This month we published our largest-ever issue of Pulse, our internal magazine.
The amount of content contained here is a reflection of the growth we have witnessed in the last year and more. We have more new blood, an energetic, committed, passionate team that wants to seize the moment, and this makes us a vibrant, wholesome family that cannot be contained in the pages of a magazine, but a glimpse of its vivacity can be obtained by thumbing through them.
I spent New Year’s Day and eve at a place that’s very dear to my heart and I hadn’t visited in five years. Bandhavgarh – a tiger reserve in Madhya Pradesh. I had fallen in love with it on my very first visit and it wasn’t simply because wild and beautiful tigers are relatively less difficult to see there, as compared to other forest areas. It was because this theatre of tigers is also an amazing open school of life.
As we drove through the serpentine dirt-roads of this wildlife haven, I learned of all the ways in which the park, its inhabitants and stakeholders had changed. The tigers, for one, weren’t all the same. Some had become parents, some which were helpless little cubs had entered their prime, some had died, and some others had disappeared from the scene, with nobody knowing what had happened to them.
There were new guides and drivers introduced, some of whom are so new on the job that I could’ve told them about Bandhavgarh; new technologies implemented to prevent speeding by tourist vehicles, and the habitat itself seemed renewed in some places due to the installation of solar pumps, while at some others, it seemed to be not as beautiful as I remember seeing, because I had never visited this deep into the winter.
And yet, despite all these changes, there was one thing common: everything and everybody was striving to do the best for themselves – the plants, the animals, the drivers and guides, and tourists (me!) included. And that captures the essence of what we do neatly, in a nutshell.
Technologies change, years roll on, times come and times go, but what remains common is that we keep trying to do the best in the service of that which resonates in everyone whom we are in this collective dance contemporaneously: life.
I wish you a lively New Year 2023!
