It was too good an opportunity to pass up, although it meant changing my travel plans and going from Bangalore to Kolkata via Dehradun! “Mid-career” (actually, pretty senior) Indian Forest Service officers were being equipped by the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, with management skills, and part of the programme was how to engage with the media.
My interest in sharing knowledge about the media was minimal. What I really wanted to do was trade forest stories and come away with the romance of our forests more firmly ingrained in me. The nearest I had got to them physically was decades ago, when I used to exercise my ministerial clout in Delhi to go and stay at forest department rest houses strewn all over north Indian hills. Set up by the forest department itself, they are incredibly located and would make a forest lover out of almost anybody. Now I would actually be meeting those people who were the inheritors of that legacy — and maybe say “thank you”!
The first negative was the announcement that the midday ambient temperature at Jolly Grant airport was 40 degrees when en route we had been told that the temperature around Delhi airport was 38 degrees. Weren’t the Himalayan foothills supposed to be cooler than the dusty plains of middle India, the breeze wafting down from the green slopes, taking away some of the dead heat of summer?
The taxi driver affirmed that this has been a particularly unbearable summer and I soon thought I knew why. The highway linking the airport to the city was being widened by cutting down roadside forest trees. The road, built in another era, was obviously not wide enough to meet the demands of the present incarnation of the city as the Uttarakhand capital. All I could think of was that sacrificing any number of trees would not help with the traffic eventually.
It was another world within the over-1,000 acre campus of the famed Forest Research Institute, which has a fair bit of north India’s floral diversity preserved in a permanent living nursery. As we took a little walk of discovery, I saw that a lot of trees were numbered and labelled, and I thought a similar census and tracking were needed in cities like Bangalore, where the future of many stately rain trees is threatened. But then the next tree bore a twisted name tag that, on closer scrutiny, read “Pratap’s Dry Cleaners”, with time and nature having erased the phone number.
The huge symmetrical Graeco-Roman pile that served as the colonial seat of Indian forestry was as permanent as it was self-assured, rather different from the anxiety of forest department officials who faced multiple predators, from the economic forces riding the back of deforestation, to the enemy within — those who stole timber or poached animals. On top of it was the reality of belonging to a service with a not-so-exalted status among India’s many civil services.
At the formal session, the officials made no bones about what they thought of the media, and hauled me over the coals. There was a particularly insistent questioner who said my idea that they should encourage journalists to do more legwork and research was fine and applied to Big Media, but at the operational level forest officials mostly had to deal with Little Media and small-town hacks, who read almost nothing and worked for proprietors for whom running a paper was no different from running their other businesses. I could only recall the whole bunch of local journalists in that very town in the early eighties vehemently and bitterly opposing the efforts by Arun Singh, a friend of Rajiv Gandhi, to re-green the Mussoorie hills and put an end to predatory quarrying.
When a Sikh gentleman asked what to do when petty blackmail turned life-threatening, I could only reply that you had to ask your friend the police commissioner to do a “Pratap Singh Kairon”. (Mr Kairon had used “encounters” to eliminate large-scale dacoity in the turbulent post-Partition days.) But my day was made when, in an informal conversation, a forester, with a twinkle in his eye, narrated the story of how a minister who insisted on entering a reserve forest after closing time soon found papers splashing photographs of him doing so. Tackling insistent gatecrashers thereafter was easy. The guards at the gates had only to point to the newspaper clippings pasted up and say: “If the minister can get into trouble, who are you?”
