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NOTE FROM JONAH: This is the continuation of a photo series from India. If you’re just joining us, here’s what you’ve missed:

1. I’m not alone here
2. People ‘like’ my diarrhea
3. Dancing In(dia) the Streets
4. Indian trains: Contemptibly cozy, crammed and claustrophobic
5. Feeding a City Part II: From Macro to Micro
6. Confusing realities of child labor
7. Enlightined in Bodh Gaya बोधगया
8. Kathmandu — You’ve met your match: Varanasi वाराणसी
9. Varanasi वाराणसी: Full Photographic Spectrum
10. From sea to sand: Welcome to Rajasthan
11. Holy cow!
12. Gender inequality in a Blue City
13. Indian Failwhale Tiger Tracking

And just like that — your back in India (at least in the digitally vicarious sense).

After leaving the sandy deserts of Jodhpur, Rajasthan I figured since I was in the neighborhood, I should probably stop and see the Taj Mahal. However, on my way I decided to split my trip up and stop in Ranthambore National Park — to once again, attempt to track a (alleged) Bengal Tiger.

And once again, I was thwarted by nature. Or perhaps, it’s just harder to find a wild tiger than one would believe based upon the tourist literature to Ranthambore National Park. While in Nepal, I searched for the enormous cats by elephant and by foot, in India, I searched by open air jeep.

As a method of searching for wildlife, the jeep seems highly ineffective to me. I was up at sunrise driving through the Rajisthani park, and its hard to believe that tigers would want to go toward a noisy car.

Hence today’s title “Indian Failwhale Tiger Tracking.” If you are unfamiliar with the Failwhale, you apparently don’t use Twitter. And while its hard for me to admit that everyone doesn’t use Twitter, I will briefly explain the Failwhale with a little help from our good friends at the Urban Dictionary. The Failwhale is:

DEFINITION: The image of a whale being carried by a number of birds that appears when the Twitter website is overloaded or has failed. Failwhale appears to now have his/her own fanclub.

WORD ORIGIN: From fail + whale (probably for rhyming purposes).
i.e.: Sad that Twitter had failed just when he needed it most, he was somewhat consoled by the appearance of his beloved Failwhale.

After this quick lesson in nascent Twitter vocabulary that has moved past the Twittersphere and into the global vernacular, hopefully we are all on the same page now. And although I didn’t see any tigers and I saw no real whales in Ranthambore National Park — I did see some wildlife along the way, including myriad monkeys, bird life, deers and some boars with very human like eyes.

While I didn’t see any big game, the park is known for its leopard, nilgai, dhole, wild boar, sambar, hyena, sloth bear and chital. I’m not sure if it requires some type of skill set or just simply more time and patience to see this stuff but its certainly not easy. In Nepal’s Chitwan National Park I hired a guide and we spent eight hours walking through three meter high grass (in the rain) following an infinite number of paw prints that seemed to simply go in circles.

When the amazonian grass got annoying to the point where there could have been a tiger two feet away from me and I would have had no idea, I rented an elephant (as you do … ) and road around high above the grass looking down for the elusive tiger.

From what I know about cats, be them big ones or small ones they are certainly much quicker than most animals and don’t seem to have the need for attention, unless of course they want it. So tracking these animals seems more like dumb luck than skill, but I’d gladly here the opinion of anyone who actually knows what they are talking about, rather than my circumstantial evidence.

So after my second failure this year to track a tiger, I moved on to the Taj Mahal as buildings seemed much easier to track than wild cats. The India photo series picks up at this magnificent building with some gorgeous light next.

A LETTER TO EVAN OSNOS:

In a “Letter to China” New Yorker writer Evan Osnos asks “Does Twitter matter in China?”

Having lived here for only 11 months, I have never known China to have open access to Twitter as it was blocked by the government last June right before I arrived. However, I have been an active community member of China’s Twitter community since day 1 … well, ok, maybe day 10 after having to learn the A, B, C’s of VPNS, proxies, PPTP, LT2P, and other acronyms you only know if you have to.

