Film: The Truth About Tigers

Here is a small exercise. How many tigers are left in India? If you watch any television at all, the answer should be easy. Thanks to the barrage of WWF-backed advertisements starring cricketers, footballers, actors and super-cops, we all know it’s 1,411.

But pause a while. The precision of the number; how can anyone be so accurate? As it happens, it isn’t quite. The number incidentally is an average of a range — 1,165 to 1,657 — that a tiger survey came up with. It’s tough to count the number of tigers, even though methods are improving. All we can safely conclude is that we don’t know very much.

Shekar Dattatri’s documentary aims to correct that, but it also has bigger ambitions to spur us into action.

But why should we be bothered about saving tigers? The reasons are not as obvious to us laypeople as they are for the activists and conservationists.

What this film does is place tigers in the larger ecosystem, shows them as a part of a food chain where everything is connected. And more importantly, it convinces us that we can’t truly hope to save the tiger without doing something about the environment, without strengthening the rule of law and without building a strong civil society. The tiger, thus, is not merely a symbol of environmental protection; it’s also an important indicator.

For example, an adult tiger kills and eats about 50 adult deer-sized animals a year. So you don’t have to necessarily shoot a tiger to kill it, you can starve it to death by hunting down its prey. You can make its life difficult by cutting down the forests. The biggest threat to tigers however is more direct and deliberate. It is from the poachers who hunt tigers down for their body parts. There is a huge demand from China, where it is considered to have medicinal properties. The documentary comes down heavily on the ability of bureaucracy to tackle poachers; the staff are under-trained and under-equipped. The solution it offers is four-fold: Face the facts, modernise the system, protect forests and use the best science.

The narration by Roshan Seth (who played Nehru in Attenborough’s Gandhi and the television series Bharat Ek Khoj) is subtle and nuanced, and retains your attention throughout the film. The music blends with the visuals, giving way to silence when it doesn’t have much to do.

However, the most refreshing feature about the documentary — aside from the positive note on which it ends — is the breathtaking visuals. The producers say it was two years in the making and the footage came from exhaustive search in BBC archives, Icon Films and elsewhere.

Dattatri’s passion is obvious, and he is not averse to taking a strong position when it comes to lashing out at bureaucracy. Still, a little more balance would not have hurt.

Watch it. Pass it on. Especially to the people who sent you forwards about those 1,411 tigers.

The Truth about Tigers. Written and produced by Shekar Dattatri, narrated by Roshan Seth, music by David Mitcham.

Non-Fiction, 40 mins. Available for free dowload at truthabouttigers.org