WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE
NEHA SINHA’S FIRST BOOK IS A THOUGHTFUL COMMENTARY ON WILDLIFE, PEOPLE AND THE SPACES THEY SHARE
You know you will read about fascinating wildlife if you pick up Wild and Wilful—conservationist and writer Neha Sinha’s first book—but you also need to be prepared for rumination and retrospection. The book may make you smile but it will also tug at your heartstrings, offering a lot of troubling food for thought.
Sinha’s vivid descriptions take the reader across spaces that people and wildlife share in India—from the research institutes located within the woodlands and wetlands in Uttarakhand, to the “prickly” heat of Kutch and the open, grassy vastness of Kaziranga. Through 11 personal essays—sprinkled with drama, perspectives and science—she introduces the reader to not only the charismatic, well-known species (like tiger and elephant) but also the common-yet-overlooked ones (like tiger butterflies). She talks of conflict and coexistence. The book is a commentary on how we have drastically altered natural-scapes, on how wildlife still lives, sometimes even thrives, despite us.
The author is a part of these stories and, most often, the reader too (Sinha uses the second-person narrative most effectively). This lends to the personal, emotional appeal of the book. Many excerpts draw from Sinha’s own memories and experiences with people and the wild. You follow her trains of thought through the book and yet this does not overpower the reader: there’s still room to read, visualise and comprehend.
Sinha calls out our double standards with inspiring boldness. Be it the inability of institutes to follow their own recommendations on living with wildlife in its precincts, or how an animal worshipped and lovingly hand-fed on certain days can be killed “for a cost of a cup of coffee at Starbucks”.
What also makes for engaging reading are the motley characters who star in Wild and Wilful—individual animals like Avni the tiger, the people who interact with wildlife and live in the same landscape and scientists who are studying these species. Sinha also deconstructs why some animals may be deviating from usual behaviour, because of our impact on their habitat or person.
And yet, are these animals really ‘wilful’? A wild animal exists, thrives or dies in such spaces because it has to: there’s no other way out. Sinha partly answers this in her essay on butterflies: “I realise how human-centric it is to consider the butterfly as defiant, or to box it as a survivor in the face of a bullet… perhaps, I am saying this out of admiration in a desperately unequal world.”
CALL OF THE JUNGLE Tourists at the Kaziranga National Park in Assam