Zeenat’s back home, soon in living room

The first day of the year is a good day to come back home after vacationing. And back home she was on Wednesday after a 21-day sojourn through three states – Zeenat, the 3-yr-old tigress from Odisha’s Similipal Tiger Reserve. It’s not every day that focus from our species and its mindless and mindful activities get shifted to another sentient being. Zeenat‘s adventures through Odisha, Jharkhand and West Bengal, from where she was picked up by authorities, held the nation’s human attention. Her roamings across eastern India highlighted the illusion of geographic ‘borders’. Who knows, left to her own, she may have crossed over to Bangladesh at some point without having to bother about silly things like travel documents, money and religious tags.

Zeenat has earned her stripes for being the most closely followed traveller of 2024. For a generation that doesn’t believe in anything unless it is ‘posted’ on social media, the tigress was brought to Similipal last November from Maharashtra to improve the Odisha reserve’s genetic variety. But the lady, in the spirit of Bruce Springsteen’s lines from ‘Born to Run’ – ‘We’re gonna get to that place/ Where we really wanna go and we’ll walk in the sun’ – saw the world unreservedly. After spending a few days in an enclosure, Zeenat will be back in the wild, her familiar living room, as it were.