Mr Scot Wrighton, City Manager, Lavasa & the Chief Guest ET2010 delivering the Inaugural Address

Prof Daniel Seidman delivers the Organizing Secretary's address at Lavasa

My Presidential Address at the ET2010, Lavasa, December 2010

Fruity Bats of Lavasa

Why don't bats live alone?

They prefer to hang out with their friends!

A bat that was clinging to space shuttle Discovery’s external fuel tank during the countdown to launch the STS-119 mission remained with the spacecraft as it cleared the tower, analysts at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center concluded.Based on images and video, a wildlife expert who provides support to the center said the small creature was a free tail bat that likely had a broken left wing and some problem with its right shoulder or wrist. The animal likely perished quickly during Discovery’s climb into orbit. Because the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge coexists inside Kennedy Space Center, the launch pads have a number of measures available, including warning sirens, to deter birds and other creatures from getting too close. The launch team also uses radar to watch for birds before a shuttle liftoff.Nevertheless, the bat stayed in place and it was seen changing positions from time to time. Launch controllers spotted the bat after it had clawed onto the foam of the external tank as Discovery stood at Launch Pad 39A. The temperature never dropped below 60 degrees at that part of the tank, and infrared cameras showed that the bat was 70 degrees through launch.The final inspection team that surveys the outside of the shuttle and tank for signs of ice buildup observed the small bat, hoping it would wake up and fly away before the shuttle engines ignited. It was not the first bat to land on a shuttle during a countdown. Previously, one of the winged creatures landed on the tank during the countdown to launch shuttle Columbia on its STS-90 mission in 1998.Bats sure are intriguing creatures.

There has never been a TV series where the animal hero was a bat. Why not? Because people generally hate bats.For many Westerners, bats conjure up eerie visions of vampires and witches. The Chinese see these flying rodents as symbols of good luck. Fortunately, there are people working on behalf of bats - people who study bats; who respect bats; who love bats; who have, on occasion, TASTED bats.No, seriously, although bats look like evil creepy demonettes from hell that want to swoop down and bite us and give us rabies, the truth is that they are generally harmless flying mammals just like us who form colonies, care for their young, go to the mall, etc. Statistically, the average bat is far less likely to be rabid than Abu Azmi. Besides catching insects, bats play a critical role in pollinating certain plants, such as the agave, without which there would be NO TEQUILA.Even vampire bats have their human side. Researcher Ted Fleming told me that sometimes a female vampire bat will return from a successful bloodsucking trip and share her good fortune by "regurgitating to her roost mates."

Many bat species are endangered because of humans, some of whom view bats as actual food. A researcher once told me that in parts of Southeast Asia, bat soup and fried bat are considered tasty treats. In Guam, people have eaten pretty much all the bats. There's a bat shortage! You could become a bat rancher and get rich! Although you would need skilled bat wranglers. He also told me that the Gubu people of Papua, New Guinea (I am not making the Gubu people up), have a big feast wherein they boil up a mess of bats, cook them over coals and then eat them whole, after which they pick little bat teeth out of their mouths. He said that, as a researcher, he actually took a tiny bite of this dish.Incredibly, he did not say that it tasted like chicken!

So we see that bats have really received a "raw deal" from us humans. I think that from now on, we should all remember that bats are our friends, and we should make every effort to be nice to them while remaining at a safe distance! Also, if we go to a restaurant in Southeast Asia, we should make darned sure we know what we are ordering.

The Bats we see around Lavasa are the Megabats.They are also referred to as fruit bats, old world fruit bats, or flying foxes. The megabat, contrary to its name, is not always large: the smallest species is 6 centimeters (2.4 inches) long and thus smaller than some microbats. The largest reach 40 cm (16 inches) in length and attain a wingspan of 150 cm (5 feet), weighing in at nearly 1 kg (2.2 pounds). Most fruit bats have large eyes, allowing them to orient visually in the twilight of dusk and inside caves and forests.Fruit bats are frugivorous or nectarivorous, i.e., they eat fruits or lick nectar from flowers. Often the fruits are crushed and only the juices consumed. The teeth are adapted to bite through hard fruit skins. Large fruit bats must land in order to eat fruit, while the smaller species are able to hover with flapping wings in front of a flower or fruit.Frugivorous bats aid the distribution of plants (and therefore, forests) by carrying the fruits with them and spitting the seeds or eliminating them elsewhere. Nectarivores actually pollinate visited plants. They bear long tongues that are inserted deep into the flower; pollen thereby passed to the bat is then transported to the next blossom visited, pollinating it.Because of their large size and somewhat "spectral" appearance, fruit bats are sometimes used in horror movies to represent vampires or to otherwise lend an aura of spookiness. In reality, as noted above, the bats of this group are purely herbivorous. Some works of fiction are more in line with this fact, portraying fruit bats as sympathetic or even featuring them as characters. For example, in the book series Silverwing by Kenneth Oppel, a fruit bat named Java is one of the main characters in the final book of the series. In Stellaluna, a popular children's book by Janell Cannon, the story revolves around the plight of a young fruit bat who is separated from her mother. In The Winjin Pom, a 1991 puppetry-based tv-series by Richard Carpenter and Steve Bendelack, Frazer is an anthropomorphic fruit bat with a laid-back attitude and a taste for fresh fruits.

