FACE TO FACE

Meet the heroes guarding India’s national parks, the women turning clay into art, and the actors bringing Mamma Mia! to life once again

An illustration depicting rangers at Keoladeo National Park in Rajasthan, a sanctum for birds and birders alike. COURAGE STANDS AT A STRANGE ANGLE TO THE WORLD, OFTEN NAMELESS and obscure, careless of its own daredevilry. It gilds itself in decorated armoury, but also in forgotten boots walking under canopies, the dust they raise powdering the leaves of green, autumn and spring. India’s forest rangers are our unsung heroes, those who protect the earth as she indolently stretches across our nation, her green breasts patterned by the wings of the hornbill in the northeast, her sandy folds arching in a wind sculpture in Rajasthan, her mangrove hair billowing through the Sunderbans, turbid and streaked with the stripes of the tiger.