00:00 Hello, good evening.
00:07 Another day, another show.
00:18 But this show is going to be slightly different.
00:19 It is going to be away from branding, marketing, politicians and politics.
00:26 It is a show about a very emotional subject and I am going to talk about it.
00:31 And I am going to talk about it at length.
00:33 And let us see how it goes.
00:37 So let me first set the context what I am going to say.
00:40 You know when you grow up in a place like Sikandarabad, which is not a, which used to
00:43 be a small little containment when we were growing up, now it has become a big city.
00:48 Most of us had bikes.
00:49 Our mode of transport was bikes.
00:52 We lived on bikes.
00:53 And bikes were a way of our life.
00:59 So because we lived on bikes, every long weekend was a ride into the countryside.
01:06 So from Sikandarabad we had some standard destinations.
01:10 We went to the Nagarjuna Sagar Dam or we went to the Srisailam forest.
01:14 These were our two big hunting grounds.
01:23 Srisailam forest possibly was the first big forest that I physically saw.
01:28 It was a teak forest, huge, big, lots of trees, very thick.
01:33 You couldn't see daylight.
01:36 And it was infested with tigers.
01:37 Did I see one?
01:41 No.
01:42 But the villagers, the local people gave us a lot of stories.
01:46 And we loved the stories.
01:47 We used to sit there with them, have a, have lunch, have tea and listen to stories.
01:53 Tiger was their part of the DNA.
01:56 They co-existed with the tiger.
02:02 My mother came from Maharashtra and my maternal uncle was a district collector.
02:11 So his last posting was in Chandrapur.
02:15 Chandrapur was close to Thadova.
02:18 And I remember pretty much after every dinner, we used to catch the driver and the jeep,
02:25 all the kids, get into the jeep and go into the forest.
02:29 This we must have done for four, five years before Thadova became what it became today.
02:33 It used to be a wild, superb forest.
02:37 Anyway, we saw a lot of wild there.
02:40 We saw wildlife.
02:41 We saw boars, deer.
02:43 At night, you couldn't see much.
02:45 Couple of times we spotted a tiger at a distance.
02:48 And yeah, it was beautiful.
02:49 We used to go to our local forest guest house there, hang out for some time and come back
02:53 home.
02:54 It was very standard.
02:55 And that's how we grew up.
02:58 Around the mid of 2000, 2005 I think, that was the first maiden trip to Africa, which
03:04 is when I saw what is the African wildlife, so different from Indian wildlife.
03:11 The elephants were bigger, the lion prides were bigger, and the cheetah was faster.
03:18 I've never seen an animal that runs faster than a cheetah.
03:22 And I've seen a couple of kills in Africa.
03:24 I've seen it from the Tanzania side, from the Kenya side, Nairobi side, Kruger National
03:32 Park.
03:33 I mean, you can just go on naming them.
03:35 They're fantastic.
03:36 But my favorite animal always in Africa has been the black mamba.
03:40 You have to see to believe it in the wild, the way it moves.
03:43 It moves faster than a cheetah.
03:44 And it was fantastic.
03:45 Scary and fantastic.
03:46 Anyway, so I have been exposed to a little bit of wildlife.
03:53 Around the same time, my journey in the Indian tiger reserve started.
04:00 I must have done two or three in a year from across the country, from Kana to Pains, Tadoba,
04:08 Andhavgarh, Southern Forest near Coorg, Madhumalai.
04:17 And my favorite has always been Ranthambore.
04:19 I just love it.
04:20 The history, geography is so beautiful.
04:23 Though all the other forests also are beautiful.
04:27 Ranthambore has stories.
04:30 2015, I saw Ustad.
04:32 We're all friends.
04:33 We saw Ustad for the last time.
04:35 He walked with us for about two and a half hours.
04:39 And next day, he did a famous kill.
04:40 He killed a forest guard and he went to the zoo.
04:44 Now, I'm not getting into the merit, demerit of that.
04:47 But Ustad was, I think we saw him one day before he got caught or two days before he
04:50 got caught.
04:51 That was the same visit where we saw Noor.
04:56 She had a cub called Sultan.
04:59 Ustad and Noor's child, cub.
05:02 Krishna was there on the lake.
05:05 She also is a beautiful tigress.
05:08 We left the forest at about 5.30, 4.00 to 6.00 and at the gate we saw Machli and that
05:14 was a fantastic sighting.
05:16 She was there for about 45 minutes with us.
05:18 And a week or so after that, she died.
05:19 She was very old, the mother of Ranthambore.
05:24 On zone 9 or 10 was Fateh, Ustad's brother.
05:27 When Ustad got captured by the forest department and put in a zoo, Fateh moved in.
05:35 And the folklore is that Fateh, Noor mated with Fateh to save Sultan.
05:41 Normally a nursing mother doesn't mate, but to save her cub, she did that.
05:46 These are beautiful animal stories.
05:49 I can go on and on for hours.
05:51 I have so many stories because living that life is so beautiful.
