Kodanad, one of the largest elephant training centres in South India, is located 40 km from Cochin in the high ranges near the southern bank of the Periyar River. In the past elephants where captured from the adjoining forest and trained there. The capture of wild elephants was banned in 1977 so now the center is used for only for training. The pachyderms receive training for participation in temple festivals, one of their primary works in the region.
The dangers of coming between a mother and her child are well known. Bears are infamous for their maternal aggression. Lionesses delegate to other lionesses their maternal duties in order to hunt, but if anything gets too close, it’s “out with their bowels”! What about herbivores? Continue reading
When I was 9 my family relocated from Upstate New York to Orlando, Florida, an odd hodgepodge of concrete and drywall that is less a city and more a network, an expanse of strip malls and toll roads stretching for miles with no discernible locus—i.e. a place without place, a harbinger of the New America—both model for and copycat of other American NonCities. At the heart of this network, not in place but in time, is Walt Disney World, Orlando’s reason-to-be and essence, which lies below and hangs around the accretions and habits of Orlando-residents like a living ancestor. As Orlando’s originary purpose, it touches its inhabitants even if they try to avoid it; it shapes you, no matter how far away from it you stand.
I say this not only because I enjoy holding forth on the metaphysics of place (I do), or because I want to suggest I’m some sort of DisneyChild (I don’t), but because a curious circumstance surrounded our ‘Cloud Walk’ on Sunday morning that caused me to think about my relationship to where I grew up, and how these ‘living ancestors’ affect how we experience our environments. Continue reading
Organikos 