I have been part of other Twitter communities all around the world — and I would suggest China’s Twittersphere is among the most sophisticated and advanced in the world.

Osnos writes:

Can Twitter really tie people together in a country where it is blocked? Before writing a profile of artist Ai Weiwei—published in the magazine this week — I had only a vague sense of Twitter’s presence here. It has been blocked since last June, which means that the average Web user who tries to sign on to Twitter from a regular Internet connection will get a page that says that the “connection has been reset,” or words to that effect.

Osnos key statement here is: “the average Web user who tries to sign on to Twitter” is blocked.

So who does this leave? The super users.

This makes China’s Twittersphere extremely unique. We’ve lost a lot of the bullshit that clogs up Twitter streams in Europe and the U.S. Users here are so committed to using the service, we are willing to go through all kinds of bassackward measures to communicate and share information.

The people that will try Twitter out for a week, send three tweets out a week on their dinner plans and than never use the service again — simply don’t exist here. If you see someone on Twitter, you can pretty much guarantee they will be there day and night and every day this week.

We also all share a couple things in common beyond using Twitter. We all face the same government restrictions and all chose to find ways around them. This effort unites the Twitter community in China. We all share a common understanding of computer systems and have a broader understanding of Twitter in comparison to an average Twitter user elsewhere. Jason Ng’s small sample of Chinese Twitter users survey points out:

The majority of the [Chinese Twitter] users has bachelor degree and the second largest group is master degree holders followed by twitters with tertiary education background.

The data shows that about 30% of the respondents are students followed by computer software and hardware sector (15%) and then Internet related production sector (12.5%). If we group the two into I.T industry, then we can see that students and I.T professionals are the key player in Twitter community as they together constitute more than 50% of the respondents.

Internally we have a community of well educated, tech-savvy users sharing information and dialogue from around a fast-changing country. However, our community reaches far beyond the Great Firewall of China. Our Twitter friends outside of the middle kingdom are China experts, political analysts and the likes. In a secret society, the voices of those that speak beyond the walls might be heard more.

Although I have only circumstantial evidence, this might mean the average China user might have more followers than the average user outside of China. Are our voices louder because of China’s ban on Twitter?

Yesterday, the Dalai Lama responded to questions via Twitter and other social media networks. While Mashable used the headline “Dalai Lama Uses Twitter to Circumvent Chinese Government,” in some ways it might be more accurate to say: The Dalai Lama addressed a very powerful group of tech savy netizens in the world’s largest blogging country. Some estimates say there are over 30 million blogs in China. Those blogs reach the world’s largest online population. Some estimates say China now has over 400 million Internet users. As an outlet to reach more ears — the Dalai Lama’s tact is both powerful internally in China — and acts a symbol to the rest of the world.

AFP reports:

150,000 Chinese are estimated to have Twitter accounts, with as many as 100,000 of them physically living in the mainland.

While 150,000 is a small number compared to the rest of the world — it would be pretty fair to say — many of those people who use Twitter are also blogging to to Osnos’ “average Web user” and the other 400 million Chinese internet users. The strong Twitter community helps bring information outside the Great Firewall but also streams lot of information into Chinese based social media sites like QQ, Rehren — who users far outnumber Twitter’s in china.

Some useful links

• Evan Osnos: Letter to China — Does Twitter matter in China
• Evan Osnos Article: Must-Reads on Ai Weiwei and Chinese Art
• My Beijing Twitter list (not on here – @jonah_kessel and I’ll add you)
• Kaiser Kuo’s China Folks Twitter list
• 12vpn.com: A great VPN that works on the mobile platform and old fashioned computers
• Viscosity: A great Open VPN client
• AFP: Dalai Lama tweets to Chinese web users
• The Blog Herald: How How many blogs in China?
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