A symposium in the memory of Ravi Sankaran? What a bad idea, I thought. Not just because I could almost hear Ravi’s booming voice in my head saying: ”I don’t see the bloody point of having a stupid meeting to honour a dead person.” But also because… (1/n)
sccs-bng.org/ravi-sankaran-…
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I couldn’t fathom how, if ever, one could honour the memory of a complete maverick like him. Sure, you could remember what he did, how he went about it, and recall its impact. Recollect how he learnt about a sobering conservation situation and jumped right in. (2/n)
How he always unafraid to ask the most basic questions. How he did absolutely anything it took—enduring endless physical hardship, acquiring every skill necessary, or suspending all moral judgement—to gather data meticulously but also impartially. (3/n)
How he was firm and blunt, yet fair and warm. How he argued passionately and reconciled graciously. How he rejected hierarchies, orthodoxies and their proponents fearlessly, while respecting people and their circumstances honestly. (4/n)
How he recognised that conservation was achieved, not by intrepid superheroes, but through inspired collectives of ordinary people. How, in every place he worked, he engaged deeply and gave back unselfishly. 5/n
How easily he did the hardest thing in conservation: of using everything he learnt to challenge everything he believed. (6/n)
And yet, how could an event ever invoke his intensity, his imagination, or his inspiration? Or share his audacity, his irreverence, or his repartee? But, boy, was I wrong! Each of the speakers immortalised one or the other of Ravi’s creative, undying,… (7/n)
unconventional approach, even in the face of the gravest despondence, not only in the manner they had gone about doing their own work, but also in the bitter-sweet stories they told, and the irony and humour with which they told them. What a lovely event! (8/n)
Dr Asad Rahmani, one of our foremost ornithologists, explained how the historical loss of wild grazers, coupled with the current practise—ignorant albeit well-intentioned—of keeping livestock and fire out of our grasslands is costing the amazing Bengal florican very dearly. (9/n) 
Suhel Quader spoke about how a more equal partnership between birdwatchers and scientists via @birdcountindia is slowly helping transform our understanding of the distribution, abundance, seasonality and trends in our avifauna. (10/n)
Sutirtha Datta traced the grim decline of the great Indian bustard right under the gaze of conservation. The loss of adults in collisions with power-lines, and the risk to young from subsidised predators, are making interventions like captive breeding inevitable. (11/n)
@DeveshGadhvi spoke about how @TCF_wildlife's work with local communities to help resist and salvage the damage done to bustards in Kutch, whose habitats have been lost to shortsighted renewable energy projects, ill-informed tree-planting, and agricultural intensification. (12/n)
@CGRBowden chronicled the catastrophic collapse of Asian vultures from consuming diclofenac-laced carcasses, cautiously tracing a few silver linings from success of captive-breeding, and the declining use of veterinary diclofenac (13/n)
Jeganathan's was a lively story of a 15+ year journey with the Jerdon's courser, tinged with a deep sadness. The heedless alignment of an ill-advised Telugu Ganga project slashed its key refuge, and with it, the bird and its calls have faded. And yet, Jegan won't give up. (14/n)
@vvrobin, among other things, shared surprising insights into how the rarer forest owlet had a diet that was much less specialised compared with its commoner cousins, the spotted and jungle owlets. (15/n)
The session on Conservation on the Islands, chaired by the remarkable @manishchandi was superb. People mentored directly by Ravi spoke. K Sivakumar powerfully demonstrated the precarious status of the Nicobar megapode, buffeted by the 2004 tsunami and ill-advised projects. (16/n)
Shirish Manchi's presented a poignant conservation story of the edible nest swiftlet, a rare example of extraordinary conservation imagination and initiative that Ravi led until his passing, that was repeatedly vexed and hindered by bureaucratic inertia and apathy. (17/n)
Elrika D'souza spoke of an animal she passionately cares about, the dugong, and of a decade of research and outreach to work with the island administration and local communities to ensure that this remnant population endures into the future. (18/n)
Finally, Madhuri Ramesh gave a brilliant talk, turning the gaze back on researchers themselves. With a fascinating story from his life, she recalled how Ravi held that there were two kinds of researchers: those that 'mined' their study areas and their communities, (19/n)
and only took stuff away from them (lenewale), and those that cared and strived to give back (denewale). She remembered how Ravi exhorted her and others to be the latter, and to give back to the places that they worked in. A terrific tribute to the memory of an incredible man!
PS: Madhuri recounted how Ravi got those two words—and the far-reaching judgement they embodied—from a friend, and camel herder, Fakeera, in Jaisalmer.
