Day 328- Part Four Of "Celebrity Elephants"

The Hard Life of Celebrity Elephants

They’ve never met, these two men battling over the fate of Kerala’s elephants, and they couldn’t be more different: Venkitachalam in his faded dhotis and worn-out button-up shirts; Kumar with his entourage and flashy get-ups. Venkitachalam has seen only one movie in his life, and then only because they made him watch it at school; Kumar has acted in three movies in the past year alone, including a Malayalam-language remake of the Sandra Bullock film “The Proposal.” Their main difference, though, arises over a decade-old set of rules concerning the treatment of elephants. Late last year, Kumar rewrote it, removing, among other things, a 26-item list of acts of cruelty against elephants, like forcing a sick or injured elephant to march long distances or making elephants play games like tug of war or football.

When I asked Kumar about the revision, he said there were no drastic changes — he got rid of only “silly, silly things; small, small things, that’s all.” Raja Raja Varma, the head of the state’s Forest Force, agreed. “When there are too many rules, you can’t do justice to them all,” he said. And fewer rules could mean fewer opportunities for corruption. O. K. A. Thampi, the treasurer of a temple in Kuzhupilly, told me that he had just paid 50,000 rupees in bribes to make his temple’s festival happen. He wouldn’t say to whom: “I want to have a festival next year too.”

These costs are often passed on to the villagers. A man in Manimala told me that members of the local temple go door to door demanding donations for their elephant festival. “If you don’t have any cash on you, they say, ‘Oh, you have coconuts on your tree, we’ll take those,’ ” he said. In Thrissur, Venkitachalam said, the donations committees will stop public buses on the road and hit up all the passengers for cash.

None of this is to suggest that Kumar is personally corrupt. He’s been steadfast in standing up to the leader of his own party, a powerful political boss named R. Balakrishna Pillai, who spent a few months of 2011 in prison on corruption charges. Almost since the day Kumar took office as minister, Pillai has called for Kumar’s resignation for not following party orders. In a twist out of a Malayalam movie, Pillai also happens to be Kumar’s father.

The minister was sanguine when I asked about the family feud. Even if he were forced out of office, he said, he’d always have a home in movies. “If I resign from the ministry, I will be known as an ex-minister,” he said. “But there is no ex-artist. An artist is always.”

One evening in January, Vijaya Kumary brought her family to a festival in Rayamangalam featuring Thechikottukavu Ramachandran, the most celebrated elephant in Kerala and perhaps the tallest in all of India. Just before sunset, the colossal animal turned on the crowd. He broke Kumary’s arm, threw her daughter against a wall, stepped on her other daughter’s leg and trampled her mother to death, along with two other women in their 60s. Kumary was calm as she described to me the carnage of that night. It wasn’t until I asked why it had happened that she began to cry. “The people responsible are the temple authorities,” she said. “I’ve never seen so many elephants in the temple. It’s because of their greed.” At the end of the path that leads to her house stood a huge poster that no one had bothered to take away advertising the festival where her mother was killed, illustrated with a life-size photograph of Ramachandran. A speech bubble pointed from his mouth: “I’m coming.”

A few months after that night in Rayamangalam, I found Ramachandran chained on a concrete platform behind the temple that owns him. I watched him for an hour, and he never stopped swaying violently from side to side, lashing out with his trunk whenever someone lingered nearby. Rajan, his latest mahout, said that it was only a matter of time before he’d be hired out for festivals again. For now Rajan was keeping his distance — he’d been on the job for only 15 days. But soon he would teach Ramachandran to obey him. He’d probably start with a beating. “Otherwise he won’t listen,” Rajan said. “That is how you train an elephant, with beatings.” A previous mahout’s beating left Ramachandran blind in one eye.

~Rollo Romig
New York Times

August 14, 2013

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