Or how we traded presence for proof
At first light in Nagarhole, the forest stirs as if half-awake. Mist drifts low through the lantana, the air still heavy with the night’s damp. Somewhere in the canopy, a langur coughs, then another answers as a kind of Morse code of nerves, one species relaying another’s unease. The forest exhales, inhales, and falls back into its long, watchful silence.
The jeep starts, diesel slicing through the quiet while the guide leans forward, scanning for tracks; the driver whispers into his phone. “Female tiger by the watering hole,” someone says. The engine hums a little louder, the air shifts, and just like that, the chase begins.
What unsettles me is the pace. Safaris once meant waiting and watching and listening and accepting the forest’s refusal to perform. Now they play out like speed runs. Six jeeps race down the red-dust track, each one desperate to be first at the sighting. Cameras the size of rifles hang from windows while eyes sweep the forest edge, hungry for stripes.
When we finally saw her—a tigress marking a tree near the water—it was from the tail end of a long line of vehicles on a narrow dirt road, nowhere to move. She appeared for three heartbeats, a flick of her tail, a glance that stopped time, and then she slipped away. Dozens of shutters had already clicked, the forest sighed, emptied of anticipation, and the day, it was decided, had been a success.
I understand the thrill. To meet that gaze, the amber stillness of something that owns the ground it walks on is unforgettable. Yet what saddens me is how quickly the encounter turns into proof—into an image, a tally, a story to carry home. The safari ends the moment it “succeeds.” Everything else—the hum of cicadas, the light shifting through the sal and teak—fades into the backdrop.
But a forest is more than a species, more than even a collection of them. It is movement and sound and pause: the rising heat that smells faintly of leaf decay, the metallic call of the greater racket-tailed drongo, the bark of a sambar that echoes for miles. It is texture and time, alive in ways that resist capture. Somewhere along the way, we have mistaken the experience for the evidence.
Karl Ove Knausgaard wrote that “the whole world has been transformed into images of the world.” He was speaking of technology, but the thought followed me through those dusty tracks. Even here, in what we like to call the wild, we’ve turned experience into image. The tiger has become a symbol—an abstraction detached from the forest that sustains her, a sign of having been somewhere rather than being in it.
This is what I keep returning to: the drift from connection to abstraction. Abstraction itself isn’t the enemy—it helps us think, compare, and organise—but left unchecked, it hollows things out. It turns forests into carbon sinks, rivers into water resources, and tigers into sightings. Connection, by contrast, insists on presence. It asks that we slow down enough to be claimed by what we wish to know.
A day later, almost in the same spot, the forest offered something quieter. A rusty-spotted cat—no larger than a rabbit—was padding along the elephant-proof railing, muscles rippling under its dappled coat. It seemed to be shadowing a ruddy mongoose that darted through the undergrowth. The same bend, the same time of day, but this time no convoy, no radios, no crowd. Just us, and this small, perfect animal.
When we told a passing jeep, they nodded politely and drove on. No one wanted to stop for the smallest wildcat in the world. Yet that sighting—the delicate balance of curiosity and grace on a strip of metal, the forest holding its breath again—stayed with me far longer than the tigress because it wasn’t spectacle but felt like intimacy.
Later, we stopped where the Kabini backwaters glinted through the trees. There were no fresh pugmarks, no calls. Only the shimmer of dragonflies above the water and a breeze that seemed to move everything at once—the leaves, the herons, even the silence itself. Nothing to record, yet everything alive is the part of the safari that refuses to be captured and the part that can only be experienced.
The word safari comes from the Swahili safara—a journey, a long walk. Its original sense was movement through space and time, not a chase for spectacle. To go on safari was to be on the way, not to arrive. Somewhere between the WhatsApp groups and the tripods, we lost that meaning.
The tragedy isn’t only ecological; it’s existential. We’ve built a culture that confuses knowing with experiencing, that believes to see is to understand, to collect is to connect. But the forest doesn’t care what we’ve seen. It asks something more complicated: that we listen, that we belong.
Perhaps that’s why true connection feels so rare—it resists speed and certainty. It comes when we stop counting, when we let the unrepeatable, unpredictable world act on us instead of performing for us, when we allow ourselves to be changed by what we can’t control.
That morning, as the jeeps scattered again, we turned off the track and waited. No tiger came. Instead, a pair of Malabar giant squirrels chased each other across a web of branches, their tails arcing like comets. A woodpecker drilled nearby. The light shifted from gold to white. Nothing dramatic, and yet it felt complete.
When we finally left the forest, the others in the jeep looked mildly disappointed. “No luck today,” someone said. I wanted to tell them that luck had been everywhere—the rhythm of wings, the invisible choreography of alarm and calm that is the forest’s language—but I stayed quiet. Words, too, can slip easily into abstraction.
The real safari is learning to bear witness without turning the world into evidence—to trade the chase for attention and to let awe and wonder be slow and emergent. The tiger, when she appears, is not the prize but the punctuation mark in a much longer sentence. The sentence is the forest itself—alive, unrepeatable, still speaking, if only we can learn again to listen.
And somewhere between the tiger and the tiny cat lies the reminder that connection begins when we stop needing proof that we were there.
Originally published on Substack on 12 October 2025. Read on Substack →
Gautam John 
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