THE DAVID ATTENBOROUGH OF INDIA

[Guest guest]

http://www.tribuneindia.com/2005/20050514/saturday/sight.htm

Call of the wild

Amita Malik

 

WITH the Indian obsession with sports and politics, it is not

surprising that the print and electronic media have also fallen in

line. Of course, Maneka Gandhi has done her bit on TV in a mostly

critical role. And it took the Bedi brothers years to get recognition

from Doordarshan, then the only TV channel around, and that because

they had won many international awards before they got recognition in

India. There are, however, followers of David Attenborough's

fascinating programmes on environment and, of course, wildlife on the

BBC and elsewhere, but there was a sad lack of anything consistent on

Indian TV.

 

It goes to the credit of Swathi Thyagarajan (of NDTV) and her

colleague Gargi Rawat, who have kept up high standards, and do

in-depth research without any supporting teams. Week after week, Born

Wild, by Swathi Thyagarajan, picks up one or two themes. Last week, it

was on elephants. The programme tells viewers all that there is to

know about the particular animal, wildlife reservation and vanishing

species. I never miss Swathi's programme and was glad to know that

young though she is, she has also followed the career of the Bedi

brothers, hopefully as a model, and that she is also a great admirer

of David Attenborough.

 

Which brings me on to the big question: Why are such serious

programmes absent on other Indian channels? I remember Swathi doing a

thought-provoking programme when the leopard menace just outside

Mumbai was agitating not only those directly affected but also

wildlife specialists and the ordinary people all over India and

outside.

 

Another channel then covered the same problem as a news programme and

it did not help much that they brought in a complete Mumbai Hindi film

unit to shoot a film there, complete with Amitabh Bachchan. The

programme was doing exactly what it was warning others about —

intruding into the territory of the leopards, which seemed to be the

injured party rather than the humans who had encroached on their

natural habitat.

 

Swathi Thyagarajan, on the other hand, focused more on the cruelty

involved in the captured leopards being cramped in small spaces before

being bundled off to be let loose somewhere else, and being subjected

to onlookers crowding in front of their cages while confined in those

narrow spaces.

 

One cannot help feeling that if the media, and particularly the

electronics media, had paid more attention to wildlife on a regular,

researched basis, the alarming disappearance of tigers would not have

come as such a surprise, and perhaps been prevented.

 

And that if they had involved specialists like Valmik Thapar in

regular programmes before the BBC picked him up for an outstanding

series some years ago, Indian wildlife would have been in a better

state and the general public more informed and therefore also involved

and let problems such as that of disappearing tigers, not the national

scheme it has now become.

 

 

http://www.hindu.com/br/2006/01/17/stories/2006011700311500.htm

In the cause of the tiger

 

G. Ananthakrishnan

 

A valuable corpus presenting current perspectives mixed with the

historical perception of the tiger

TIGER — The Ultimate Guide: Valmik Thapar; Oxford University Press and

CDS Books in association with Two Brothers Press, YMCA Library

Building, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi-110001. Rs. 1950.

 

Valmik Thapar has been saying in recent times that he has engaged an

untested sixth gear to get the campaign to save the tiger moving

again. His anxiety for the cat is well founded, and heightened by

local extinctions in designated tiger reserves, the most publicised

example of which is Sariska.

 

These are difficult times for tigers, tiger biologists and

conservationists in general, as the Ministry of Environment and

Forests, in a bizarre and self-negating twist to its mandated role,

has been dangerously tinkering with protective laws. The Ministry has

also been surprisingly passive and tolerant when confronted by news of

the decline of the species due to poaching.

 

The least that any determined activist can do at such a troubled

moment is to advance public understanding of the tiger's plight. This

is crucial to create a broad constituency of citizens who reject myths

about the species, support science-based conservation and are wholly

unwilling to tolerate poaching and habitat loss.