Female short-nosed fruit bats have been observed performing fellatio on their partners during copulation. Mating pairs spent more time copulating if the female did so.The video seen here is sexually explicit and was edited and soundtracked by the researchers.
Coming back to Lake Dasve, you see a lot of fruit-bats suspended from the trees at the Western end of the lake (see photos!). The best sightings of these fruitbats are towards sunset when they are in their element. They are handsome creatures with a very stylish flight path. If you take the Pontoon boat ride at closing time (5pm), you can have a personalized sighting of our very own Lavasa Fruity Bats! I have spent hours on hours photographing these fascinating mammals. In fact, legend has it that they have a photographic memory! A Weizmann Institute researcher from Israel however, is using bats to help reveal the secrets of human memory.

The Rehovot institute's Interface magazine wrote recently about bat researcher Dr. Nachum Ulanovsky, a neurobiologist who studies the most common Israeli bat species - the fruit bat. He says they are an excellent animal model for human memory not only because of their impressive spatial memory but also due to their highly developed senses and unique behaviors. Bats are being outfitted with sophisticated telemetry equipment transmitting data about the activity of single neurons or networks. These are used as the bats crawl or fly around in Ulanovsky's lab. A US company working with the Rehovot researcher developed the world's first global positioning and telemetry system that weighs only nine grams; as the average fruit bat can carry nine grams of equipment and still fly with ease, it is the perfect bat species for his experiments. To avoid disrupting the bats' natural behavior, Ulanovsky has arranged for the building of a large cave-like room with rough-hewn rocks in the ceiling.

His work, which is partially conducted in collaboration with the Hebrew University, promises to reveal new information not only on human memory but also on hippocampal diseases such as epilepsy and Alzheimer's.

We are opening an outlet at New Years which will serve only desserts - and guess what it is christened - Fruity Bat!

The Winter Cometh

We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again—to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.
-Pico Iyer
The age of the hill station mirrored the period when seaside resorts, spas and the great mountain lodges were built in Europe and the United States. In some case, the style and atmosphere of these European or American mountain retreats were consciously copied in the colonies. The Adirondacks influenced a planner of Baguio, in the Philippines for example. But in colonial Asia, the relatively high altitude hill station, usually at 5,000 to 8,000 feet above sea level, always had to be more than just a resort. The hill station was also a genteel fantasyland, a retreat from reality where the homesick colonial could be cosseted by the atmosphere of a European hometown, down to its familiar institutions: the club, the library, the village church. The hill station at its homiest was and is a phenomenon most often associated with the British in India, but the French, the Americans, and to some extent the Dutch also endowed them with similar properties. As Indians, we must now take pride in announcing to the world a completely made by Indians – Hill-station!
If you're looking for an exotic winter vacation with clouds in your hair and memorable nature trails, Lavasa as a hill-station is hard to beat. Citrus Citrus has pulled together some ideas for adventurous types more interested in exploring the rain forests of Lavasa or the rappelling off Ekaant than hanging out in the shopping malls of cities such as Tokyo, Seoul, Hong Kong, or Singapore. Even so, the Lavasa resort selections offer all the amenities one finds in major urban centers. Here's a sampling of what Lavasa has to offer this winter vacation season.
The best time of the year for water-sports activities is now! Lavasa is turning out to be the water-sports capital of the country – with personal water jets, speed-boats, pontoon boats, inflatable dinghies and a water-obstacle floating dock! Again the winter months will be the best time to see the almost-extinct fresh-water crabs & the fruit-bats of Lavasa. For the trekking enthusiasts, the nature trails are full of flowers & butterflies the next 4 months! For the adventurous types, go rappelling with the official adventure co of Lavasa – Z-bac! I can bet my last penny that someone who steps foot into Lavasa for the first time will skip a heart-beat! It is a mini-Switzerland in Maharashtra! Its not only tourism that is being promoted – the Lavasa Corporation is also supporting traditional crafts of the villagers around and the first cooperative for bamboo weaving is called Bamboosa!
By now all of us have heard (too often) the old Proust line about how the real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new places but in seeing with new eyes. Yet one of the subtler beauties of travel is that it enables you to bring new eyes to the people you encounter. Thus even as holidays help you appreciate your own home more—not least by seeing it through a distant admirer’s eyes—they help you bring newly appreciative—distant—eyes to the places you visit. You can teach them what they have to celebrate as much as you celebrate what they have to teach. This, I think, is how tourism, which so obviously destroys cultures, can also resuscitate or revive them, how it has created new “traditional” handicraft outlets, and caused craftsmen in villages around Lavasa to pay new attention to their works. If the first thing we can bring the Indians is a real and balanced sense of what contemporary Lavasa is like, the second—and perhaps more important—thing we can bring them is a fresh and renewed sense of how special are the warmth and beauty of this town or hill-station, for those who can compare it with other places around the globe.
Thus travel spins us round in two ways at once: It shows us the sights and values and issues that we might ordinarily ignore; but it also, and more deeply, shows us all the parts of ourselves that might otherwise grow rusty. For in traveling to a new place, we inevitably travel to moods and states of mind and hidden inward passages that we’d otherwise seldom have cause to visit. The beauty of this whole process was best described, perhaps, before people even took to frequent flying, by George Santayana in his lapidary essay, “The Philosophy of Travel.” We “need sometimes,” the Harvard philosopher wrote, “to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard, in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.”
Welcome to Lavasa!

