Sariska, Rajasthan, April 2023

At my last stay at Sariska in 2001, I recollect a number of memorable motor safaris into the forest seeing many animals and bird life including of course the tiger. This April, it was a comfortable 4-hour drive on a spanking new highway of the kind that are springing up all over India. It took me the same time in 2001 as the traffic was sparse though the road was narrow. Modernity demands and produces ever increasing speed as time gets scarce with so much to do, see, produce and consume. Economic development speeds up. Friction in the local economy reduces as it is greased by connections to far-flung global and national markets and consumers. Inevitably, increased commerce increases pressure on the forest. It’s a familiar story. In Sariska this is visible more as a highway cuts right through the reserve forest despite passionate debates over decades to realign it. And why, the locals might ask. They need the tourists to enable them grasp the prosperity they see we possess, and that modernity provides ever so tantalizingly – vehicles, phones, gadgets, clothes. A safari into the forest on a motor vehicle symbolizes human emotions of fear of nature and the desire to dominate her. Like all mechanized conveniences, it has its very practical and obvious uses in touring and patrolling the large forest area. But you don’t get to sense and live the forest and its world as the constant growl of the engine of the Gypsy you are on overwhelms the sounds of the forest. And you and your guide don’t stop at any one place for more than a bit as that reduces your chance to see the tiger. So we drive incessantly round and round in the forest, neither really seeing nor hearing nor experiencing the forest and certainly not contemplating nature. Nonetheless, we carry on as it’s far better than being in Gurgaon in a vehicle.