Readers Write In #806: Fare Thee Well, Tiger Man!

By Madan Mohan

Legendary conservationist Valmik Thapar passed away on 31^st May. He was 73 and had been suffering from cancer. Some say nobody did more than him for the tiger.

Other than trips to Sanjay Gandhi National Park and the boat ride at Thekkady (which takes you into Periyar Tiger Reserve, really and where I did see a herd of gaur by the riverbank), I have precious little to show for my self-proclaimed wildlife love.  It is after moving to Harare for work that I was finally able to visit a national park (Zambezi) where I got to see a bunch of animals (though not the big one – lion).

But it’s true and it dates back to my school days.  Those who knew me then would know this side of me well and maybe even remember it with not a little irritation.  And I heard about Thapar in the late 90s.

You’d think I was a natural fan of his but it didn’t quite pan out that way.  I found him very tiger-obsessed (duh!).  I was much more of a lion guy (still am in some ways if only because the Asiatic lion remains one epidemic away from an extinction event). 

I don’t remember the program anymore but a journalist asked him why he focused so much on the tiger when there were so many endangered animals in India.  His explanation was pragmatic to the core – tigers are only found in abundance where there are large water sources.  And such water sources naturally support a plethora of fauna.  So, you save the tiger, you save an ecosystem. 

True enough but it’s equally true that he did love tigers like they were his own.  How he managed to thread the needle, to love them madly but to also respect their immense strength and not cross over into Timothy Treadwell-like lunacy, I will never know.

If you have read any of his books or watched his documentaries, it is impossible to not quickly become aware of the extent of his tiger-love.  I loved reading his Secret Life of Tigers, its scope being encyclopaedic about all things tiger and Ranthambore.  It was also graced by the brilliant photography of the late Fateh Singh Rathore.  Rathore was there at Ranthambore from the get-go, from the beginning of Project Tiger in 1973.  You could say the same about Rathore – nobody did more for the tigers of Ranthambore than Rathore.  And Rathore was Thapar’s mentor!

With conservation becoming rapidly re-centralized, like nearly everything else, in the last ten years, Thapar’s roar had been diminished long before it had been silenced.  He was barely heeded to anymore.  Time will tell whether he was justified in his objections to the reintroduction of cheetah in Kuno National Park.

But whether or not those in power agreed with him anymore, they will nevertheless have to concede that there were/are few champions of the tiger who were as enthusiastic and as indefatigable.  It was a lifelong mission for him.  Is there somebody else who will pick up the torch from him to similarly make it their lifelong mission?  And will that somebody actually come from his kind of background – Thapar family and married to Sanjana Kapoor? 

Think about that.  You’d take Thapar for a typical, privileged Delhi socialite if you didn’t know how obsessed he was with the fate of wild tigers in India. May there be many more like him.  Fare thee well, tiger man!