Kaavan, the world's loneliest elephant, is finally going free

 For decades, the world's loneliest elephant has entertained crowds from his small, barren patch of land in a Pakistani zoo.

The visitors would call for more as he saluted them, prompted by handlers who poked him with nailed bull hooks to make him perform for the money which lined their pockets.

Around him, animals disappeared from their enclosures, rumoured to be bound for the plates of the wealthy, while his only companion died, allegedly of sepsis brought on by those bull-hook nails digging deep into her skin.

Kaavan with a caretaker in his enclosure at Marghazar Zoo in June 2016. Getty Images

And for years, it seemed that no one cared about the elephant's lonely fate. His wounds became infected and the chains around his legs slowly left permanent scars. He drifted slowly into psychosis and obesity.

But on Sunday, the world's loneliest elephant will finally leave behind his desolate enclosure for a new life on the other side of the continent, thanks to the determination of a coalition of determined volunteers and, somewhat unexpectedly, the American pop icon Cher.

This is the story of Kaavan. It begins with a prayer and ends in a song.

The prayer

Kaavan may never have ended up in Pakistan had it not been for a Bollywood film, some delicate international diplomacy, and the whims of one little girl.

Zain Zia, the daughter of Pakistan's then-military ruler Gen Ziaul Haq, fell in love with elephants after watching Haathi Mere Saathi (Elephants my Friends).

Young Zain Zia with her father, General Haq. Family

And so, she uttered a prayer.

"I looked up at the sky and prayed, Allah Mian, give me a haathi mera saathi (dear God, give me an elephant to be my friend)," Zain told the BBC recently.

Her prayer was heard - by her father. One morning not long afterwards, as Zain was getting ready for school, Gen Haq asked her to stop, blindfolded her, and led her out into the back lawn.

"He said there was a surprise for me," she recalled. "He made me touch it. Then he removed my blindfolds, and there the little elephant stood. He was so lovely. I insisted we'll keep him at home, but my father said he belonged to the government and must go to the zoo. He said we won't be able to take good care of him, especially when he grew up. So then I said OK."

The little elephant was Kaavan, who had - until that day - been kept at Sri Lanka's Pinnawala Elephant Orphanage (PEO), according to Ravi Corea, a US-based Sri Lankan elephant rehabilitation expert. It is thought the year-old calf had been gifted to Gen Haq's government as thanks for backing the Sri Lankan army during an insurgency.

Zain Zia at her home in Pakistan

The exact reasons remain murky - as does the question of whether Kaavan was really an orphan - but we know that at some point in 1985, the young elephant ended up at a zoo in Islamabad.

A goldmine

Marghuzar Zoo had been built just seven years earlier, but already a power vacuum had emerged at the top, into which a number of "business mafias" had stepped.

Put simply, the authorities did not seem to care what happened at the zoo, or to its animals.

And so, a number of influential zoo employees began offering contracts to family members, allowing them to run food stalls and children's play areas within the attraction's grounds, as well as on the surrounding green belts.

They had other ways of making money too.

There is evidence to suggest that animals, mainly black bucks, had been surreptitiously supplied to drinks-and-barbecue parties hosted by influential people in the region at various times.

When a group of volunteers called the Friends of Islamabad Zoo (FIZ) started to hold periodic surveys at the zoo in 2019, they found the animal numbers had fluctuated. When they pointed out these anomalies, new animals suddenly appeared in enclosures.

Visitors to Marghazar Zoo gather around Kaavan on the Eid holidays in July 2016. Getty Images

That was not the only thing the group discovered.

"There is no veterinary facility, and no medicine supplies in the zoo," Mohammad bin Naveed, a FIZ volunteer, says. "There's no animal health facility here; there is no room where a surgery can be performed, and no space where a sick animal can be kept in isolation."

In the midst of all this was Kaavan, the zoo's star.

Zoochosis

Kaavan's job was to stand at the fence to entertain the crowds during opening hours, raise his trunk as a begging bowl when his mahout, or handler, prodded him with a bull hook, passing him the money the crowd gave him.

Kaavan's nights were spent idling around his small half-acre enclosure, about the same size as half a football pitch and containing a hut with concrete floor. When volunteers from Four Paws International (FPI) animal rights group compiled a report later, they found "a dry moat with narrow concrete walls; compacted soil; no other natural loose substrate, no trees, logs, bushes, rocks, tires or any other structures".

