Who would've thought one day I would be walking along the beach at 2.00 in the afternoon, looking for dead turtles. Strange how things turn out, huh?
Quick flashback:
Last weekend, in a moment of what I can only describe as pure delirium, I had agreed to join a few of my friends for the turtle walk along the Chennai coast. At midnight.
(FYI. If your friends invite you to join them for a 4 hour walk along a cold, clammy beach at 12.30 am, you know what's a good answer?
"I'll think about it."
You know what’s a better answer?
"Nope.")
So anyway, I decided to tag along that day, maybe see a few turtle eggs - a turtle even. But instead of seeing the magic of nesting, what we did see are two dead sea turtles washed ashore in various states of decay.
If you have never seen a huge dead sea turtle up close, let me tell you, there is nothing worse than that.
Except seeing a huge dead sea turtle with eggs spilling out of it. Not an image you would forget.
So that is how the idea of doing a news story on increasing number of dead sea turtles came up.
When I started off in the morning, things seemed pretty straightforward. Talk to the conservationists, the fisheries and try and locate the dead turtles to take a photograph. However, when the two people I spoke to gave two different different issues related to the same problem, things started getting complicated.
Suddenly, there was a court case that needed up to followed up on. Folks at the fishermen association did not take what they percieved as me judging them kindly and asked me to get out. A contact at the fisheries department kept making me call every hour and finally said "you should have come in the morning. Sir left now."
Too. Many. Things to do.
When the sun got too strong, the basement of an apartment became my temporary office, until a lady with a ferocious dog started giving me suspicious looks. Overhearing my repeated phonecalls to the fisheries department, the watchman of that apartment suggested that I speak with an old fisherman who had previously worked on trawlers.
Sounds chaotic yes? Oh it was…and how! At the end of the day, more than the things that I learned, I am aware of the quotes I did not get, angles that I did not explore and points that I did not pursue as much as I should have.
Well, there’s always tomorrow.
