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Earthy lure Mike Pandey follows the adventurous path

Forty years later when Mike Pandey wanted to make a film on them - by then he had made celebrated films on the tiger and the elephant - many people told him that whale sharks never existed in India!

For two-and-a-half years Pandey scoured the Indian coastline searching for them and discovered that unknown to the establishment, the fishermen on the Gujarat coast hunted them every year. He spent another two-and-a-half years making a film on them: “The whale sharks come here in the monsoon season when it is so torrid and dangerous on the sea. I was risking the lives of my young crew. But nothing comes easy!”

The film worked. Within three months of its release in 2000, the government included whale sharks under the Wild Life Protection Act, the first marine species in the country to be brought under the act. The DVDs of the film were decisively instrumental in influencing CITES, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, to impose a global ban on whale shark hunting. “This is the only film in the world which has saved a species from extinction. Nothing can be more satisfying!” Pandey says with justifiable pride.

His two films on elephants The Last Migration - Wild Elephant Capture in Sarguja and Vanishing Giants, capture with great sensitivity the venality with which the elephants’ habitat has been destroyed. “This in a country where we venerate the elephant as Ganapati bappa!”

He is extremely critical of the dizzy pace of industrial and consumerist growth in the country. “It is so mindless. Along with China, we are going to create the greatest environmental crisis the globe has ever seen!” And so, he is a passionate advocate of public broadcasting and using television for creating awareness and education.

At sixty plus and over 600 films and too many awards under his belt, Mike Hari Pandey hardly looks his age and lives life to the fullest. Apart from many other projects, he is planning “a high adventure, value based as well as entertaining film” featuring children and animals “that will not only showcase India but will change the way children’s films are made in this country”. Meanwhile, you can catch up with him through Earth Matters on Doordarshan - National every Sunday at 11 a.m. or at these websites: http://mikepandey.org , www.riverbankstudios.com and www.earthmattersfoundation.org.

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