Pondering on conservation of wildlife, and the legacy of Gandhi

Conservationists Neha Sinha and Sanjay Gubbi in conversation with historian Mahesh Rangarajan; Subodh Kerkar plays the Mahatma’s heartbeat.

“We associate wildness in animals as a bad thing, because they are not tamed,” began Neha Sinha, conservation biologist and author of Wild and Wilful, to a question on the title of her book. She, and wildlife biologist and conservationist Sanjay Gubbi, were in conversation with author and historian Mahesh Rangarajan at the session on day two of The Hindu Lit for Life 2021.

“We use the word wilful in a similar connotation… I wanted to give this term a positive connotation,” she said. “…We have man-eating leopards, rogue monkeys, angry tuskers... It is an image that is seen as animals being murderers. I wanted to say that they are wilful, they are outside the bounds of human society. But that may not necessarily be a bad thing.”

Dr. Gubbi spoke about the leopard being a “much more elastic species” when asked if the human-tiger interface was different when compared to the human-leopard interface. “I would call it the poster boy of India’s conservation success stories,” said Gubbi, whose latest book Leopard Dairies – The Rosette in India is based on studying the animal up close for years.