05:59 And in the middle of all that, we bring some cheetahs from Africa and leave them in that
06:03 national park, Kono National Park, which was not meant for cheetahs.
06:06 It's meant for, it was designed to put lions there.
06:09 The excess lions from Gir were supposed to move there.
06:13 But they got these cheetahs and left them there.
06:16 You need to understand the Indian subcontinent cat and the African cat.
06:22 The African cat relies heavily on stealth and speed.
06:25 They chase and they kill.
06:27 The lion pride surrounds and kills.
06:29 The cheetah chases and kills.
06:32 The lion, the tiger is completely the opposite.
06:37 The tiger operates on stealth and pounces.
06:40 He's got no speed.
06:44 He has power and he is extremely deceptive.
06:49 The problem with Indian subcontinent forest is that out of 20 hunts, 25 hunts a tiger
06:54 goes for, he wins once, he loses 24 times.
07:00 Because the forest doesn't let him kill an animal and it is a fantastic balance between
07:08 the prey and the killer.
07:12 The moment a tiger goes on to a hunt, the calling starts.
07:16 And when you sit in a canter on a jeep in a forest and when the calling starts, it's
07:20 a fabulous experience.
07:22 You know there's a tiger on a hunt.
07:24 You know that the other animals are warning each other that this guy is moving around.
07:29 This is the ecosystem in which tiger survives.
07:30 It's trained, its DNA, its genetic structure, it's trained from a cub size.
07:36 You bring a leopard, you bring a cheetah from Africa, which is trained to hunt in the plains
07:41 and leave them in a tropical forest.
07:43 How will they survive?
07:46 A tropical forest will not let you hunt.
07:48 By nature it is designed to keep the prey away from the hunter.
07:53 These cheetahs can't run in a thick bush.
07:57 They are designed to run on plains.
08:00 I mean there's everything wrong about this cheetah introduction into Indian forest.
08:04 We've lost 9 of them.
08:06 Every morning we get up and we read one cheetah has died.
08:09 Whoever is doing it, I think it's a criminal offense to bring animals from there and kill
08:17 them like this.
08:18 Send them back.
08:19 They are not going to survive.
08:21 They are not tropical cheetahs.
08:23 These are not the Indian cheetah that went extinct.
08:25 These are African cheetahs.
08:26 They are very different.
08:29 You want to introduce cheetahs again, it's a long process.
08:32 It's not something you bring some from somewhere and leave them in the wild.
08:35 It doesn't work.
08:36 Put them back in the zoo.
08:39 Put them back wherever you want.
08:40 But don't let them just die.
08:41 It's heartbreaking.
08:42 These animals give us so much of joy.
08:45 They give us so much of, you know, love.
08:48 Why are you doing this to them?
08:51 Put them back in the forest.
08:52 Put them back in Africa.
08:53 Send them back.
08:54 Or if you can't do that, put them in a zoo.
08:58 What is this slaughter going on?
09:01 These cheetahs can't hunt.
09:03 They can't run in this tropical forest.
09:06 They don't know their way.
09:08 They are all over the place.
09:10 You find them in fields here and there.
09:12 They don't know their territory.
09:13 Just stop it.
09:14 I mean, I'm praying to the Prime Minister since he went to introduce them into the forest.
09:20 Just go back them, go back to the forest and put them back in the cage.
09:24 Don't kill them.
09:25 Please.
09:26 It's good.
09:27 It's bad for us.
09:28 It's bad for the optics.
09:29 All the hard work that India Forest Department has done over years to save the tiger, all
09:35 the reputation goes down the drain for this one stupid mistake.
09:39 Just stop it.
09:40 Just stop it.
09:41 Do whatever you can.
09:43 I don't have a solution.
09:44 But I'm just saying, you have two options.
09:46 You send them back or you put them in a zoo.
09:48 Figure out one of them and save them.
09:51 Please don't let any more die.
09:55 Please.
09:56 I mean, this is not a, this is a message from an environmentalist, a guy who loves the environment,
10:02 a person who celebrates every moment in the wild.
10:07 And like me, there are thousands of people or lakhs of people who do this annually.
10:12 And we all are pained by what's going on.
10:14 Just stop it.
10:15 I hope this message travels.
10:17 If you're watching it, please share it amongst your friends and family.
10:22 And let's all help each other stop this process.
10:24 It's not a good thing.
10:26 And it's very painful.
10:29 It's very, very painful.
10:32 I mean, beyond this, what can I say?
10:35 I just, I just find it very painful to read a news article every morning and headline
10:42 that a cheetah has died.
10:45 No, please stop it.
10:48 Thank you.
10:49 I'm sorry, but this has been an emotional one.
10:52 But I have a platform, so I'm saying it.
10:56 Use your own little platform, WhatsApp groups to say it.
10:59 And let the message reach whoever it has to reach, who can help the situation.
11:05 Thank you.
11:06 See you soon.
11:07 Bye.
11:07 Bye.
11:08 (upbeat music)
11:11 you
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