Back from Hiatus -- Ram Guha in The Nation

[Let's start small, shall we? And ease back into things...]

From Ramachandra Guha's piece in the Nation on the Maoists in Chattisgarh:

The first thing I found I knew already from travelogues: that the landscape of Bastar is gorgeous. The winding roads we drove and walked on went up and down. Hills loomed in the distance. The vegetation was very lush: wild mango, jackfruit, sal and teak, among other indigenous species. The forest was broken up with patches of grassland. Even in late May the terrain was very green. The bird life was as rich and as native as the vegetation--warblers and wagtails on the ground, the brainfever bird and the Indian cuckoo calling overhead. (link)

This sort of surprised me -- I didn't expect to see details about the forest and bird life as part of an in-depth piece on Naxalites. (I was also surprised, I guess, because I myself wouldn't know the names of these birds if I saw or heard them while driving through the jungle.)

It's a good piece overall, though I didn't see a great deal in it that I hadn't already read elsewhere.