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The Plateau Whisperers
The Morning Standard
|July 20, 2025
Hidden across Maharashtra's Konkan coast lie mysterious and little-known rock carvings
"Imagine Sudhir Risbud walking slowly across a Lwarm, windless plateau of laterite in coastal Maharashtra. The rock underfoot is rust-red and coarse. Around him, the landscape stretches flat and quiet a sea-facing tableau like hundreds of others that dot the Konkan coast. Risbud, a conservationist and naturalist from Ratnagiri, sees differently. His gaze doesn't rest on the horizon. It scans the ground.
A faint curve catches his eye a smooth depression, too deliberate. What looked like random lines resolve into form: a massive elephant etched into the plateau, nearly 50 feet long and 48 feet wide.
Within its stony silhouette swarm dozens of smaller figures such as stingrays, fish, clawed animals, shapes part-familiar, part-enigmatic.
This story is from the July 20, 2025 edition of The Morning Standard.
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