The Birdman of India

Re: # 5
Hamidm2
Meinhertzhagen amongst other good things was a Nazi sympathiser for some time, was a plaigiariser his magnum opus Birds of Arabia was compiled along with George Bates but he never gave him credit, killed one of his assistants in India in a fit of rage and bribed the police to cover it up as a death due to plague, his second wife , so the official story goes shot herself in the head while engaged in pistol targetna practice with her husband and this is what Colonel T. E. Lawrence writes about him in his book

``Meinertzhagen knew no half measures. He was logical, an idealist of the deepest, and so possessed by his convictions that he was willing to harness evil to the chariot of good. He was a strategist, a geographer, and a silent laughing masterful man; who took as blithe a pleasure in deceiving his enemy (or his friend) by some unscrupulous jest, as in spattering the brains of a cornered mob of Germans one by one with his African knob-kerri. His instincts were abetted by an immensely powerful body and a savage brain....``

Now isn`t that cute? -)

gill sahib,

.... thank you for a very enlightening article ...... we, on chowk, have known all this for a long time but it is nice to have independent corroboration and confirmation of the desi traits :

- practical things like pitching camp is a long and tedious business and indians are`` quite useless at anything of that sort``

- desis who can read, write or code are ``so accustomed to be waited on by an army of servants that they is impotent when they have to do something themselves``

- desi babus who advocated they were capable of governing india, were wrong and ``must first learn to govern themselves”

- indians are quite quite useless at anything`` but writing code ....... ``they cannot skin a bird, nor cook, nor do anything connected with camp life, packing up or chopping wood``

- they are insufferable because they write ``interminable notes about something`` (a lot of evidence is available on chowk )

- `` all Indians are incredibly incompetent at anything they do; if there is a wrong way of doing things they will do it, and they are quite incapable of thinking ahead.”

- bjkumar ``is the personification of the educated Indian and interests me a great deal. He is excellent at his own theoretical subjects, but has no practical ability, and at everyday little problems, is hopelessly inefficient, yet he is quite sure he is right in every case. His views are astounding.`` ......... ``he is very touchy about India and Indians. He resents any trace of criticism and is extremely bitter about South Africans’ treatment of the Indian question.

- desis have `` introduced disease, dishonesty and sedition” all over the world


.......... it is really very sad that the englishman gave up and turned over india to ``be governed by rats” ............... really unfortunate - we could have been living happily like the australian aborigines, the american indians or the bushmen of kalahari ............

I was a member of BNHS for a long time. All of us members were indebted to Dr.Salim Ali for keeping one of the oldest wild life preservation organisations in the world going. Actually the place where Hornbill House (the headquarters of the BNHS) is situated has been renamed Dr.Salim Ali Chowk after him.

BNHS, thanks to Dr.Ali and others have some wonderful collections of specimens of various flora and fauna native to Asia. It was nice to see an article about him, having seen him potter around BNHS when he was alive.

Incidentally if anybody has read Anita Desai`s ``A village by the sea`` , it is my opinion that the ornithologist in that book was very definitely based on Dr. Salim Ali.

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Salim Ali was a truly remarkable man. As a kid, I remember watching with rapt attention documentaries in which he featured. Even at 80+ years of age, his energy and fascination for birds would be like that of a kid for a new toy.

Few nuggets about Dr. Ali. Although he is remembered as an ornithologist, he also identified a new mammal species which is now named after him, Latidens salimali or Salim Ali`s fruit bat. It is one of the most endangered mammals of India. He spent much of his time birdwatching in the marshlands of Sultanpur Jheel near Delhi, which later became a national park, one of India`s smallest thanks to his effort and a popular picnic spot for Delhiites.

At the time of partition in 1947, he seriously contemplated emigrating to Pak, luckily for himself and India, he decided to stay back.