October 11, 2023

Wednesday, 09:30 PM

Ranthambore Regency,

Sawai Madhopur, 

Ranthambore, Rajasthan

Got up early in the morning, as usual on the trips, and felt like the same tired me I have been feeling for the last few mornings on account of sleeping late and getting up with a lot on my mind. With all the travel, shooting, editing, Vlogging and interviewing, I have not had as much rest as needed, which had to happen in the beginning, given the length and complexity of the project. But now we are finally beginning to find a semblance of rhythm in the workflow, which is indispensable in this kind of project. It is in part for that reason that today’s Vlog has already gone live right on time even though it did take a little bit of pushing and hurrying up, but we managed to push it through without compromising on the quality or the number of quality checks that we have in place, both on-site and off-site. 

Right after getting up in the morning, I visited the National Chambal Ghariyal Sanctuary in Palighat, where I found two ghariyals spending some quality time in reptilian leisure, several meters away from each other (no ghariyali bonding there). There were no good pictures to be clicked even though ghariyals are capable of striking a visually impressive pose once in a while. But the ghariyal kind of impressive is not the cat-cute kind of impressive; it’s more in the range of the blood-curdling sort. 

But lazying ghariyals were not the only thing we saw in the Chambal morning; we also took in a breathtakingly beautiful sunrise. We met a forest guard, too, who told us a few interesting things about ghariyal and the Indian skimmer (a bird; also known as Indian scissors-bill), who are suffering due to habitat loss at our hands, resulting in a massive decline in their overall numbers. 

I returned to the Regency in the afternoon and worked on the final edits of today’s Vlog, which needed a lot of work despite a ready first cut. It took a few hours, and it was evening, and I had to rush for a meeting with the DFO of the region, Sh. Mohit Gupta, for an interview, which went well and you’ll get to see it soon in full although the significant portions of the same will be published as part of the daily ATR Vlog in due course.

I also had a meeting scheduled with the Chief Conservator of Forests, Sh. P. Kathirvel, who I am planning to interview for Project ATR next. The meeting went well and I returned to finalize the Vlog upload today, and after some last-minute changes, the video did go live earlier than usual, about which I am pretty happy. Although there is a lot yet to be done to satisfactorily smoothen the process for a timely release of daily Vlogs, we are making some progress — little by little — in that respect. Hopefully, we’ll be able to release tomorrow’s Vlog on time.