SIGHT & SOUND
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.

Thought for food

Food programmes are becoming as frequent, although not as popular as programmes on crime, which seem to be leading the rat race.

But surely we need something more than five-star hotel chiefs airing exotic recipes with ingredients not always within the reach of ordinary viewers.

However, what astounded me last week was to find a programme on NDTV Profit carrying a number of dishes from Hungary under the title Great Tastes of the Mediterranean. I am sure the Hungarians would be as astounded to know that their country and cuisine belong to the Mediterranean region.

And I think I have come across only one instance where the chamcha who stands by the super five-star cook while he cooks (women feature very rarely) and then tastes the food saying it is also super, had to guts to say that he found the chillies a bit too hot. But this was at a safe distance, in Hong Kong.

One almost wishes for the good-old days when various auntyjis with heavy silk saris and diamond rings showed us old-fashioned recipes home for gajar halwa and macher jhol, even if their mangalsutras got dipped in the karahi.

Only the other day, I saw a demonstration of mango panna, that good old-fashioned summer drink favoured all over India, being made in a microwave oven.

But they only cooked the green mango in it. After that it was back to the good-old method of peeling it and even squeezing the pulp out by hand. As they say, fingers were made before the microwave ovens.