Far away from the comforts of air-conditioned offices, in the heat and dust and in extreme terrains, a few spend their lives looking for the traces of our origins. The world of paleontology is fascinating, to say the least, but rarefied, largely.
Chennai-based Anupama Chandrasekaran wants to lift the veil and let us witness the stories of paleontological and archaeological heritage through her podcast, “Desi Stones and Bones”.
Through her audio stories, writings and illustrations on these intriguing finds and people behind them, Anupama tries to elicit public interest. In between her travels, when Anupama speaks to me, she reveals the latest story that she has taken up - the copy of a fossil in action, in Nagpur. “It would be one of the top fossils in the world. Usually, when you see fossils you see an ammonoids that is a shell-like formation, or you see a Dinosaur’s fossilized egg. These are individual fossils. A fossil in action is a fossil which is telling you what happened at that moment. In this place, it is about a kind of ancient snake trying to bite into the eggs of a dinosaur. That moment has been captured in the fossilised form.”
The stories that range from archaeologists experimenting with stone age tools; a physics teacher in Madhya Pradesh who has discovered Dinosaur’s egg fossils; an archaeologist’s persistence in tracing the cave paintings in the massive rock shelters in Andhra Pradesh - take a listener to a relatively unknown world.
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It was during a break as a business journalist that she discovered Pranay Lal’s much-feted book “Indica” and got hooked to the field. She says it’s difficult to not get fascinated. “Even if you are not interested in that area of knowledge which is about natural history of India, you do get curious because of the way Pranay Lal has narrated the story which is simple and lucid with illustrations and photographs. The other thing is that there are facts you are stunned to read about. The book actually starts with the story of Nandi Hills. It talks about how it is one of the oldest bedrocks. The first rock that has been created on earth. You can't not be fascinated by it and the other thing is that it opens up a curtain into something that is around you but you haven’t seen,” explains Anupama.
One of her first stories - on Vishal Verma, the physics teacher in Bagh, came from Tanay’s book. “The first thought was, is it worth spending all this money and travelling there? But once having gone there and seeing his collection and going around and seeing the fossil park that is being established over 100 acres, it was priceless. It’s like an education. I wouldn’t say I have learnt about the subject but this is like going back to school,” expresses Anupama.
Listening to the experiences of Vishal Verma or Jinu Koshy is a learning experience. While Verma has been working in the area of Narmada Valley for two decades finding Dinosaur’s fossilised eggs, nesting sites and fossilised feces, Jinu has been chasing the rock shelters in Andhra Pradesh. “With Jinu it is also trying to convince his peers, which happens to a lot of researchers, that it is genuinely a find and to have more backers to his theory that is it possible that some of our ancestors gradually came from Australia. Is there a memory they carried back? Are they really kangaroos and obviously the funding. A lot of these people spend their own money trying to do the research. How do you find these places?. You will only get the funding later. You have to first spend years finding a place which could become your lifetime of research.”
A few years ago, Verma’s find - three rare fossilised eggs of dinosaur, were stolen from the Fossil Park ‘Ashmadha’, in Mandu, Madhya Pradesh. “I had a sense of warmth talking to these people. There is a genuine camaraderie between whole community in some sense according to me. They are willing to talk, meet, and show you around. About two months ago, I went to Roorkee, Chandigarh and Lucknow. In Roorkee, there is a professor who studies whale fossils in the entire the area of Kutch stretching from Gujarat to Pakistan. In his lab, he had some fossils!"
These compelling discoveries require an equally compelling narrative and Anupama does just that in her podcasts. She grew up listening to radio and when podcasts emerged on the scene, Anupama felt drawn to the medium. Short crisp sentences, no heavy-duty jargon, incorporation of natural sounds, and a soothing music accompanying the narration make her work noteworthy. In her episode on archaeologists Shanti Pappu and Akhilesh Kumar, there are also sounds emanating from their stone tools called knapping.
“For me the most interesting podcasts I listened to were those which had the sound of the doors shutting, you hear somebody weep, you are talking and that person is choking so that kind of storytelling is something I am drawn to. I am still learning how to mix music, how to set up a website, how I want to present it."
According to Anupama podcasts can’t be commercial particularly the category that she engages with. “It has to be funded by some philanthropy. I am looking for funding agencies. If the work is good, it will pick up.”
And perhaps it can also trigger a conversation on the neglect of fossil sites, the lack of access to these sites for paleontologists and the absence of a national institution in the country to preserve this heritage.