Lavasa in Red

Red Translations

red in Afrikaans is rood
red in Dutch is rood, blozend
red in Finnish is punainen
red in French is rouge
red in German is rot
red in Italian is vermiglio, rosso
red in Latin is rutilus, puniceus, rufus
red in Portuguese is vermelho
red in Spanish is tinto, rojo















Color is an intense experience on its own.
-Jim Hodges
Lavasa is gorgeous. The sunshine in Lavasa is gorgeous red in March. Red is any of a number of similar colors evoked by light consisting predominantly of the longest wavelengths of light discernible by the human eye. In human color psychology, red is associated with heat, energy and blood, and emotions that "stir the blood", including anger, passion, and love! Lavasa in March is the season of Love. The word red comes from the Old English rēad. Further back, the word can be traced to the Proto-Germanic rauthaz and the Proto-Indo European root reudh-. This is the only color word which has been traced to an Indo-European root. In Sanskrit, the word rudra means red. In the English language, the word red is associated with the color of blood, certain flowers (e.g. roses), and ripe fruits (e.g. apples, cherries). Fire is also strongly connected, as is the sun and the sky at sunset. Red is frequently used as a symbol of guilt, sin and anger, often as connected with blood or sex. A biblical example is found in Isaiah: "Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow."
The association with love and beauty is possibly related to the use of red roses as a love symbol. Both the Greeks and the Hebrews considered red a symbol of love, as well as sacrifice.
Red is the ultimate cure for sadness.
-Bill Blass
I was having my "missing-Lavasa" pangs & drove down Friday afternoon to my destination of dreams. Had my usual addictive "batata-wada-pao" on the express-way & zoomed onto the Lavabahn, which was as inviting and pristine as ever. The "short-cut" from just before Pirangut towards Lavarde has been tarred & widened for 3/4ths of its length. The Beamer slipped over the top of the Lavabahn like "makkhan"! On the ascent, I noticed the forest covered in red!! The color red is associated with lust, passion, love, and beauty as well. These 4 words describe Lavasa as well. The trees were swathed with red flowers (genus unknown!).The usual drive from the beginning of the Lavabahn takes just 30 minutes, but this time I took all of 75 minutes to reach the Lavasa Dwaar; making many short halts on the way admiring & photographing nature in its full glory. The red flowers on the trees were mesmerizing. The flowers were glowing in the radiant sunlight like fireflies around a bright flame! This was in stark contrast to the jowar fields which were enveloped in rust-brown shades with a little green of dried grass peeking through. This was hay-making time & the villagers along the route were making bundles of hay. The jowar pods reminded me of how life begins from earth & ends there too. The wild shrubs by the sides of the Lavabahn were also sprouting flowers in shades of purple. Nature seemed to be smiling in March.
I got out of my car and decided to take a walk on the wild side. As I walked and thought about what to spot that resembled nature, I would notice trees with palm-like fronds, flowers, grass, and birds of assorted kinds. Some of these trees were as high as a third floor building. Nature is amazing no matter how it is created.These huge trees with the red flowers were the predominant feature of my tryst with Lavasa this time.

And then I passed through the Lavasa Dwaar. The landscape here was well organized. I mean if nature had done it by itself, I know it would not look the same. Since man organized it, it was different. It was different in a pretty way though. The different plants organized in such a manner. One kind of flowers was in a row and another kind was in a row in back. The way they placed vines to spread in a certain manner around the plants made it more colorful. All this was close to the helipad and not a forest, yet it was nature. The sun shone however, it seemed that its rays never quite made it to the deep nature trail created by the Ekaant team which leads to the Dwaar. Nonetheless, my surroundings seemed to have no complaints at all. The wild bush, medicinal plants and trees, and flowering shrubs danced merrily to the tune of the wind. It was then that I realized that even though it was Indian summer time, the area was filled with a colorful scenery. Adding to the hues of nature were some birds who hung out nonchalantly waiting for a bite to eat. As I stood there feeling the wind against my cheeks, I couldn’t help but admire nature’s unique way of taking care of its creatures. I think what impressed me the most was the number of different species that shared the same abode without threatening each other’s territory.

I now spend my days at Lavasa fleeting from flower to flower, photographing these miracles of nature and I’ve discovered that I am not alone. There are hundreds of butterflies out there, in all the hues of nature. For now, it is enough that I have become what I was meant to be and the flowers seem equally happy.

The true color of life is the color of the body, the color of the covered red, the implicit and not explicit red of the living heart and the pulses. It is the modest color of the unpublished blood.
-Alice Meynell