TELEVISTA
To animals with love
Amita Malik

Swathi Thyagarajan is to Indian television what David Attenborough is to European TV—protector of the environment. Her programme on NDTV, ‘Born Wild’, has, over the years, built up a formidable reputation for tackling a variety of problems with research, documentation and good presentation. It is no accident that on the last two occasions when I have rung her up to check on a detail before writing, she was in Africa, "doing research for NDTV", she explained. It was typical of the thoroughness with which she pursues a subject.

Last week it was an unusual subject tackled with usual seriousness. She did a painstaking story on the life and cruel fate of performing bears, ultimately introducing us to an organisation which tries to rehabilitate them after they have been rescued. Ironically, they are caught, trained and made to perform for a living by a tribe which has done so for generations. The owners of these bears, in some ways, are even more difficult to rehabilitate than the bears themselves.

If animals are treated well and properly fed, they behave like household pets.

But first, the bears. The extent of cruelty to which they are subjected makes one wonder if what man does to beasts is worse than what man does to man. The noses of bears are pierced. They are tied to ropes for life. They make movements to entertain the onlookers. But actually their movements cause them immense pain.

This is one of the horrifying truths to which this programme opened our eyes. Yet those bears respond to human kindness. This was proved by the way in which they cuddled up to Swathi, as, indeed, have leopards and other fierce beasts from time to time.

One of the worst treated of them, when relieved of pain and properly fed, behaved like a household pet. But so far removed are they from their natural environment that it is impossible to let them return to the wild where they should have been in the first place. They would probably die due to inability to return to nature.

I repeat that Swathi Thyagarajan, who has won both national and international awards for her splendid devotion to the environment which she communicates to the rest of us, deserves regular viewing of her programmes, which are not only brimful of important information but, because of their subjects, also provide that quality of understated entertainment which is the hallmark of good television. I have no idea what Swathi is doing in Africa this time. But I am sure her viewers can look forward to something highly interesting and unusual. In fact I would make her programmes’ compulsory viewing for children and in schools.

The horrible events in Goa preceding, accompanying and following the Scarlett Keeling case continue to appal us and, to some extent, lead to serious programmes which try to get at the root of the decaying reputation of Goa as a safe and pleasurable tourist spot. The one programme so far which has tried to analyse what happened was Barkha Dutt's foray to Goa, where she held a session of her weekly programme, ‘We The People’, with the participation of Scarlett's mother, a local minister, sociologists, prominent citizens and people from the crowd. Singer Remo Fernandes was an articulate participant.

Personally, while I feel sympathy for Scarlett's mother for losing her child, however irresponsibly, in such a cruel manner, I feel more research should have been done on her previous life in London, and why and how she came to Goa and sustain herself. The British media has brought out some disturbing details, such as Scarlett’s mother having had nine children by different fathers. Truly, there seems to be more to the story than we have learnt so far. It is time the Indian media also did some serious social analysis, devoid of sensationalism.