PATIL Kaka!
Friday, May 30, 2008
Patil kaka (kaka = uncle) is a true champ…never underestimate this smiling old man in his 60s…you shake a hand with him and the pain that follows to your palm will be a testimonial to his undying strength. He is a strong man…brave, intelligent, sharp, bold and always smiling…He is one of the 4 watchmen to the 33 acre wilderness called Conservation Education Centre (CEC) in Mumbai.
Except for last three months; I have been visiting this forest patch regularly almost every alternate week since past 4 years. Whenever Patil sees me or I see him amidst the forest, we welcome each other with a handshake or a pat on the back…every time I do this, I repent the tradition for obvious reasons. Anyway, Patil always welcomes me with a warm smile after this ritual.
Patil originally belongs to the southern part of Maharashtra… very close to Dandeli tiger reserve…Here he has a huge agriculture farm looked after by his wife…In Mumbai he stays in his self-made house along with the children and grandchildren. While his wife guards and manages the several acre farmland, Patil visits her twice a year…Sometimes he also goes to his village to claim compensation from the forest department…for his crops that get ruined by wild elephant herds occasionally visiting his farm, eating and wiping out majority of his sugarcane crop.
This man knows almost everything of about forest…the leopards, Deer, monkeys, civets, Cobras, Vipers etc etc…All the time he has huge never ending stories about real life close encounters with cunning, gentle, angry, aggressive, hungry, massive, small, “beautiful” leopards… he gives adjective for almost all the leopards he has seen.
The most incredible story would be his face to face encounter with a massive overgrown female leopard.
He says that was the first time he was actually frightened. It was evening 6 pm…the visible light had already vanished… and Patil was walking on the forest road. He was just about to climb the steep slope towards the CEC campus and, the leopard was just about to climb down the same slope towards the forest road. Both eyes met…Patil always advises that during close encounter with leopards, you should always maintain cool and should never show any anxiousness…
Running away means asking for the attack… anything that runs away from the predator is thought to be a prey. So, Patil maintained his cool and faced the leopard just 2 feet away for 5-10 long minutes… he says those minutes were like hours. Both, the Leopard and PATIL were confused about each other’s move…Finally the massive cat made a opening move and took a leap deep into the forest cover. I don’t know if anybody else can do this… This makes Patil so courageous…he says he was so close to the beautiful beast that he could hear her breath.
One more episode that I always memorize…
Me, Patil, a lady colleague and another 2 young chaps… desperately waiting for a leopard that had just gone inside a small tunnel hole that connects two valleys of the CEC forest. We were sitting on a slope about 10 feet high… The tunnel that I am talking about will be more or less 2 feet in diameter and is closed on the other side by the rock boulders brought down and deposited by the stream that flows through this tunnel during monsoons…This means leopard would come out only from the side of the tunnel that was facing us…for that was only opening from where the leopard entered and from where it could come out…So we were very certain and confident of the leopard sighting…
Let me give you more information about the tunnel area. The tunnel our side opens in to a small waterhole that was dried..so if you try to go and stand on the dried sandy waterhole bed and look in to the tunnel, your head and opening of the tunnel will be in a same plane….
So now, we were waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting…
1 hr…1.5 hr…2 hrs…
I am such a impatient soul…somehow I lost hope…I thought, the leopard would have definitely sneaked out fooling us…so I concluded our wait is going in vain. I also made a theory that probably the leopard didn’t even go inside…the person who informed us might have just been in a illusion…
I was so restless …I started convincing people that there is no leopard in the tunnel…And to take a additional step…I even volunteered to go bang opposite to the tunnel opening on the waterhole bed and checkout…so that I can make sure the leopard isn’t there…
Well I did that…took a torch….jumped on the waterhole bed sand and stood there for while. I lit the torch I had and focused it inside the tunnel…I lost my speech for what I saw…
I saw the Sub-Adult medium built leopard staring at me face to face…eye to eye…
I lost the earth below my feet…The leopard was sitting right at the edge of the opening and seeing me it stood …gave a stare and tender snarl… It freezed me…All these happened within seconds…I was damn petrified…frightened but managed to not run or scream…
Patil sensed this and from the height he was sitting, this old man jumped right aside to me…He started making sounds with his stick that made the leopard move away from us.
Walking deep inside the tunnel, the leopard sat on the extreme end staring at us continuously…
I called everyone down…we sat behind a bush opposite to the tunnel opening…focused the torch…saw the king of the CEC forest for a while and then understanding the respectable distance and space we moved….