But at least Kaavan was not lonely. For years, his constant companion was Saheli, an Urdu word for a 'female friend' - an elephant brought in from Bangladesh in early 1990s.

The need for such companionship cannot be underestimated. Wildlife experts say elephants are cognitively sophisticated and sentient, almost like humans. They have nearly the same life span - between 60 to 70 years in the wild - and have similar emotions, forming strong family bonds.

Dr Khalil feeds Kaavan in a transport crate to prepare him for the journey to Cambodia. Getty Images

They also mourn their dead.

Saheli died in 2012. The official version of events is that she died of a heart attack due to the hot weather, but Mohammad bin Naveed, the a FIZ volunteer, alleges it was actually sepsis.

"At some point the unsterilised nails of the mahout's bull hook went too far into her skin. She got gangrene and died of a septic shock. Everyone knows this, but won't admit it," he says.

Kaavan - already bereft of the natural environment he needed - had been acting increasingly aggressively in the years leading up to her death. He spent prolonged periods in chains from 2000.

After she died, he got worse. His mahout warned that he was dangerous and allowed no one, including himself, to get close to the lonely elephant.

By the time the team from FPI arrived in 2016, they found an "aggressive" animal suffering from "zoochosis". He had "low locomotive activity, no explorative or comfort behaviour, advanced stage of stereotypical behaviour (constant bobbing of head)" and complete indifference to humans, "except some begging".

His physical condition was also deteriorating, FPI said, finding "mild conjunctivitis in left eye, some less pigmented areas on lower legs indicating old chain lesions, several cracked nails and overgrown cuticles".

Kaavan was sick, that much was clear. He was also worryingly overweight, a result of the high sugar diet his keepers fed him.

But no one wanted to lose the zoo's star attraction. What Kaavan needed, it turned out, was an even bigger star to come to his aid.

The song

Cher first learned of Kaavan's plight in 2016. The Oscar-winning actress and singer, who cofounded Free the Wild, a wildlife protection charity, hired a legal team to press for the elephant's freedom.

When the court order freeing him was announced in May, the singer called it one of the "greatest moments" of her life. In the months since, she has chronicled his progress on her Twitter account, where she has 3.8 million followers.

But the fight for Kaavan and the other animals in the zoo was not over. The problem was tossed from one department to another, before finally ending up in Islamabad's High Court.

In June, the order came to close the zoo for good. But Kaavan's fate remained uncertain.

There were those, Mohammad bin Naveed says, that took the "egotistical route" saying they would refuse to let Kaavan go abroad, "that they would take care of him".

But as the World Wildlife Fund's Dr Uzma Khan pointed out in a recent television interview, Kazaan's zoo was the not the only one with problems. Pakistan doesn't have uniform standards when it comes to keeping animals. None of its zoos is a member of the World Association of Zoos and Aquariums (WAZA).

So Four Paws International was invited to the country a second time and a new plan was hatched - to fly Kaavan across Asia to Cambodia, where he could live out the rest of his years in a "protected contact" sanctuary.

There was only one problem. Kaavan was an angry 30-something elephant with a weight problem. Neither the anger nor the weight leant itself to an easy journey to Cambodia.

In the end, Dr Amir Khalil, the Egypt-born head of the FPI team, stumbled his way into a solution.

The team needed to make security arrangements so they could safely assess Kaavan's physical health, which meant Dr Khalil and a colleague had to keep the elephant in another part of the pen, requiring them to stand around for hours waiting.

It was, he says, a boring job.

"So I started to sing. And after sometime, I noticed that the elephant started to get an interest in my voice, which no-one loved anyway, so I was embarrassed. But then I was happy to have found a big fan, and I started to sing to him."

Kaavan enters his crate, ahead of the long journey to Cambodia

Soon Kaavan could be seen eating out of Dr Khalil's hands, hugging him with his trunk as he took a bath at the pond while his new friend sang along one of his favourite songs from the traditional pop era being played on a portable sound system.

Not long after, this once-aggressive elephant happily followed Dr Khalil and his colleagues into the crate which had been specially designed to carry his five-and-a-half tonne weight on an eight-hour flight to Cambodia.

