A woman of the wild

a woman of the wild

Akanksha Sood Singh still remembers the perilous experience of being caught in a flash flood. “We were doing (an episode) on the brown bear in the trans-Himalayan landscape last year,” recounts the director of On The Brink, a series that explores the lesser-known species in India. It had started raining, and they were filming the shower, commenting on how pretty it was. “I was thinking where I would use it (the footage of the rain),” she recalls, wryly, adding that it all changed in less than 30 seconds.

“It was run…and run now,” recalls Akanksha, with a laugh, admitting that filming wildlife in the field often turns treacherous. She doesn’t seem to mind the danger though. In fact, she seems to embrace it. “What keeps us going is the adrenalin rush,” says the award-winning natural history filmmaker, the co-founder of The Gaia People, a Noida-based production company.

Women and the wild

Akanksha, who was in Bengaluru recently as part of the Nature inFocus Festival, is also the founder of Women of the Wild, an Instagram page that seeks to bring together women in the wildlife space. Talking about the genesis of it, she says that it stemmed from a practical problem that she encountered, a couple of years ago, during Covid. “We were trying to put together a list of women working in STEM to enable them to create content while sitting at home or in their labs, communicating the science that they were doing,” says Akanksha, who was on the advisory council of the Jackson Wild Film Festival back then.

But she simply could not find enough women. “I would log into social media and find that their profiles were locked or incomplete,” she says, adding that her response to that was to start a directory of women. Over time, it evolved into what it is today: a platform for every woman who has a career related to wildlife. “There are so many ways you can be connected to the wild,” she points out. “It doesn’t have to be research. You can be a musician, a journalist, an artist,” says Akanksha, who constantly puts out posts on the Women of the Wild Instagram page celebrating these women’s journeys. “It is an unstable career with challenges,” she says.

Despite that, however, these women continue doing what they do, sticking to what was usually a childhood passion. “Given that there is so much attention going to so many other fields, I wanted to give it to the women of the field I was connected to,” she says.

Television and Tigers