Reflections

My maternal grandfather was a school master. Known by generations of students and everybody else as well as “ MasterMoshai”, he spent his life teaching English to thousands of students in many parts of the old undivided Bengal and later in Calcutta and Krishnanagar. I have spoken of him in an earlier post, but I feel there is more to be said about this man who influenced me so much when I was a boy and a young man. He was one of the sort of Bengali who were not uncommon in those days. They had been influenced by the Non Cooperation Movement when they were young men and never wavered in their ideals of honesty, hard work and a firm belief in the aphorism of “plain living and high thinking. He was a marvelous teacher. I still remember him reading Keats’ Ode to Autumn with me. He showed me how wonderfully relevant it was to our experience and how the magical words spoke to us in tropical India as much as it did to Englishmen in cooler climes. He also spoke of the Bengal of his younger day...

The elephant is associated in our minds with the vast empty spaces of Africa or the Indian forests. However elephants have been an integral part of the fauna in many other parts of the world as well. There are large numbers in Sri Lanka, and they have been an integral part of Thai culture too from time immemorial. There are elephants in the Malay Peninsula as well, though the numbers have been dwindling and may soon become too few for a viable population. Elephants also exist in the Indonesian island of Sumatra. A small population also exists in Borneo in the extreme north eastern part of the island. All the fossil and historical evidence suggests that this has been the historical range of the elephant in Borneo; they have never ranged over the rest of the island. Scientists have always debated about the origin of these elephants. Were they indigenous to Borneo or were they feral elephants that had escaped from groups brought to these islands during the heyday of elephant trading in th...