And on Sunday, after 35 years suffering at the hands of what Dr Khalil describes as a combination of "wrong management, lack of experienced staff, humanity mixing with business and money, and less attention to the welfare of animals", Kaavan will be taking flight.

Cher has hinted on Twitter since Kaavan's freedom was ordered in May that she might travel to Cambodia, and on Friday she landed in Pakistan on her way. Her exact schedule has been kept secret for security reasons, but she reportedly met with the prime minister, Imran Khan, on Friday.

She is expected to travel on from Pakistan to Kaavan's new home in Cambodia, the one-million acre Kulen-Promtep Wildlife Sanctuary, where volunteers and staff work to protect the natural habitant and house a wide range of endangered species.

Kaavan may still have problems overcoming his psychological issues and adjusting to a natural environment, his friend Dr Khalil says, but he "finally has a chance to be an elephant, and to live in a place he can call home".

(Source: BBC)

Indian Army wanted Royal Enfield Bullets — Nehru ensured they were 'made in India' first

 In ‘Indian Icon’, Amrit Raj traces the journey of Royal Enfield setting up an Indian company with Madras Motors because the Army wanted hardy bikes.

Royal Enfield had come to acquire a fair amount of fan- following in the immediate years after the Second World War. During the War, the Redditch-based company made and supplied the ‘Flying Flea’ to the British Army as a means of transport for its paratroopers. These 125cc, 2-stroke engine bikes that produced 2.5 hp power could be dropped by parachute in a tubular crate behind enemy lines. Nothing like this had been done before. These bikes were fast enough for army purposes, light-weight, and able to get through where heavier vehicles would not.

Some Royal Enfield bikes were also being imported to India by Madras Motors Ltd Its owner K.R. Sundaram Iyer (KRS) also imported a host of other British bikes. In search of greener pastures, KRS and his nephew K. Eswaran had moved to the then Madras from their ancestral village in Kallidaikurichi in Tamil Nadu just before the Second World War started.

File photo | Royal Enfield- Bullet 350 | Wikimedia Commons

‘One worked as a fitter in the cycle shop and another as an accounts clerk in a cycle shop they eventually acquired. Then they also took over English Cycle, which was another cycle shop, and English Cycle was also importing bicycles from UK and selling it,’ Kapil Viswanathan, the grandson of KRS, told me in an interview for this book.

Gradually, KRS and Eswaran went on to become importers of motorcycle brands such as Raleigh, Rudge, Humber, BSA, Hercules, and Enfield.

In 1952, Madras Motors received an order for 500 350cc Bullets from the Indian Army, a model the company had launched three years ago in the UK. The motorcycles arrived from Redditch in early 1953 and proved to be a great success, being both hardy and easy to maintain. The army officers who rode the motorcycle in flat, cultivable lands to patrol Indian borders felt it was better than the bikes they used.

After 1947, the Indian Army had been using Triumphs and BSAs to patrol the newly-created Indian borders.

However, these motorcycles were prone to many mechanical glitches and frequent wear and tear. To compound the problem, they were all imported.

The Indian Army was so impressed with the Bullets that it wanted to place an order for more bikes. However, the Indian government was of the opinion that the bikes be locally manufactured.

The Indian government under Jawaharlal Nehru was operating on a shoe-string budget and wanted motorcycles that could be acquired at a reasonable cost. They were specifically on the hunt for ones that could be manufactured locally, that could at a later stage be ‘Made in India’. Nehru’s government believed this would allow industrialisation to take root in the country.

The British manufacturer agreed to the terms and conditions of the Indian government and presented the 350cc, 4-stroke Royal Enfield Bullet.

The next task was to find a joint venture partner in a mostly barren motorcycle landscape. This would come from an unlikely region, one that was far from the mountains and the northern plains of India.

‘T.T. Krishnamachari was the commerce minister at the time and my grandfather and he … they knew each other rather well. By Independence, my granddad was fairly well established as a large cycle importer, seller, and re-seller,’ Viswanathan said.

In 1955, Enfield India Ltd was formed as a 51:49 joint venture in favour of Madras Motors and owned by KRS and Eswaran. The duo later split the business once it diversified into power transmission in the 1960s. While KRS and his sons retained Enfield India, Eswaran and his family kept the power transmission business.

