Why Valmik Thapar Needs A Plan B

‘‘Whenever things got bad, something always kept me going—spotting an unexpected tiger in Bandipur, or seeing 110 rhinos in a single day at Kaziranga. It was a sense of timelessness where days passed by in minutes. These pleasures are almost lost to me because I spend most of my time fighting politicians in the city,’’ says Thapar, who’s served on close to 60 government bodies. Even his park visits are down to one month in a year. And there’s no guarantee of bumping into old friends.

Why is Valmik Thapar so important to Panthera tigris—at once the symbol of the country’s history, traditions, promise and huge failings? After all, even some of Thapar’s colleagues in the conservation community regard him as an extremist. But divining Thapar is important because his moods uncannily reflect the state of our greatest carnivore—and down the line the myriad species linked to it, the health of our rivers, and our lands. His current state of mind is a grim reality check on the downward spiral of wild India.

After 30 years of hyperbole, the drained warrior says he has released his last books, Tiger: The Ultimate Guide and The Last Tiger: Struggling for Survival, this month. The reason: He holds himself personally responsible for the big cat’s bleak future. ‘‘I failed to save the tiger, so I have to withdraw and pause. Obviously the current line of action is inadequate and it’s time to chart a new course. I need a miracle to invigorate myself to write again,’’ says the author of 15 tiger books. Now he claims nothing materialized from his efforts. ‘‘He believes there are no more truths to tell with regard to the tiger and what it needs to survive,’’ says Bittu Sahgal, close friend and editor of Sanctuary Asia.

In his time out, the writer intends to spend his days peering into the past for answers. ‘‘There are 500 books written on the tiger from the 19th century onwards—I want to know how people faced these problems then,’’ he says. Three hundred of them lie in his personal library, many are hunting books with detailed descriptions of wildlife.

His only competitor in the collector’s corner is three-and-a-half-year-old son Hamir and his omnibus of animal fables—books by Eric Carle like The Very Hungry Caterpillar and 1 2 3 to the Zoo, as well as titles from the Little Tiger Press.

As Hamir and he spend quality time in their Delhi home, admiring folk art with tiger motifs and countless pictures of the jungle’s poster boy, Thapar fears he will have to crush the child’s artless conviction about tigers. ‘‘He believes they’ll always be there to see,’’ says Thapar who takes his son along on as many trips as possible.

His own first sighting was at Jim Corbett National Park in Uttar Pradesh, where his uncle was the chief conservator of forests. In 1960, from atop an elephant, the teenager watched his first cub being flushed out from the grass below by the tusker’s stride.

His tiger guru, Fateh Singh Rathore, former director of Ranthambore National Park, remembers the jolly young lad who first came there to escape family problems. ‘‘He was so excited whenever he saw a tiger, he’d come running. Once I decided to test his enthusiasm and asked him to go a few feet from a tigress to untie the bait and he did, even though she came snarling at his face,’’ recalls Rathore. The practice of luring a tiger involved belling its lunch and releasing the animal into the bushes. But Thapar insisted on walking with the bell himself. ‘‘Failure has made him more serious than he ever was,’’ says Rathore.

Thapar remains as militant, but there’s a new tender side, which Rathore believes, has come from being a father.

His parental duties require him to nurture new talent—one of them is Hamir’s favourite pastime, car spotting. From the passenger seat of Thapar’s second-hand Honda City, Hamir can identify the make of every vehicle that whizzes by. Every time he visits Mumbai—usually during the Prithvi festival organised by wife Sanjna Kapoor—he buys his son miniature car models. Last year, for the first time, he put on a diving suit on a trip to the Maldives. His reward: An underwater Serengeti.

Thapar finds himself driven by instinct. ‘‘If I don’t like something at first, there’s no way I’m going to do it,’’ he says talking about his disdain for neckties. He’s unable to knot one, and once refused a gymkhana membership as the meetings required him to dress formally. Because of his non-negotiable position on shaving his beard, villagers have nicknamed him Bhalu saab.

It was also gut feeling that drew him to Kapoor. After his work on the Emmy award-winning film Land of the Tiger, she interviewed him on the then Amul India Show. ‘‘I immediately thought to myself, this is interesting, I want to get to know her better, and I suggested a trip to the Wild Ass Sanctuary in the Little Rann of Kutch,’’ laughs Thapar, recalling that first date.

Being a father also comes naturally. The full-time babysitter is happy to offer horseback rides around the house, while allowing Kapoor to pursue her theatrical interests. In his wife, he’s found not only a sounding board but also a business collaborator. Based on his research, Kapoor produced a guide to Ranthambore and donated it to the forest guard. The volume, sold only around the park, has generated revenues worth over Rs 10 lakh to date. The couple also worked on Bridge of God, a book on Kenya’s Masai Mara tribe.

Born into a family of journalists and political commentators, his tiger obsession was cause for much concern, especially when he turned down a lucrative offer from Sriram Chemicals, after ranking first in social anthropology at Delhi University. ‘‘But my parents saw tigers before they died and understood what I was trying to do,’’ says Thapar, who also thanks them for his uncommon first name.

At many functions, he’s introduced as the saintly Valmiki by organisers who assume that Valmik must be a misprint. ‘‘My name does derive from Valmiki. In fact, some people have liked it so much that about five of my friends have named their sons after me,’’ he laughs.

Thanks to years spent tracking the tiger, Thapar not only thinks for the beast, but also like one. His game plan—get tourists out to give the forests time to recover, relocate the resorts and plant armed commandos to police the reserves. He believes that most tiger committees focus on improving the lives of the people around the parks. He insists there can be no coexistence between the two, contrary to what the Tribal Bill proposes. His favourite one-liner: The tiger and man cannot Chipko, like a man hugs a tree.

Recently, he publicly ripped apart the recommendations of the newly formed Task Force for Reviewing the Management of Tiger Reserves. In 2001, he resigned from the board of the World Wildlife Fund when he was asked to tone down the rhetoric. He also quit the Bombay Natural History Society four months ago, when they refused to seal the age limit for office-bearers at 60.

He abhors big NGOs and thinks globalisation is an unnecessary evil. All this and more have earned him the reputation of being a solo player. ‘‘Certain conservationists, though well meaning, think the weight of the entire crisis is on their shoulders and only they can solve the problem without involving people,’’ says Sunita Narain, chairperson of the Task Force.

Thapar hasn’t always been a loner. In 1988, he set up one of the first wildlife NGOs in the country—the Ranthambore Foundation. For a year, he tracked cattle with the locals, marking the highest yielders so they could be protected. ‘‘But something failed, and I gave it up,’’ he sighs. All that remains familiar in Ranthambore is a patch of land he purchased to plant saplings, which led some of his detractors to accuse him of profiting from the reserve. It’s the same plot on which he tried to kick-start a dairy development programme.

But there are takers for some of his ideas. Like Hemendra Kothari, leading Mumbai banker and founder of the Wildlife Conservation Trust, who agrees that our forests require policing. “That’s what saved the rhino in Kaziranga,’’ says Kothari.

Thapar’s anti-globalisation stance is more personal than people realise. A self-professed techno-moron, he hasn’t learned to SMS and still writes all his books in longhand. Right now, it’s looking into the future that haunts him. When the next year of the tiger dawns in 2010, Thapar hopes that he won’t need picture books to show a new generation what a tiger was.