Miniature Portraits: Shawl for a Legend

He stood, his back angled rakishly 45 degrees to the podium. The weight of his 88 years rested on his cane. The silver hair glistened under the lights, a place he has been for 50 years. And as he spoke in his by now trademark throaty whisper, Sir David Attenborough had in his thrall, the two hundred and fifty odd people at the BAFTA, the theatre that hosts the British equivalent of the Oscars. He spoke of hope, he spoke of despair, he spoke of how critical land purchase was for animals (after all he was speaking on the occasion of 25 years of the World Land Trust) and he spoke of the intense passion that he still feels for nature.

Later, while he was sipping on half a glass of Chardonnay and I had wet my lips with a Monkey’s Shoulder (a triple malt, not a wildlife product I daresay). I asked him when he knew definitively that nature conservation was all he wanted to do in life. “At age eleven” and he was very quick with that “when I watched a pair of dragonflies at my family pond”. “And you?” He was polite to a fault. I told him I kept animals at home but a little later than 11, though not very much after. Birds and monkeys and snakes. I did too, he thought back and we talked of how children have that instinctive love of nature and how we as adults do our best to take that away and replace it with algebra and trigonometry.  Who was his mentor, I wondered, his father perhaps. “Oh, no!” He was even quicker ” it was me…I did things myself”. I did not say but thinking back, it was not my family either who mentored me, it was my own little discovered paradise. So there went the famous father-son bonding over nature bit

We were called back to the stage soon, for a brilliant botanist, mathematician and illustrator Lou Jost was presenting on the thirty or so orchids that he discovered in the cloud-mountains of Ecuador. How the isolated mountain peaks had differently evolving flora (and perhaps fauna) just as islands separated by the high seas.

Selfie with Lou Jost, a brilliant botanist, mathematician and  illustrator, at the BAFTA. Photo: Vivek Menon/WTI 

A lady near the stairs wanted me to click her photo with Sir David. I tried but nothing came out on her iPhone…she was rude and disappointed. For in that instant, he had turned away and walked back for another talk, another exposition on nature, another inspirational pat on the back for a youngster. A life lived under television lights, but also under a blue sky in far flung corners of the world where nature still held out against his own kith and kin.  “I have underdone India” he whispered to me as I put an aroni, a cotton shawl produced by the women weavers of our community project near Manas park in Assam around his shoulders. “and then it was only tigers “.