Enfield India had a solid start on the back of their first order from the Indian Army for the 350cc Bullet, whose rhythmic thump is part of folklore.

In 1956, a manufacturing plant was built in the Tiruvottiyur locality of North Madras and the production of motorcycles began in a phased manner. A total of 163 Bullets were built by the end of the year. The first completely ‘Made in India’ Enfield rolled out of the factory in 1962. India was now making and selling Royal Enfield Bullets.

KRS’s eldest son, S. Sankaran, and later, his younger one, S. Viswanathan, took charge of managing the company. KRS’s second son S.R. Subramanian headed Madras Motors, distributing the company’s products at the national level. In pre-liberalisation India’s protected market conditions, with limited competition, Enfield India slowly but steadily flourished.

When the Indian Army placed a big order for 500 Royal Enfield 350cc Bullets with Madras Motors in 1952, it could have broken a forty-three-year-old colonial record for selling the greatest number of single-brand motorcycles in India.

The record until then was held by Francis Benjamin Stewart, the famed photographer who had filmed the Delhi Durbar for Lord Curzon in 1903. Stewart ran a company based out of Pune called Messrs. F.B. Stewart and Son. Among other things, the company was also the distributor of Triumph Motorcycles in the country and they held the record for selling 136 Triumph motorcycles in the country in less than five years.

This excerpt from ‘Indian Icon: A Cult Called Royal Enfield’ by Amrit Raj has been published with permission from Westland Publications.

(Source: The Print)

Uttar Pradesh Police registers first case under new law against 'love jihad'

 The case was registered by a resident of Bareilly who accused a Muslim man of trying to forcibly convert his daughter and also for threatening to kill her.

The Uttar Pradesh Police has registered its first case under the newly-implemented anti-conversion law, accusing a Muslim man of trying to forcibly convert a Hindu girl.

The case was registered Saturday under the Prohibition of Unlawful Religious Conversion Ordinance, 2020, which was cleared by Governor Anandiben Patel earlier that day.

Tikaram, a resident of the district Bareilly, filed the case at the Deorania Police Station against a youth named Uwaish Ahmed for allegedly threatening his daughter’s life and forcing her to convert to Islam.

Representational image | Photo: Pixabay

The Deputy Inspector General of Bareilly zone Rajesh Pandey told ThePrint that the Deorania Police registered the case under Sections 3 and 5 of the new law, along with the Indian Penal Code sections related to threat to life.

Pandey added that the accused, Ahmed, who is a resident of Sharifnagar in Deorania, had absconded from his residence and efforts were on to apprehend him.

Accused verbally abused girl, threatened to kill her

In his complaint, Tikaram alleged that Ahmed was acquainted with his daughter since they were students and used to frequently talk to each other.

However, recently, the latter started pressurising her to convert to Islam. According to the girl’s father, Ahmed and his family were warned on many occasions but he did not relent.

Tikaram also accused Ahmed of verbally abusing his daughter and threatening to kill her.

Based on his complaint, the police has registered an FIR against Ahmed under the ordinance that applies to cases of alleged ‘love jihad’. According to the police, a team is currently trying to apprehend the accused.

The Uttar Pradesh government approved the ordinance, Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion Bill 2020, that seeks to bar “forceful religious conversions”, including for marriage, on 24 November

The ordinance provides for an imprisonment of 1-10 years and a fine of Rs 15,000 to Rs 50,000 under different categories.

(Source: The Print)

Decades of data suggest parenthood makes people unhappy

 Decades of studies have shown parents to be less happy than their childless peers. But are the kids to blame?

How does one live a happy, meaningful life? For many the answer is, at least in part, raising children. Watching a child grow and learn about the world is a joyous experience, and the time spent providing unconditional love and care offers spiritual dividends. Then in our golden years, children can be a source of palliative comfort.

This view is so entrenched in our culture that many people, especially women, are pressured by friends and family into having children and feel they must justify their reason not to.

As is often the case, social reality proves more complicated than the worldview learned at mother's knee. Decades of research has compared the happiness and well-being of parents to nonparents, and the verdict is in: a lot of parents are less happy than their childless peers. But not all of them.

