Pachyderms, especially the elephant, much closer to humans that any other of their brethren, are a placid kind, a tad too much for their own good it seems at times, trudging countless miles without the frills and tantrums of well-provisioned wayfarers, if one were to think of a living analogy for taking it in one’s stride, we needn’t look beyond the elephant… large and steady, the elephant for centuries has been an epitome of calmness and maturity, one that finds it propelled into the very foundations of the cosmos to the chariot of choice for divinities… a cat’s eyes eye opportunity, a bird’s ere on the side of caution, and an elephant’s evoke empathy throughout the eons of its physique and memory…

The elephant is an agriculturalist of the flatland, meticulously trudging the length and breadth of its expanse, meditatively watching the universe go around its seasons, a legacy of paths calligraphed by the proboscis, leaving imprints of evolution etched in the canopy and stamped upon the grasslands… an ant of the infinity, the elephant is both large and minuscule, the former in land, culture and scripture, the latter in what its existence is being hacked into…

For hacking is what is happening… a cruel metaphor… the beauty of the Archimedean spiral in its folded trunk is now the state of its habitat – scrapped, bisected, chiselled away… hacked… lands are shrinking beneath its nose, walls are wafting into thickets, dusty roar of engines now synonymise the grasslands…

With every statue of grace comes a tipping point, and we’re starting to feel the elephant’s grunt… as it tries to wander off, it gets chased in, as it starts to probe into alternatives, it gets banged up against the tarmac… and then it gyrates into the darkness to defend itself, chasing and trampling, the erstwhile gentle giant… the elephant, in modern times, is no longer a keeper of the cosmos but a contraband…

Musings on the elephant, Corbett National Park, Uttarakhand