It takes all kinds

I recently went to Kanha National Park in, well, Kanha. For those of you, who aren't avid tiger-lovers, Kanha is one of India's finest tiger reserves, it is also home to many other kinds of fauna.

Set in Madhya Pradesh, it is said to have inspired Rudyard Kipling to write the famous Jungle Book, part of the movie also having been shot there.

We went there as part of a family meeting, around a hundred people, my team with their wives and children. Kids as young as 45 days were part of the thing, appropriately bundled into several layers in order to withstand the biting 1 degree Celsius temperatures.

It was good. I did not get to sight any tigers, but some of our people did. Indeed I got to see many varieties of deer, so much so, that I slept during the second part of the Safari.

An interesting thing - I came to know how the Tiger census is taken - the conventional method is for the team to spend several months at a particular park, branching out everyday into different directions, tracking and taking photographs of pug-marks - no two of which are the same - and repeating this process daily for months, to cover all the different pug-marks and eliminate any duplicate counting. Nowadays, they also use tranquilizer guns which lodge transmitters - innovative paparazzi.

Some days back, I also finished reading - Paths of Glory - Jeffrey Archer's latest, a sort of brief biography of the life of George Leigh Mallory, a superb mountaineer, who, as public records show, came very close to climbing the Everest, years before Hillary and Tenzing did. What Archer is trying to say is, he did actually reach the peak of the Everest, but could not come back alive.

However, the point of this post is this - it amazes me that people will suffer any kind of hardship to pursue their passion. I cannot for the life of me, imagine spending months on end, in a tiger park, going around peering at pug-marks and taking photographs, only to sit around and compare them later in the evening with your other, equally committed-to-the-cause colleagues. And that is not the end of it. I met people in Kanha who have been to every tiger reserve there is, several times over, have had near-death encounters - getting sucked into the marshes of the Sunder bans by crocodiles and suchlike and are still going strong. Nor do I have the slightest of desire to stand atop the highest point on earth, after first having weathered (-)40 degree temperatures, icy gales and a treacherous mountain. That along with a lifetime of disciplined living to keep oneself in top form. Undoubtedly, along with the passion, individuals who devote their lives to such pursuits also have the talent for it.

It is good in a way. Imagine a world where all the Hillarys, Livingstones, Vasco-da-Gamas and Robert Scotts want to be masters of business administration after having acquired a redundant degree in engineering.

I shudder at the mere thought.