The Bengal Post, 20 January, 2011
If you grew up in Calcutta like I did in the 1970s, you would remember those heady days of galli cricket. For us kids, this was serious business. We knew that Sunil Gavaskar could perfect his trademark straight-drive thanks to a Dadar alley that offered little incentive for cuts and pulls. We were no Gavaskars, and we took cuts and bruises fielding on blacktop ground to ensure that no batsman pretended to be one.
It was also a competition between the decibel level of pesky neighbours (who refused to appreciate a few broken window panes as sporting milestones) and our dogged insistence to free our arms. Nevertheless, our dubious skills flourished between intermittent injunctions and temporary ceasefires. On days, we also enjoyed an indulgent fan following in the balconies overhanging the makeshift pitch.
Not that there were no playfields nearby. In my neighbourhood, we had two dusty squares where the college boys played. They did not let kids play with them. On rare occasions when they did, they considered us dudhe-bhate (inconsequential) which was hardly acceptable to any boy of honour. Anyway, we found them too big to handle. Even holding an occasional side game, on days when they were not having a match, was fraught with the danger of getting knocked out by a cork-and-leather ball flying from their practice pitch. It was only in galli cricket that young boys could come to their own.
In the early-eighties, those two playfields were being marked up for building apartments. The local youth clubs, backed by community elders, tried to reason with the builder. But compelling financial logics won the argument. But do I recall any of the builders ever suggesting that the big boys of the sporting clubs could do without those fields and take to galli cricket after the kids? I do not. Such a suggestion would have anyway led to violence.
Did the game of nerve intensify along our alley after those sporting fields were lost? It did, actually. No, not because the big boys with bigger back-lifts and stronger swings replaced us kids in the alleys. A couple of them joined bigger sporting clubs. The rest simply hung up their keds and concentrated on management courses.
What eventually drove us out was the increasing hostility of the neighbours. Quite a few families had already moved into the newly built apartments. Earlier, cranky aunts and uncles would go ballistic every time a ball sought out a window but everything would be forgotten the next day once we offered an impish apology with a casual promise that it would “never happen again”.
But the new neighbours were strangers and too protective of the glass panels in their posh apartments (or an occasionally parked car in the afternoon). Some of them even found us too noisy. When they started petitioning our parents too frequently, the more notorious among us broke a few eggs in their letter-boxes. Needless to say, cricket was soon banned in the galli.
I am not feeling nostalgic. Last week, a friendly conservationist asked me to accept that deforestation was the reason behind the rising human-leopard conflict. It has been conventional wisdom. But it is outdated and too simplistic. I tried to explain that increasing intolerance, and not deforestation, has been the biggest trigger for the recent escalation in conflict. After a prolonged exchange over three days, the noted expert called off the discussion. I was at a loss. If my technical case failed to move an expert, why trouble my readers with it?So I felt some childhood memories might illustrate the point. Be it in sugarcane fields or village alleys, many leopards have been living close to and even among people, feeding on smaller domestic and feral prey, far away from forests. They have been doing so historically without causing major conflict.
Why do leopards stay close to people? Because wherever we have protected forests, we have or aspire to have tigers. Leopards usually do not share space with tigers. In the winter of 2004-05, presence of too many leopards in the Sariska valley was the first sign for me that the tigers were missing. In many places, leopards are fringe forest animals that make frequent forays into villages. Elsewhere, leopards use any vegetation cover available to stay close to villages.
It is ludicrous to suggest that anyone can misuse the fact that most leopards live in non-forest habitats to justify deforestation. There are enough animals -- like tigers or elephants -- that cannot survive outside forests. But we know that tigers disperse. So we need buffers. We know that elephants migrate. So we need corridors. Even leopards that live in fringe forests need such wilderness protected. They also need vegetation cover in their natural non-forest habitat intact. But what they need most is acceptance -- of the fact that a mere sighting of leopards near a human settlement is not a sign of danger, that the animals have been around us for a long time without harming any, that we need not rush to capture or kill them.
I have known many old-timers who testified how leopards have always been a part of their life, how they overlooked losing occasional livestock, knowing well that leopards would never harm people unprovoked. What has tipped this balance recently is the intolerance of the younger generations that wants neighbourhood leopards killed or captured (and released far away) for their perceived safety.
Yes, with growing population and shrinking space, chances of accidental face-offs have grown over the years. Yes, occasional problem-leopards will have to be culled. But instead of securing us, random killing and capture-translocation only fuel conflict. Unless we accept that leopards have been and will always be around us, that they do not harm us if left alone, our fight against deforestation alone will not be able to secure the spotted cat.
Back in the mid-80s, we lost our alley to increasing paranoia of new neighbours. Around the same time, the mecca of galli cricket was also weaned off this tradition. Though organized coaching nets have mushroomed in every available ground of the city since, no great Mumbai batsman has followed in the footsteps of the great galli icons Desai, Gavaskar, Vengsarkar or Tendulkar in the last two decades.
But who cares for nuanced batsmanship in the time of cheerleaders?
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