SALIM ALI

He then worked with Detachment in Bangkok, working to recover Allied airmen who had been captured in the region with the help of friendly Thais who worked to keep them under cover from the Japanese forces. After this period he moved to Sri Lanka and never got to Australia as originally planned. The two often met at dinners and parties both in New Delhi and at Trincomalee.

On one occasion, Ripley noticed a green woodpecker and went off to shoot it while dressed only in a towel. The specimen label reads "Shot at cocktail party The anthropologist Gregory Bateson was also here and he would introduce Julia to Paul Child, her future husband. Nehru came to hear of this from an article in The New Yorker and was furious, leading to a difficult time for his collaborator and coauthor, Salim Ali. Salim Ali came to hear of Nehru's displeasure through Horace Alexander and the matter was forgiven after some effort.

David Challinor , a former Smithsonian administrator, noted that there were many CIA agents in India, with some posing as scientists. He noted that the Smithsonian sent a scholar to India for anthropological research who unknown to them was interviewing Tibetan refugees from Chinese-occupied Tibet but went on to say that there was no evidence that Ripley worked for the CIA after he left the OSS in He joined the American Ornithologists' Union in , became an Elective Member in , and a fellow in After the war he taught at Yale and was a Fulbright fellow in and a Guggenheim fellow in Evelyn Hutchinson , who had led the Yale expedition to India in Ripley served for many years on the board of the World Wildlife Fund in the U.

He served as Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution from to Haupt Garden , the underground quadrangle complex known as the S. Dillon Ripley Center , and the Arthur M. In , he helped found the Smithsonian Folklife Festival , and in , he helped found Smithsonian magazine. In he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom , the highest civilian award of the United States. He was awarded honorary degrees from 15 colleges and universities, including Brown , Yale, Johns Hopkins , Harvard, and Cambridge. Ripley successfully defended the National Museum of Natural History against a lawsuit that objected to the Dynamics of Evolution exhibit.

Ripley had intended to produce a definitive guide to the birds of South Asia , but became too ill to play an active part in its realisation. However, the eventual authors, his assistant, Pamela C.

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Rasmussen , and artist John C. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, October, Treasures of the Earth: Need, Greed and a Sustainable Future. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, paperback edition, Fall, Extracting at the Borders: Sustainable Development in press , Mineral supply for sustainable development requires resource governance. Routledge Handbook of Environmental Conflict and Peace-building. Grasso, Domenico and Saleem H. Expected publication in The Conversation Contributor - List of Articles.

Once cleared of these allegations, the project however stopped routing the funds through Bangkok to avoid further suspicions and was directly funded by the Americans to India. He also attempted a citizen science project to study house sparrows in through Indian birdwatchers subscribed to the Newsletter for Birdwatchers.

Ali had considerable influence in conservation related issues in post-independence India especially through Prime Ministers Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi. Indira Gandhi, herself a keen birdwatcher, was influenced by Ali's bird books a copy of the Book of Indian Birds was gifted to her in by her father Nehru who was in Dehra Dun jail [54] while she herself was imprisoned in Naini Jail [55] and by the Gandhian birdwatcher Horace Alexander. One of Ali's later interventions at Bharatpur involved the exclusion of cattle and graziers from the sanctuary and this was to prove costly as it resulted in ecological changes that led to a decline in the waterbirds.

Some historians have noted that the approach to conservation used by Salim Ali and the BNHS followed an undemocratic process. Ali lived for some time with his brother Hamid Ali who had retired in from the Indian Civil Service and settled at Southwood, ancestral home of his father in law, Abbas Tyabji , in Mussoorie.

1. Sidney Dillon Ripley.
2. Salim Ali Bird Sanctuary in Munnar?
3. Great Indian bustard?

As a consequence, he was considered to be part of the Dosco fraternity and became one of the very few people to be made an honorary member of The Doon School Old Boys Society. Salim Ali held many views that were contrary to the mainstream ideas of his time. A question he was asked frequently in later life was on the contradiction between the collection of bird specimens and his conservation related activism. Although once a fan of shikar hunting literature, Ali held strong views against sport hunting but upheld the collection of bird specimens for scientific study.

But my love for birds is not of the sentimental variety. It is essentially aesthetic and scientific, and in some cases may even be pragmatic. For a scientific approach to bird study, it is often necessary to sacrifice a few, Brought up in a Muslim household, he had in his younger life been taught to recite the Koran without understanding any Arabic. In his adult life he despised what he saw as the meaningless and hypocritical practices of prayer and was put off by the "ostentatiously sanctimonious elders". In the early s the national bird of India was under consideration and Salim Ali was intent that it should be the endangered Great Indian bustard , however this proposal was over-ruled in favour of the Indian peafowl.

Although recognition came late, he received several honorary doctorates and numerous awards. In the same year, he received the J.

In he received the John C. Salim Ali died in Bombay at the age of 90 on 20 June , after a protracted battle with prostate cancer. In , Kitti Thonglongya discovered a misidentified specimen in the collection of the BNHS and described a new species that he called Latidens salimalii , considered one of the world's rarest bats , and the only species in the genus Latidens. The subspecies of the rock bush quail Perdicula argoondah salimalii and the eastern population of Finn's weaver Ploceus megarhynchus salimalii were named after him by Whistler and Abdulali respectively.

Creator of an environment for conservation in India, your work over fifty years in acquainting Indians with the natural riches of the subcontinent has been instrumental in the promotion of protection, the setting up of parks and reserves, and indeed the awakening of conscience in all circles from the government to the simplest village Panchayat.

Since the writing of your book , the Book of Indian Birds which in its way was the seminal natural history volume for everyone in India, your name has been the single one known throughout the length and breadth of your own country, Pakistan, and Bangladesh as the father of conservation and the fount of knowledge on birds. Your message has gone high and low across the land and we are sure that weaver birds weave your initials in their nests, and swifts perform parabolas in the sky in your honor. For your lifelong dedication to the preservation of bird life in the Indian subcontinent and your identification with the Bombay Natural History Society as a force for education, the World Wildlife Fund takes delight in presenting you with the second J.

Paul Getty Wildlife Conservation Prize. He also wrote a number of popular and academic books, many of which remain in print. Ali credited Tehmina, who had studied in England, for helping improve his English prose. Some of his literary pieces were used in a collection of English writing. A popular article that he wrote in Stopping by the woods on a Sunday morning was reprinted in The Indian Express on his birthday in The first ten editions sold more than forty-six thousand copies.

The plates from this work were incorporated in the second edition of the Handbook. Ali provided his own vision for the Bombay Natural History Society , noting the importance of conservation action. A two-volume compilation of his shorter letters and writings was published in , edited by Tara Gandhi, one of his last students. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. For other people named Saleem Ali, see Saleem Ali disambiguation. Bombay , Bombay Presidency , British India.

Bombay , Maharashtra , India.

Salim Moizuddin Abdul Ali". Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India. Retrieved 21 July In search of the Mountain Quail. The Illustrated Weekly of India.

A short account and some reflections". Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society. Tracking the Biodiversity Ideal in India, — Accession , Box 1. Ecology in a Climate of Cold War Suspicion". Economic and Political Weekly. Bird study in India: Its history and its importance. Its past, present and future. Archived from the original PDF on 16 March