Is it easy to take up wildlife film making as a career? What does Shekar Dattatri say
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Explanation:
Shekar Dattatri is a pioneer of wildlife and conservation filmmaking in India, having started his filmmaking journey in 1983 as 'Assistant Director' on 'Snakebite', a dramatised documentary. His meticulously crafted 'blue chip' natural history films have entertained, inspired and informed people around the world, while his hard hitting conservation films have helped bring about tangible change in India.
Shekar’s lifelong fascination with wildlife began at the age of 13, when he joined the famous Madras Snake Park as a student-volunteer in 1976. This led to nature photography and, subsequently, to documentary filmmaking. His first film, ‘A Cooperative for Snake Catchers’, won the National Award in 1987 for Best Scientific Film. His next two documentaries, 'Seeds of Hope', and 'Silent Valley - An Indian Rainforest' were also National Award winners.
‘Silent Valley', completed in 1991, also won several international awards, including a Special Jury Award at the first Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival in America, a top honor at the Sondrio International Film Festival on Parks and Protected Areas, and Best Nature Film Award at the Tokyo Earthvision Festival. In 1991, he was also awarded an Inlaks Scholarship to spend eight months working with Oxford Scientific Films, which, back then, was one the most innovative producers of natural history and science programmes for television.
Subsequently, Shekar worked with some of the world’s leading natural history broadcasters and production houses, including Channel 4, UK, the Discovery Channel, National Geographic Television, the BBC Natural History Unit, Natural History New Zealand and Icon Films. Some of his films as a cameraman and/or Producer include, The 'Wild India' series (Channel 4, UK; freelance wildlife cameraman), ‘The Good Snake’ (National Geographic Television, Producer and Cameraman), ‘Nagarahole – Tales from An Indian Jungle’ (Discovery Channel; Producer, cameraman and writer), 'Land of the Tiger' (A BBC NHU series; freelance cameraman on four episodes) and ‘Monsoon – India’s God of Life’ (Part of the 'Wild Asia' Series by Discovery, NHK and NHNZ; Producer and cameraman).
He has also served on the final juries of several prestigious wildlife and environmental film festivals and photo competitions, including the Japan Wildlife Film Festival (2007), Wildscreen, UK (2008 and 2020), the Sondrio film festival on Parks and Protected Areas, Italy (2008), Vatavaran Wildlife and Environment Film Festival, India, Sanctuary Asia Wildlife Photography Awards (several editions), Nature in Focus and Wildlife Photographer of the Year, 2020.
In 1998, the UK trade magazine, Television Business International, rated him as one of the top ten rising stars of wildlife filmmaking in the world. However, despite being at the peak of his international career, Shekar decided to move away from television documentaries in 2000, to try and make a difference on the ground through conservation filmmaking. Working closely with both government and conservation organisations in India since then, Shekar has been using his skills as a Producer, Director, Cameraman and writer to make films that can make a difference. One of these, ‘Mindless Mining – The Tragedy of Kudremukh’ (2001), played a pivotal role in putting an end to a vast and extremely damaging open cast iron-ore mining operation within a rainforest National Park in India's Western Ghats.
Radhe Radhe
Answer:
Among the carnivorous legless reptiles of the suborder Serpentes—snakes, in other words—is a periodic process called ecdysis, which has to do with shedding of the skin. Last August, a phenomenon called “synchrony" of ecdysis was observed among Florida Cottonmouth snakes, where snakes within an insular ecosystem shed their skin at around the same time. This is the story of a similar synchronicity. Here however, the two actors are human: a snake-loving filmmaker and a bird-loving entrepreneur. Both grew up in Chennai, both are passionate naturalists, both want to effect change in the world, and both decided to shed their previous professional skins at broadly the same time.
Shekar Dattatri is a wildlife filmmaker whose films—on Olive Ridley turtles, Silent Valley and Nagarhole among others—have won him a profusion of awards including a Rolex Award for Enterprise and the Edberg Award from Sweden. A self-taught filmmaker, Dattatri made films for the Discovery channel, National Geographic and the BBC, before turning his back on them. Principled, passionate, punctilious and perfectionist, Dattatri, 54, calls himself a ‘recluse’ because he lives alone in a three-bedroom apartment in Chennai.
Across the Kaveri river lives Sreenivasan Ramakrishnan (or Ramki as he prefers to be called), 45, a garrulous Bengaluru-based entrepreneur who worked at Procter & Gamble before starting—and selling—his own successful marketing analytics firm, Marketics. When I call him garrulous, he says, “Like a laughing thrush," referring to birds that belong to the genus, Garrulax. Ramki, no surprises, is a birder and photographer.