 

Redoubtable fighter

 

 

Thapar, the dissenting member of the national Tiger Task Force of

2005, is a redoubtable fighter in the cause of the tiger. He is the

author of many works that provide hours of well-researched and

immensely interesting detail on the big cat.

 

This book is an anthology that improves upon his admirable collection

by lending new insight, stunning photographs and art motifs drawn from

around the world.

 

Some of the most dedicated researchers, writers and campaigners who

have worked for the tiger have contributed to this compilation. There

is George Schaller, whose path-breaking work in Kanha helped India's

most admired conservationist-Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, to form

her earliest policies to protect forests, K. Ullas Karanth and Raghu

S. Chundawat, tiger biologists who have braved governmental

intimidation to pursue science, Billy Arjan Singh who has spent a

lifetime cheek-by-whisker in Dudhwa and Fateh Singh Rathore, Romila

Thapar, Dale Miquelle, Ruth Padel, Belinda Wright and others.

 

An assemblage of experts and writers such as this can legitimately

bring a diverse set of perspectives and the book does not disappoint.

There is Thapar's own rich field experience that is shared in the

major part of the narrative, often marked by despondency at the

hopelessness of tigers dying in metal traps and electrified snares in

`protected places'; the cautious optimism of George Schaller, who

reminds the reader that India and Nepal have done the most for the

tiger, but it is only in Russia that the species has grown in numbers;

Andrew Kitchener's interesting taxonomical explanation, based on

bio-geographical studies, that there were originally only three tiger

sub-species: the mainland (Panthera tigris tigris) spanning Asia

through China, Indo-China and into the Russian Far East, the Sunda

Islands (Panthera tigris sondaica) covering Sumatra, Java, Bali and

Borneo, and the Caspian (Panthera tigris virgata). Thapar puts the

issue in perspective by pointing out that tigers were divided into

eight sub-species traditionally. The Caspian, Balinese and Javan

sub-species are extinct, hounded out of existence by man, leaving the

Amur, Bengal, Indo-Chinese, South China and Sumatran sub-species.

There are fears for these too and the South China tiger may be

extinct.

 

Historical perspective

 

 

Human reaction to the tiger has, over the ages, ranged from fear,

provoking deadly violence, to the mystical and religious. Romila

Thapar, who traces changing responses to the tiger during the

evolution of India's civilisation from pre-historic times, concludes

her scholarly exploration with an appeal for reflection on the altered

relationship of people with forests and wild creatures.

 

Valmik Thapar completes this theme with his own record of the grisly

end that befell the vast majority of tigers, the decline turning

precipitous with the advent of the gun and the automobile.

 

The fate of the tiger outside India is not often documented in

interesting detail for a popular audience, but this book has appealing

perspectives on how it is faring in Russia, at the far northern end of

its range. Dale Miquelle tells these heart-warming stories of tigers

in a distant and cold landscape with passion and they only reaffirm

the value of armed security in the protection of endangered species.

 

Poaching

 

 

Where such safeguards are missing, there could be devastating

consequences. Belinda Wright, who recently exposed the apparently

thriving trade in tiger skins in Tibet, records the grim reality at

some length. We learn, for example, that the poaching machine is well

oiled and thought to be functioning essentially from 13 villages of

Katni district in Central India, feeding the deadly trade in tiger

bones, teeth, nails and skins.

 

Thapar's Guide is a valuable corpus that presents such current

perspectives mixed with the historical perception of the tiger among

artists (from Indian miniatures to Salvador Dali), scientists, writers

and conservationists. Ruth Padel, a descendant of Charles Darwin, goes

back to the Origin of Species to explain why the great evolutionary

biologist did not talk about tigers in any significant degree.

 

Her conclusion is both elementary and convincing: tigers represent all

of nature in such fundamental terms that Darwin may not have felt the

need to write explicitly about them. " In a sense, he was writing about

them all the time. "

 

It is this timeless and all-pervasive influence of tigers on the human

consciousness that Thapar's work captures beautifully.