Whisperers of Trust.

Whisperers of   Trust.

I was really looking to fill one of my empty weekends with some activity for Facebook showoff during my recent work related trip to South Africa.  As someone who had read a bit about  apartheid,  I asked  Terrence Ndaba  friend, driver and comrade-in-arm in Joburg, the way to the apartheid museum in downtown Joburg.  Terrence, one of the most customer centric professional  I had met in my life ( who would tune patiently  for a  Tamil or  Hindi FM channel for his  Indian friends), suggested safari and game reserves. Though I was born and brought up near Silent Valley national park, nature held very little interest for me.

When the hotel tourist coordinator   insisted “if u have not visited a game park here in SA u have not visited SA”, I started glancing thru their brochures most reluctantly. But then Krueger was a 3 -4 days sojourn and got immediately ticked off from the list. He told us about the private game reserves in Africa. And my own goggling took me to “the lost world” of Lawrence Anthony and Adamsons.  

I did visit the lion park  near Joburg with  Terrence on a  Sunday and  on the way back  walked into a  book store ( filled with  books on Wild life) in Rose bank.

The first book I could lay my hands on was  a gripping, funny and  sometimes tragic story of   Anthony’s  life with  huge but empathetic creatures called Elephants.. A former business man who happened to buy some 5000 acres for setting up a private game reserve,  ended up as one of the  most famous  conservationists of recent times (especially after his successful effort in saving  Baghdad Zoo).  His “real” story starts when he was asked to accept a herd of “rogue” wild elephants on his ThulaThula reserve. He was the herd’s last chance of survival as the authorities were planning to kill wild beasts. “Elephant Whisperer” is Anthony’s story, how he could earn the Trust of   Matriarch of the herd, Nana, connect with them, communicate them and live amongst them without harming the elephant herd or getting harmed for so many years.  

To quote from a guardian article “And as he battled to create a bond with the elephants, he came to realize that they had a great deal to teach him about life, loyalty, and freedom.   Anthony has worked to rehabilitate them, to the extent that they will even come when he calls. Last month, we were granted a rare glimpse of the bond between Anthony and the herd. We are deep in the African bush when Anthony cups his hands to his mouth and calls: "Come baba, come girls." The elephants were last sighted a mile or so away, and for 10 minutes there is silence. Then, on the far side of a clearing, the trees rustle and the first giant grey head breaks above the bushes. Another follows, pausing only to rip a branch from a tree. Soon, as seven or eight of the herd approach, Anthony ushers us from open ground into the relative safety of the vehicle. Within seconds, the animals are poking their trunks through the open windows, their wrinkled faces and eyelashed brown eyes just yards away. We pull forward, and the elephants follow. Only when Anthony guns the engine do they give up the chase. “

It is that trigger which lead me to the animal (which includes incidentally homosapiens) world of trust and harmony. 

 The legend of the Elsa the lioness and Adamsons, absolutely captivating and most spiritual account of connect between humans and wild animals in the modern world.  Joy, who had literally adopted Elsa, the orphaned lioness, painstakingly prepared the lioness for a life in the wild. And the lioness spent her time in the wild and came back quite often to be with her adopted parents. The most touching part of this real life story is when Elsa came back to the camp with 3 of her cubs as if to introduce them to their grandparents.

 Let me quote David Attenborough “The Adamsons were both extraordinary people but they had a curious sort of tunnel vision. When we arrived, Elsa had disappeared after a fight with a wild lioness who was trying to oust her, and when Elsa turned up, Joy was over the moon – she cried out Jinja mbusin! Which is Swahili for ‘Kill a goat? Why didn't she love goats the way she loved lions?

A couple of hours after I arrived, I awoke from a siesta to find Elsa lying on me. She was very big and very heavy and had appalling bad breath. Elsa didn't take much notice of me generally, or of any human beings. She simply tolerated being cuddled by Joy. …..She was murdered in the end, by one of her staff, and George was killed by shiftas (local bandits). It's a sad story. “

For someone  who lived among Lions and other wild animals, literally  for some  50 +  years, the  tragedy of just not Adamson’s but human race was  both Adamson’s got killed in their advanced years by wild humans and not  by  caring lions. (Elsa, Christian, Boy and many more of them…)

One of the common threads in both the stories was that of Trust and harmony. Only when there is trust between man and animal, there is harmony.  Only then they connect and communicate. Trust does come from being trustworthy. The keyword is Being. But most of us try to become something which we are not and end up as incongruent.

I left the land of kind animals, to be among modern evolved humans, who were fighting it out in Tantri Turmoil over rather a trivial matter.   Most of the emails smelt full of malice, like wild animals urinating in the forest to establish their territory. Just to warn the reader, stay off or get mauled. All of them had and showed off their long religious credentials and flaunted talismans like claws and teeth. In reply, the wise ones, tried to communicate rationally and businesslike. It was futile attempt to convince the unconvinced. They seems to be impervious of the fact that, even if Siddhartha, Gautama, who could transform someone like Angulimala had arrived on the scene, people might have demanded an Indian passport / or a Karnataka DL as identification and would have asked him to follow the process.

Time and distance bring in much needed objectivity and more light in the tunnel. We were all trying to convince without communicating, communicating without connecting, trying to connect with so much of trust deficit between people.

People seem to have forgotten the wise man’s saying “What u r speaks so loudly, I can’t hear u speaking”.The Adamson’s and Lawrence of this world knew this secret and went on to live with wild lions and elephants.  Maybe we could also find the secret of living in harmony during this lifetime, without taking our own chances in the wild.