If you don’t have budi, then it doesn’t matter who you are, nayaka, kaka or an elephant. Talking with you is useless. You do taka without even realizing what you are doing. Elephants who do not have budi are either underdeveloped or very angry with something. It makes no sense to try to come to an agreement with them.

If a kotta of elephants has come to the village, you need to talk with elephants who have budi, so that they calm those who do not. An elephant who has budi will never do taka - he will not destroy the village of nayaka, who have budi. But the elephants may not succeed in calming down their fellow who lost his budi.

Once, kaka started throwing firecrackers into the kotta of stranger elephants and the elephants decided that kaka didn’t have budi once they did it. Then this kotta of elephants smashed the villages of both kaka and nayaka because nayaka and kaka looked similar. Nayaka asked familiar elephants to tell the stranger elephants that nayaka had budi. After some time, the pogroms stopped.

Nayaka live in the Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve located on the ridges of the Western Ghats and Nilgiri in southern India. Civilization eats their way of life. They are already cutting live trees for sale, although this is a big taka. Kaka - alien Muslims also do this constantly. A little more and nayaka will lose budi and they will cease to understand the elephants.

In the meantime, science with the unpronounceable name ethno-elephantology allows us to look hundreds of thousands of years into the past when elephants and mammoths roamed the earth in no less quantities than our ancestors. And then we learn that the sharp stone chips - the cores for large Acheulean hand axes were not chopped by people, but the elephants broke them off when they rubbed against the rocks with their thick rough skins to scratch and comb out the parasites.

Perhaps it was the elephants who conveyed budi to people, showing kindness and mercy. After all, nayaka determine elephants who have budi by peacefulness and kind gaze. Therefore, they always try to look into the elephant’s eyes.

And the tales that ancient people hunted elephants are the result of misinterpretation of the excavation results. Bones of people and elephants, tusks and stone axes are found nearby because elephants and people lived together, and not because people hunted elephants.

A dense permanent elephant trail network connected the entire African continent. The ivory deposits excavated by elephants gave people tusks split into convenient sharp pieces. And the habit of elephants to rub rock outcrops supplied people with sharp chips, which archaeologists still mistake for tools made by people.

The observations I cite are on the surface. They are simply misinterpreted by scientists who are unable to overcome the Cartesian view of the world. Post-Cartesian anthropology can provide answers to questions that cannot be solved in the Cartesian view of the world, where humans are cut off, isolated from all living things and perceive nature exclusively as a source of benefits and danger.

May the budi be with you!

Photo by Suvan Chowdhury from Pexels