Patil still smiling, me still surprised and a girl crying…So, that was Patil…brave, intelligent, sharp and “smiling”
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Except for last three months; I have been visiting this forest patch regularly almost every alternate week since past 4 years. Whenever Patil sees me or I see him amidst the forest, we welcome each other with a handshake or a pat on the back…every time I do this, I repent the tradition for obvious reasons. Anyway, Patil always welcomes me with a warm smile after this ritual.
Patil originally belongs to the southern part of Maharashtra… very close to Dandeli tiger reserve…Here he has a huge agriculture farm looked after by his wife…In Mumbai he stays in his self-made house along with the children and grandchildren. While his wife guards and manages the several acre farmland, Patil visits her twice a year…Sometimes he also goes to his village to claim compensation from the forest department…for his crops that get ruined by wild elephant herds occasionally visiting his farm, eating and wiping out majority of his sugarcane crop.
This man knows almost everything of about forest…the leopards, Deer, monkeys, civets, Cobras, Vipers etc etc…All the time he has huge never ending stories about real life close encounters with cunning, gentle, angry, aggressive, hungry, massive, small, “beautiful” leopards… he gives adjective for almost all the leopards he has seen.
The most incredible story would be his face to face encounter with a massive overgrown female leopard.
He says that was the first time he was actually frightened. It was evening 6 pm…the visible light had already vanished… and Patil was walking on the forest road. He was just about to climb the steep slope towards the CEC campus and, the leopard was just about to climb down the same slope towards the forest road. Both eyes met…Patil always advises that during close encounter with leopards, you should always maintain cool and should never show any anxiousness…
Running away means asking for the attack… anything that runs away from the predator is thought to be a prey. So, Patil maintained his cool and faced the leopard just 2 feet away for 5-10 long minutes… he says those minutes were like hours. Both, the Leopard and PATIL were confused about each other’s move…Finally the massive cat made a opening move and took a leap deep into the forest cover. I don’t know if anybody else can do this… This makes Patil so courageous…he says he was so close to the beautiful beast that he could hear her breath.
One more episode that I always memorize…
Me, Patil, a lady colleague and another 2 young chaps… desperately waiting for a leopard that had just gone inside a small tunnel hole that connects two valleys of the CEC forest. We were sitting on a slope about 10 feet high… The tunnel that I am talking about will be more or less 2 feet in diameter and is closed on the other side by the rock boulders brought down and deposited by the stream that flows through this tunnel during monsoons…This means leopard would come out only from the side of the tunnel that was facing us…for that was only opening from where the leopard entered and from where it could come out…So we were very certain and confident of the leopard sighting…
Let me give you more information about the tunnel area. The tunnel our side opens in to a small waterhole that was dried..so if you try to go and stand on the dried sandy waterhole bed and look in to the tunnel, your head and opening of the tunnel will be in a same plane….
So now, we were waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting…
1 hr…1.5 hr…2 hrs…
I am such a impatient soul…somehow I lost hope…I thought, the leopard would have definitely sneaked out fooling us…so I concluded our wait is going in vain. I also made a theory that probably the leopard didn’t even go inside…the person who informed us might have just been in a illusion…
I was so restless …I started convincing people that there is no leopard in the tunnel…And to take a additional step…I even volunteered to go bang opposite to the tunnel opening on the waterhole bed and checkout…so that I can make sure the leopard isn’t there…
Well I did that…took a torch….jumped on the waterhole bed sand and stood there for while. I lit the torch I had and focused it inside the tunnel…I lost my speech for what I saw…
I saw the Sub-Adult medium built leopard staring at me face to face…eye to eye…
I lost the earth below my feet…The leopard was sitting right at the edge of the opening and seeing me it stood …gave a stare and tender snarl… It freezed me…All these happened within seconds…I was damn petrified…frightened but managed to not run or scream…
Patil sensed this and from the height he was sitting, this old man jumped right aside to me…He started making sounds with his stick that made the leopard move away from us.
Walking deep inside the tunnel, the leopard sat on the extreme end staring at us continuously…
I called everyone down…we sat behind a bush opposite to the tunnel opening…focused the torch…saw the king of the CEC forest for a while and then understanding the respectable distance and space we moved….
Patil still smiling, me still surprised and a girl crying…So, that was Patil…brave, intelligent, sharp and “smiling”
