Every life form makes a difference
[Music]
hello everyone
how many of y’all have spent your
vacations tracking tigers or elephants
in a forest
or better still doing pottery in a
quaint little indian village
not many right because when it comes to
picking the ideal travel
destination wildlife sanctuaries don’t
necessarily feature on that list for
many people
but that wasn’t true in my case i was
four years old
when i did my first road trip mumbai
to the southernmost tip of indian
mainland kanyakumari
my parents planned this exotic road
journey
because they wanted me to experience my
country
and its different cultures we visited a
lot of national parks
went to religious places of worship and
met incredible local people
and i distinctly remember one incident
we had stopped for lunch at a small
village
and there was this bunch of kids who
were playing
with a small mud house that they had
built
and they had these dolls with them made
out of twigs
and they had used jackfruit seeds for
decorating the heads of the doll
and they had dressed up those dolls with
leaves and flower petals
seeing their smiling faces and simple
lifestyle
made me wonder do you really need barbie
dolls and fancy toys
to be happy in life even if you’re a
small child
so this question of finding true
happiness kept popping up
as i traveled across india and
experienced the lifestyles of different
local communities
the answer presented itself and i
realized
that finding true happiness is all about
searching it within yourself you only
need to know
how to mine it travel changes you
in so many different ways much more
than you can ever imagine it shapes your
personality
and it broadens your horizons being a
wildlife presenter and storyteller
has taught me so many different things
and these
lessons have been ingrained within me
possibly because i didn’t wrote learn it
from a textbook
sitting in a classroom so
today i’m going to share with you my top
three key lessons that i have picked up
on this journey number one respect
the first thing that nature teaches you
is to value
every creature no matter how big or
small
it is the web of life connects
all these different beings and even if
one thread is broken
then the entire balance gets tilted
similarly in human life as well we need
to respect people
irrespective of their caste creed
religion gender sexuality or vocation
for that matter
we all have a role to play on this
planet
and i discovered this more but when i
began working with the local fishing
community
in bom in mumbai during wetland
conservation project which i have been
working on for the past two years now
so mumbai as you know is a coastal city
and at one point it used to have
a lot of wetlands and mangroves and
marshes
today very few of these pockets remain
because a majority of them have been
taken up for development
so there is this one wetland among these
known as punjay
which is the last remaining wetland of
oran
now this is about 523 hectares of land
which is like magically based out with a
pristine ecosystem
and every year over 1.4 lakh migratory
birds
visit punjab not only this over 2
500 fishermen are dependent on punjab
for their daily income and livelihood
so panchay also happens to be selected
as the hub
of a very massive
luxury residential complex which is
supposed to be a part of a larger
special economic zone which is coming up
at uran
now what’s at stake if punjab wetlands
are reclaimed
one not only are you standing to lose
a pristine ecological habitat
but also real people’s livelihoods like
you
and me will be gone forever
won’t it be much easier if the developer
just decided to you know just shift the
place of this uh township from punjay
to another location probably within the
essiz area
that way it’s a win-win situation for
both the local community
and the migratory birds and the bird
life out there
because we are talking about real people
who
have been fishing for generations these
people
know about sustainable fishing about
conservation
about the migratory birds that visit
these wetlands
much more than an average city dweller
does
and it is the fishes that are caught by
these fishermen
that end up on silver platters in a
five-star hotel
yet when it comes to taking decisions
that impair their livelihood
they are taken with undue haste without
even proper thinking
and probable uh consideration of
alternatives
thus implying that we have to be more
inclusive
and more considerate of all these local
communities around us
just like fishermen who act as guardians
of
our ocean and of our seas the indigenous
tribals of our forests
or its protectors so when you’re sitting
in your house and probably
you know wondering whether to binge
watch on national geographic or
discovery channel
after a yummy meal there is someone who
in the forest has patrolled all day and
is having a meager meal
when you are watching a tiger
documentary and marveling at
the majestic bengal tiger there is
someone
who has stood tall against poachers
to defend the life of that very tiger
a forest guard toils suffers
and emerges victorious every day
but their victories largely go unheard
they are the first line of defense when
it comes
to our wildlife they put their lives in
danger
every single day to protect the last of
our endangered
yet they aren’t
that glorified i have had the fortune
of spending some of my time and meeting
these real life heroes and listening to
their stories
these people live in areas of human
animal conflict
sometimes they lose their loved ones or
their cattle
to animal attacks their crops get raided
by these wild animals
yet they work relentlessly to protect
the forest and its delicious
when you work towards something that you
love do it
without any expectations or hope of
getting a possible return or benefits
moving on to my third lesson which is
connected to my previous two
i got to know about this while working
on a project involving big cats
and the local communities that live with
these predators
so in gujarat if you notice there is a
tribe known as maldharis
now they are people who live right in
the heart
of geer national park which is the only
home
to the asiatic lion now these people
are cattle herders and they worship the
asiatic lion as lord narasimha
the fierce half-line half-man avatar of
lord vishnu
so i got talking to a maldari village
headman
and he told me something which stayed on
with me
his exact words are and i quote
we are the lions guests we live in their
house
so how can we ever disrespect them
those words were so poignant that they
stuck with me
despite losing their cattle time and
again to this big cat
they continued to worship it and they
never think of
revenge killing such deep is their
worship
this practice not only exists in gujarat
but in maharashtra as well
there is a group of people who revere
the tiger at lord varghoba
to them he is vana devata the lord of
the jungle
so their worship transcends the daily
temple rituals
and is actually practiced by them every
single day
this is what taught me my third lesson
of living in harmony
even if you’re sometimes in a hostile
environment
so when you look at nature there is
something infinitely healing
in the repeated refrains of her canopies
the assurance
that after every night comes a new dawn
and after every winter come spring
being a wildlife storyteller has made me
a better human being
i realized by looking at nature that
absolutely there are no barriers or
boundaries
you know there are no artificial
discriminations on the basis of caste
creed religion gender sexuality age
vocation none of them matter in real
life
because after all we all are creations
of mother nature
so when you look at the principles that
exist
in nature they are all echoed
in the preamble of the constitution of
india which is very interesting
so it’s high time i feel that we
learn tolerance and we become
understanding of the various
social and ideological beliefs and
differences that exist among various
communities
because only when we embrace each
other’s differences
then and only then can the varied colors
of humanity shine through
thank you