Ajith: An Otter Among Primates
Dear Ajith,
It is sort of hard - for anyone who has known you or met you occasionally as I did - to accept that you are gone. For you were much more than a wildlife biologist (and a fine one at that).
You were a true kind, gentle teacher You were one who was loved by anyone who learnt under him. Both these put you in the rarest of the rare, as endangered as some of the species you must have seen in your many excursions into our country's fine forests.
Anyone who has known you will carry the memory of a wide smile under an equally wide moustache, the eyes behind those large spectacles lit with a twinkle and the light of compassion. I will for sure. I have something more too, for, somewhere in a notebook, in that pile of used ones, I have that page on which you scribbled those notes on the otter transect in the NCBS canteen.
Which brings me to your wish, which you had expressed to friends and is in the last paragraph of the lovely tribute to you in Current Conservation. I hope you are among us again, this time as an otter.
I wish you had told me of this wish sometime and I would have asked you in turn, 'Which species?', which no one probably had done earlier. You would have laughed, those eyes twinkling with mischief at the thought, and then lapsed into the exploration of this idea.
...and that would have been a debate in itself, if a light, thoughtful, soft-spoken conversation can be termed a debate.
So, I hope you are there somewhere - a smooth coated otter, guiding those young ones with gentle nudges into the water and reminding them of a larger world that exists outside their known realm.... - yes, I hope you are there somewhere.
If we meet when I am in the field, those eyes will give you away.
