anirudhchandrakant

I began to think about what Veera Ballalla might have seen. Would MG Road have been a stream, Jayanagar a wooded area and Indiranagar chockablock with tall evergreen trees? More interestingly, what kind of birds and animals might have existed - species that thrived then that we might have lost now or the other way around. Was it a place with tigers lurking around the corner, elephants announcing their mighty presence, warblers darting from one branch to another trying to sell their wares while pink headed ducks calmly waded in the streams wondering what the excitement was all about. Maybe there were racquet tailed drongos imitating and making fun of the winter immigrants just as the cormorants waved their wings in disgust at the pelicans, "These foreigners are spoiling our city!". The woodpeckers would have asked for "one and aff" for use of their tree-holes during the rains and the babblers would gather every evening to gossip about the neighbors, "Did you notice what happened to the oriole that was showing off near the mango tree? He got a white eye! Har har!" The wily dholes would have been upto no good near the race course, while across the street the huge gaurs would be sauntering across the golf course. All the animals would jostle for space on lazy evenings to watch performances by the dancing peafowls, the singing tree frogs (who got booed off stage every time) and the acrobatic hanuman langurs.

Yes, it was a lazy Saturday morning with nothing good on television. But, let's not allow a little weird imagination to get in the way of an interesting science project. Aside from this being a fun project, it could have implications on conservation efforts.

Building this time machine is straightforward on paper, but is incredibly hard in practice because of the lack of information and appropriate maintenance of records. Probably the main ingredient is the landscape ecology data of the area. Another incredible datapoint would be any historic maps made by the Cholas or Hoysalas, the icing would be if these maps are of the natural environment. Co-relating these maps with any existing ruins within the city and entering these in a GIS database would give a fairly accurate picture of what each part of the city might have looked like back then. Now, given that we have specific environment information, we could construct a probability continuum of the possible species and their likelihood of being found in the region given their natural habitats (as a factor of time and space, of course. You can't expect Mammoths because they would not have been found during the time or in the region, even if the environment suited them).

A new pet project, however inane, is always something exciting. Watch this space.