(Photo by Alex Hockett / Unsplash)

The parent trap

Headlines claiming parents to be more dejected than nonparents certainly grab our attention, but such stories are hardly news. Empirical studies have been tracing out this pattern since the 1970s. Here are three sample papers demonstrating the trend:

A 2011 review by Thomas Hansen, a researcher at Norwegian Social Research, compared our folk understanding on the relationship between parenthood and happiness to the evidence. It found that people believe "the lives of childless people are emptier, less rewarding, and lonelier than the lives of parents," but that the opposite proved true. Children living at home interfered with their parents' well-being.

A meta-analysis by the National Council on Family Relations looked at a more specific metric of happiness: marital satisfaction. It found that couples without children reported more romantic bliss. The difference was most pronounced among mothers of infants, while fathers disclose less satisfaction regardless of the child's age. The authors noted the discrepancy likely resulted from role conflicts and restrictions on freedom.

Finally, a study published in the American Journal of Sociology looked at 22 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries and compared the association between parenthood and happiness. Researchers Jennifer Glass (University of Texas, Austin) and Robin Simon (Wake Forest University) found that nonparents reveal higher levels of well-being in most advanced industrialized societies.

The happiness gap was widest in the United States, where parents were 12 percent less cheerful than childless adults. Fourteen other countries—among them Ireland, Greece, Britain, New Zealand, Switzerland, and Australia—also showed a less-than-sunny outlook for parents, but not to as large a degree as in the U.S.

A Spanish family sit down together for a meal. (Photo from Flickr)

Are the kids alright?

Based on a glance at this research, one could posit that children are a predominant source of unhappiness—and yes, we all know that one kid who is Exhibit A for this statement. But these researchers were careful to note that these effects are correlative, not causative, and there are many factors in the mix beyond progeny.

Hansen's review points out that the parents most susceptible to unhappiness were women, singles, those in lower socioeconomic strata, and those living in less pro-parenthood societies. Meanwhile, the National Council on Family Relations saw the largest decrease in martial satisfaction among the higher socioeconomic groups, likely because their status afforded them greater freedoms before having children.

Glass and Simon found eight countries where parents reported higher levels of happiness than nonparents, including Spain, Norway, and Portugal. Their analysis indicated that countries offering "more generous family policies, particularly paid time off and childcare subsidies, are associated with smaller disparities in happiness between parents and nonparents."

A potential reason? Parents in countries supporting pro-family policies contend with fewer stressors. They can take more parental leave, enjoy expansive subsidized care, and aren't as financially burdened by educational expenses. This is especially true when compared to the U.S., which provides little support for parents compared to the other countries in the study.

Importantly, Glass and Simon also found that such policies had no detrimental effect on the happiness of nonparents. In fact, the presence of strong pro-family policies led to greater happiness for women of all statuses.

Parental unhappiness is... complicated

Taken together, these three studies suggest a major cause of parental despondency is scarcity. Lower-class parents find it difficult to patch together the money, resources, and social networks necessary to succeed in their own lives while also supporting their children. Even upper-class parents can grow weary if a resource in short supply is traded off, such as time or the freedom to self-actualize.

Countries with pro-family policies can offset these scarcities to help balance the happiness gap between parents and nonparents.

But research in this field casts a wide net. As studies shift their focus, they draw different conclusions to give us a fuller, if more complicated, picture of parenthood's many pitfalls. Taken together with scarcity, all of the following factors likely have some pull on parental happiness, though it is difficult to say to what degree.

A young mother sits with her daughter. (Photo by Katie Emslie / Unsplash)

Culture of extended families. Countries like Spain and Portugal, where parents report being 3.1 and 8 percent happier than nonparents respectively, culturally center on extended families. The Spanish manage personal problems through family, an approach that extends to child rearing where many hands make light work.

In sharp contrast, the United States culturally centers on a sense of individualism and mobility. Its nuclear family model consists of small family units where parents take near sole responsibility for raising children while the extended family lives in separate domiciles, sometimes hundreds of miles away.

Who becomes a parent. Glass and Robin note that their results could be tempered by parental selectivity. They propose that countries like Spain and Italy, which have low fertility rates, may select toward people who truly desire to have children. The United States, with its much higher fertility rate, could have people not strongly predisposed to parenthood having children nonetheless.

