There are many reasons why Tejas has chosen a career with a difference. “I was not the best when it came to academics. I was an average student, my maths skills were terrible,” he said. “But I always had a good understanding of the relationship various species had with their habitats.” In the years that followed, Tejas went from the Sahyadris to the Eastern Ghats, the northeast, the Andamans, the Malayan archipelago, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. “Everything in the tropics is interlinked,” he said.

A lonely goodbye to Madhav Gadgil, one of the tallest environmentalists of our times.

Ameer Shahul

Under the banyan trees of Navi Peth in Pune, Madhav Gadgil was taken for cremation last evening. The gathering was small, some forty, perhaps fifty people.

No ministers. No senior officials. No tricolour to drape the body. No guard of honour salutes. No ceremonial rifle volleys.

One expects a crowd, the usual press cameras and public mourning. Instead, there was a pause, a quiet uncertainty, as if this farewell were happening somewhere it wasn’t meant to.

State honours had been promised, but never quite arrived. Even the police escort lost its way. For nearly half an hour, Gadgil’s body lay waiting, wrapped in simple white, while the city carried on around it, indifferent.

For me, this was not the death of a distant public figure.

In the 1990s, when I was starting out as a science correspondent with the Press Trust of India in Bengaluru, Madhav Gadgil was already a towering presence at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc). At the IISc's Centre for Ecological Sciences, he stood out, not by volume or self-importance, but by intellectual rigour and moral clarity.

I walked into his office many a time in those years, notebooks open, deadlines close. He listened carefully, answered precisely, never spoke down. He believed knowledge carried responsibility, and that science without ethics was incomplete. Those conversations stayed with me, shaping how I understood both journalism and ecology.

This was also the man who later led the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel, producing a report that treated the mountains not as real estate or mineral stock, but as living systems. The Gadgil Committee Report spoke of ecological limits, decentralised governance, community rights, and long-term survival.

A Padma Bhushan awardee. A UN Champion of the Earth. A lifelong defender of forests, rivers, biodiversity, and uncomfortable truths. In death, he was treated as someone easily forgotten.

The trees were not.

The old banyans stood quietly, their leaves stirring in the afternoon air. Gadgil had given his life to them. Trees remember. Animals remember. They show up when people don’t.

Had this been a politician or an industrialist, roads in Pune would have been sealed, helicopters circling, television studios filled with tributes and theatrical grief. Power is never allowed to pass quietly.

But a man who tried to protect the land that sustains us all was sent off almost unnoticed.

The trees stood witness.

The rest of us moved on.

Goodbye, Madhav Gadgil.

Forgive us.

We did not know how to honour you.