From ANIMAL PEOPLE,  October 2011:

“I come to bury Caesar,  not to praise him.  The evil that men do lives after them.  The good is oft interred with their bones.” –William Shakespeare

Jagjit Singh, 70,  died of a brain hemorrhage in Mumbai on October 10,  2011.   “Widely credited for reviving the popularity of classical Hindustani love songs in Urdu, known as ghazals,”  recalled New York Times correspondent Neha Thirani,  Singh was also remembered “for using his voice to speak up for elephants needlessly being killed by speeding trains on railway tracks,”  said PETA/India manager of media and celebrity projects Sachin S. Bangera.  Singh wrote to former Indian railways minister Mamata Banerjee in September 2010,   after a train moving at 70 miles per hour killed seven elephants in the Jalpaiguri district of West Bengal,  asking her to “limit the speed of trains running through elephant corridors and to use speed-detection guns to monitor train speeds.”  The use of speed guns to clock train speeds was introduced in October 2010 by Azam Siddiqui,  a TV news camera man who first wrote to ANIMAL PEOPLE about road and railway threats to elephants in 2004.  ANIMAL PEOPLE helped Siddiqui to collect the information he needed to apply for the PETA/India grant that funded the acquisition of a speed gun used to demonstrate the efficacy of the technique–but while the speed gun easily passed all tests,  train speeds are still not routinely monitored.  Three elephants were injured in  July 2011 near the site of the collison that killed the seven,  and another was killed in October 2011.  More than 150 elephants have been killed by trains in India since 1987. Read more