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The Binsar sanctuary in Uttarakhand is not strange to wildlife enthusiasts. However, for lesser mortals who have little kinship with animals the place had almost fallen off the map.
Till a modest cartographic intervention helped it find place in the list of the worlds's most innovative eco-tourism spots 2011 published by The Guardian newspaper. The jury at Guardian chanced upon an ambrosial map of Binsar. A discovery that put Binsar amongst the top 20 eco-friendly destinations globally, the only Indian place to have made it this year.
The map is the work of the innovative minds of a handful of young men and women working in Archi, a non-profit trust established in 2009. This team led by founder-member Anne Feenstra, an architect from Netherlands, has taken upon itself the task of creating maps of little known locales.
Unlike most traditional maps with longitudes and latitudes the Archi maps depict stories of the place through the people and culture of the local inhabitants while providing information to tourists. Anne Feenstra who teaches at the School of Planning and Architecture describes maps as friends.
"What you make of a friend is up to you. You could exchange courtesies and move on (which is what happens with most maps) or engage in long conversations. A good map is a like a friend that will arouse your curiosity and lead you to spend time exploring the place, its people and its culture."
Many adventurers have been lured into serendipitous quests by maps. For some others making a map is itself an adventure. The act of mapping was a near happenstance for Anne and his team that began at Garli, a village in in Kangra district, Himachal Pradesh.
Archi, that is involved in a wide spectrum of activities from designing sustainable buildings to city planning and restoration, stumbled upon map making almost by accident. A group of men from the Sood and Lal trading families, calling themselves Friends of Garli, approached Archi in 2009 to help promote their hamlet.
Setting out to first know the place, Anne's team soon discovered this little dorp has a highdensity of heritage buildings and pedestrian walkaways. "Being traders from the colonial times the men of this land had borrowed heavily from all kinds of architecture for their buildings," he says.
The oldest house in this area dates back 140 years while the youngest would pre-date to independence. Archi decided to first create a map of this little hamlet that would tell the story of this place and its forgotten tribe.
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