Children in the home. An analysis from the Institute for Family Studies found that men aged 50-70 are happier than their childless peers if their children have left home. However, men who still had children at home reported being less happy than either nonparents or empty nesters. For women of the same age, being an empty nester resulted in a slight decrease in happiness compared to nonparents, but a steep decline if the children lived at home.

Number of children. The same analysis showed that women with only one child were seven percentage points less likely to report being happy than nonparents, while women with three or four children showed no discernible difference. No significant variance emerged for men.

Nicholas H. Wolfinger, the analysis' author, admits these results are counterintuitive and posits two possible explanations. The first is unmet family size preference redounding unhappiness, as many people settle for fewer children than they'd like. The second is a strong sense of familism offsetting parenthood's more negative effects. It is unlikely that family size in-and-of-itself causes a decline in happiness.

Parenting style. The way a parent approaches parenting may have substantial effects on their happiness. Developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik argues in her book The Gardener and the Carpenter that our modern parenting model, in which we view children as material to be molded into a particular type of adult, is not only wrongheaded but also a source of stress and misery for many parents.

"It isn't just that the [current] parenting model isn't the natural model, it's also just not a very productive model," developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik told Big Think. "It hasn't helped parents or children to thrive. It's led to a great deal of anxiety and guilt on a part of parents and a great deal of hovering expectations for children that really aren't necessary and in fact may even be counterproductive if we still want children to innovate and create."

Self-perception. A Pew Research Center survey found that parents who reported being very happy with life also believed they were doing an excellent job as a parent.

We still have much to learn about parenthood, and the results of so much variegated research can sometimes feel in contention. Even so, it should be clear that our folk assumptions about family are in need of a major update, and we must reconsider our views on parenthood, both from an individual perspective and with regard to social policy.

With that said, there are two strong conclusions we can draw from what we do know. For nonparents, your choice to be childfree will not doom you to a sullen, meaningless existence where you'll spend your final days contemplating a life wasted, like some inverse It's a Wonderful Life.

Nor are parents doomed to immolate their happiness on the altar of their child's future. Parenthood can be a source of exuberance, but simply raising a child will not magically bring contentment to your life. If anything, you'll have to work harder for that contentment as many factors, some in your control, some not, dictate parental happiness. Anyone considering parenthood should weight them judiciously before making a decision.

(Source: Big Think)

Marriage between first cousins illegal, says Punjab and Haryana High Court

 Court rules after youth, who was in a live-in relationship with a minor girl who was his relative, files for anticipatory bail

The Punjab and Haryana High Court has stated that marriage between first cousins is illegal. The assertion came after a youth moved the High Court against the State of Punjab for anticipatory bail.

The petitioner, a 21-year-old youth, had sought anticipatory bail in a case registered under Sections 363 (kidnapping), 366A (Procuration of minor girl) of the Indian Penal Code at Khanna city-2 in Ludhiana district.

The counsel for petitioner submitted that his client had also filed a criminal writ petition, along with the girl, praying for grant of protection to their life and liberty. The State however argued the duo were first cousins and their fathers were real brothers.

Justice Arvind Singh Sangwan, while hearing the petition, said, “..the submission in the present petition that as and when she [the girl] attains the age of 18 years, they will perform marriage is per se illegal.”

During the hearing, the court file of the criminal writ petition was also summoned and as per its memorandum of parties, the girl’s age was stated as 17 and the petitioner had filed the said petition with the submission that both of them were in a live-in-relationship.

Along with the petition, a representation was also annexed, in which the girl had stated that while her parents had love and affection for their sons, she was ignored by them. Therefore, she decided to live with her friend and, on that account, she was apprehending that her parents could harass them and disturb their peace of mind. This petition was disposed on September 7.

Justice Sangwan, in the current case, pointed out “...in the present petition also, the petitioner has not disclosed the fact that he is the first cousin of the girl and, therefore, the submission in the present petition that as and when she attains the age of 18 years, they will perform marriage is also per se illegal.”

The counsel for the State, who opposed the bail, raised objections, including that the girl was a minor. Besides, the boy and the girl were first cousins as their fathers were brothers. Hence, the petitioner concealed yet another fact in the said criminal writ petition that they fall in the prohibited ‘sapinda’ under the Hindu Marriage Act (HMA) and could not marry each other. The HMA prohibits marriage between two individuals if they have common ancestor.

(Source: The Hindu)