxes. In the past, ...

Dark can be silent and may not be everyone's preferred habitat, but a little firefly can illuminate the dark with its lighting luminescence and perfectly glow up the environment. I grew up in rural part of Chennai surrounded by a sacred grove, two lakes, 7-8 small ponds, 40-45 round wells, , and a copious 100 acres of agricultural land in my neighbourhood. Since my childhood (the early 2000s), the two lakes in our vicinity catered to the needs of our people in several ways like a playground during summer, a fishing ground during monsoon, a source of water for domestic use and agriculture, an open swimming pool for the kids and a place of recreation for elders in the evenings. My first acquaintance with fireflies goes back to my childhood days when there were much darker places, fewer street lights with sodium bulbs, and remnant vegetation near my home. Our lakes and barren agricultural land are their prime habitat; we see fireflies slowly moving, emitting light, glittering like gol...

 A triangle love story is not always a love story and happiness (It is not only with boy vs girl; it is with different relationships in a family or friends). It's a set of mixed emotions, quarrels, fights, misunderstanding, judging each other, ego, ups and downs, and other emotions.  The weighing balance holds the two equal weights and tries to provide equal importance; sometimes, the priority goes to one side on a day and sometimes to the other side on a day. But the priority is equal. The only role of weighing balance is keeping things in equal proportions and giving them equal importance to their weights. However, neither weight group cared about weighing balance. Every day, the weighing balance works at its best effort, but the weights judge, misunderstand or humiliate it. The weighing balance was clueless, and many times, it was sidelined by the weights. Weights usually say you are mainly prioritizing the other weights, and you won't ask, or you need the courage to ask a ...

Valparai is well known for its tea estate and is a famous tourist place in India. Government buses are the lifeline for local people here. The buses usually travel on good-conditioned roads and off-roads in forest hamlet villages. In the morning, most of the buses start with devotional murugan songs (Tamil diety), then slowly move with evergreen Ilayaraja songs, and SPB is the prime voice of these buses. When the Valaiyosai song from Sathya movies plays on the bus, when the BGM of the song starts, it would have been goosebumps and an unofficial song of these rural buses. The driver plays a dual role: a driver and a DJ. The drivers are mostly locals; they know most of the villagers and people on the roads. They wave their hands to their known friends like painting in the air at every bus stop. They used to stop and talk for a while on the narrow roads, with their fellow drivers coming opposite with smiles. They are self-disciplined on roads while giving way to the up-climbing heavy wh...

A fter an exhausting day (May 13, 2019) in the field, one might only think of an appetizing meal and a good nap at the base camp. But, sometimes taking away a few hours from that special nap for some learning is excellent, which everyone would agree on. One such moment in my field days was when I heard about the big festival of the Irula community from the local villagers of Thegumaradha earlier called as ‘Getthapatti’ (Thengu= Coconut tree, Patti = cattle herd) .  As my interest awakened, I decided that the best way to explore more about this festival Is to be part of the experience. Irula are the Dravidian ethnic group native to the Nilgiri mountains of Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and Karnataka. They are dark people and speak their own dialect Irula language. Moyar Irula’s speech has mixed Tamil and Kannada language. According to the Irula heads, the festival is celebrated for ages and they doesn’t know the exact date when it started. It stopped in the early 90s by the active movement of...