T.R. Shankar Raman's Blog

A Songline in the Elephant Hills

Earthly Rhythms, Cadence, and the Silencing of a Rainforest Landscape

Words By Divya Mudappa and T. R. Shankar Raman

(This article first appeared on Coonoor&Co on 8 May 2025.)

Rainforest Canopy; Photo by Kalyan Varma (CC-BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons)

“… A musical phrase is a map reference… Music is a memory bank for finding one’s way about the world.”

~ paraphrased from Songlines (1987) by Bruce Chatwin

Morning with whistling-thrush song in the Anamalai Hills

A co...

Great Nicobar: Greenwashing a Catastrophe

Here’s something I want you to read, something that simply had to be said, even as I wish for a world where something like this would never have needed to be written. Here’s why.

First, it concerns a proposed project so monumental in its ambitions as in its folly, and so egregious in its likely destruction of vulnerable human lives and ecologies that it deserves all the attention, critique, and bearing of witness that we can bring to it. The project, of course, refers to the planned devastati...

Chronicle of an ‘Ecocide’ Foretold

Like the famous novella, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, by the Colombian writer and Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez, the slim and punchy little book, The Great Nicobar Betrayal, augurs a coming death. The portentous subtitle, ‘Pushing a Vulnerable Island Knowingly into Disaster,’ foreshadows the contents: a collection of essays and articles on the wonders of the island of Great Nicobar in the Indian Ocean and the impending tragedy of its developmental death. Here, the book declares, is a d...

Let my country awake

‘I am a 14-year old boy who loves India.’

So began my handwritten letter to the Prime Minister. The date: sometime in late May or in June of 1987. I didn’t know if the Prime Minister of India, Rajiv Gandhi, would even read it. I recall finding his address in the front pages of the fat Telephone Directory of Madras (as the city of Chennai was called then). When I finished writing what I had to say and asking him to do what I wished him to do, I tucked my letter into an envelope, addressed it,...

New wine in a new Bottle

Over a year has gone by without a single post here on View from Elephant Hills. The main reason being a number of technical issues that I couldn’t fix earlier. And others being, well… the big words: life, time, meaning. Fortunately, this hasn’t meant that I’ve not been writing at all. I have. I’m working on a book that has kept me absorbed for more than a year, about which I’ll say more later on, on this blog. For the moment, this is just a little post to say, I’m still here, and the blog has fu...

A Reason to Walk

This journey begins like so many others at the doorstep of our home here in the mountains. I leave today for Spain on a short break for a long walk. I am packing as light as I can to walk over 300 kilometres in thirteen days. To walk with my friend, Rohan, along a part […]

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Deep Impact: Environmental History and the Human Footprint

This book review appeared in Current Conservation in 2011. Something New Under The Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth- Century World by J. R. McNeill, W. W. Norton & Company, ISBN:0-393-04917-5 (2000). This book, which aims to present an ecological history of the 20th century, but which does more than that, is one of […]

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Indira Gandhi: One Earth, One Environment, One Humanity

Fifty years ago, on 14 June 1972, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi gave a landmark speech at the plenary session of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, Stockholm. Both the UN conference and her speech were significant events in modern environmental history. The significance of her speech was recently recounted by Jairam Ramesh in […]

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The right shade of green

Early monsoon clouds, grey as elephant skin, span the skies over the hillock where we are planting tree saplings. From 500 saplings stacked in black plastic sleeves, I select and heave two over to nearby soil pits prepared to receive them. These are not just any trees, I think, as I slit open the covers, […]

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Wildlife Photography: Gujarat Model

Re-posting this book review from over a decade ago, which appeared in the Deccan Herald’s Sunday Herald on 4 September 2011. Gujarat’s Vibrant Wildlife: A Pictorial Journey by Diinesh Kumble, Commissionerate of Information, Gujarat 2011, 192 pages, Rs 1,495. With its ‘mouth’ opening through the Gulf of Kachchh, a neck set in the hills of […]

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