 Ruth Padel in Chennai
What will you have when the great, great granddaughter of Charles Darwin, Ruth Padel, a British poet and writer, is in Chennai? A great evening.
She was in Chennai for the launch of her book, 'Tigers in Red Weather' at Odyssey, Anna
Nagar.
It's a brilliant and beautiful travel book about love, escape and that most mesmerising of animals: The tiger. Odyssey Store at Anna Nagar played host to the launch of the travel novel in association with Penguin Books India.
Both a captivating piece of natural history and a beautiful piece of travel literature, 'Tigers in Red Weather' is an absorbing exploration of obsession, and of the human heart.
"This is the best book on the tigers of the world that I have ever read. The writing is magical as Padel journeys across this incredible land of the tiger. Join this journey if you want to know about hope and despair, failure and success and find out in this personal travelogue if the tiger has a chance to survive. This is the ultimate - Ruth Padel's tiger voyage that none should miss" - Valmik Thapar
The great, great granddaughter of Charles Darwin, Ruth Padel, is a British poet and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She is also a Fellow of The Zoological Society of London. Her short stories on tigers have appeared in 'Dublin Review', 'Prospect', and the 'Daily Mail' and been translated into German.
After a terrible year, the end of a five-year affair and the death of her father, Ruth Padel was out from normal life and took an advert for a trip to India. She visited a tiger reserve - and so began a remarkable journey and an obsession. She travelled across the world, Bhutan to Siberia, China to Sumatra, into jungles and into myths, in search of tigers: the most beautiful, and one of the most endangered, animals in the world.
In every jungle, among the snakes, scorpions and animals living their secret lives, she met "defenders of the wild", scientists, guards and conservationists struggling to protect forest animals from armed poachers, live electrocuting fences, poisoning. She became more passionately interested in her elusive subject - she contemplates the meaning of obsession: where it takes us, how it shapes us. Indeed, according to some, it is our obsession with tigers that has brought them to the edge of extinction. Tigers stalk the pages of this book more vividly than in any wildlife
programme.
For the last two years, through 10 Asian countries, she has been researching wild tigers where they live, who protects them and what threatens them - for a travel-memoir published by Little Brown this year.
The event was a waterhole in wildlife history as many of the Chennai's well-known names in wildlife were part of it. Mangal Raj Johnson, chairman of WWF, TN State Office, released the book, which was received by Kalyani Candade, director, Wildertrails Pvt Ltd. Earlier, Shekar Dattatri, a noted wildlife film-maker, introduced the author and the book.
Ruth Padel has published four books of non-fiction and six collections of her own poems; several have been shortlisted for the Whitbread and T S Eliot prizes. She has won the National Poetry Competition, taught ancient Greek at Oxford, excavated Minoan tombs, and sung in an Istanbul nightclub and in the church of St Eustache in Paris. A regular contributor to BBC Radio 4's Saturday Review, Ruth Padel is Chair of the UK's Poetry Society, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Zoological Society of London, and a member of the Royal Geographical Society and of the Bombay Natural History Society. Ruth lives in North London with her daughter. Visit the author at www.ruthl.padel.com
In a brief interaction with the audience, Ruth said she found India the best destination for wildlife tourism. "I find the tiger reserves in India are well looked after and they are easily the best in the world," she said, adding, "I love to be in India and will come back as often as I can."
India could take the tiger tally to 20,000 with some effort, she felt.
The best way to move about in the forests is on foot, she said, adding that she did not think tigers faced any danger from tiger-lovers.
Ruth made an impassioned plea to save the forests as the world could face a major water crisis 50 years from now, judging by the deforestation that was on all over the world.
Although people living in the forests were very much proud of the tigers, the kind of reverence with which they held the tigers in the past was less now, she felt.
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