Page 98 - EarthHeroes

nature, and continued to escape to the countryside whenever he could, often accompanied by his wife and two daughters.
In 1973, Bittu went on his first safari in Kanha National Park, one
of the places that inspired Rudyard Kipling to write his famous stories in
The Jungle Book.
The park was
home to leopards,
foxes and jackals,
boar and countless
species of birds,
but what excited Bittu
most of all was his first
sight of tigers wandering
through the sal trees and
thickets of bamboo – something he would never forget. Over the following years he experienced many other special wildlife moments too: watching blind river dolphins on the Brahmaputra with his young daughters, hearing elephants trumpet through a tropical storm and, in another reserve, watching a tigress and her two full-grown cubs cross right in front of him.
Bittu loved to travel, and as he did he noticed that wild places were changing as forests were cut down to make space for agriculture, roads, canals and factories. There were new mines for coal, gas, oil and minerals. Hydroelectric dams and coal-fired power stations were being built to provide electricity. Bittu started to worry about the future of the natural world. Bittu felt that greedy businessmen were using up the country’s resources without any thought for nature.
At that time, Bittu was becoming unhappy in his job and in 1980 he took
a break at Ranthambore National Park run by his friend Fateh Singh Rathore. One evening, as they sat by a crackling campfire under a banyan tree, Bittu asked Fateh what he could do to help protect wildlife. His friend’s answer surprised him: he should start a nature magazine. There were countless Indian magazines about fashion, sport and politics, but not a single one about
98