Sherni- Story of human and wildlife conflicts

 Since I was a kid, my father used to tell me the stories of camera trapping the wild animals and many of his own experiences with them. I’ve heard tons of stories by him, especially about big cats. In his stories, there was one thing in common – forest officers. When I was 11, a pair of trap cameras came home. We used to fix them in the forest almost every day. Every winter, we find one or two camera trap footages and several leopard pugmarks near our house. My grandmother always tells a lot of stories about leopards killing puppies. The stories of dogs and calves who went missing mysteriously… also with all these stories, Keneth Andreson’s stories about man-eating tigers are always my favorite. My father showed me a lot of videos about camera trapping and tigers and big cats. This is how I started to like big cats.

After listning to all the big cat stories, yesterday I watched an amazing movie on amazon prime called ‘Sherni’ which means tigress in Hindi. It mainly revolves around wildlife-human conflict. A disturbed tigress in a forest at Madhya Pradesh starts killing cattle and a forest officer called Vidya Vincent and her team tries to create a balance between the tigress and villagers while trying to capture the tiger and sending it to a national park. At first, I thought it would be another film with unrealistic fights and heroism. But it was greater than I thought it would be. It is a story inspired by the real tigress called T-1 which was popularly known as Avni.

This movie isn’t only a story of finding a tiger, but also about the gender politics in the field and corrupt people. Here I felt like the both protagonists (the tigress and officer) are ‘Shernis’. One fights for it’s cubs, another fights for the tigress. Another thing I really liked was the way they told this story so sensibly and didn’t exaggerate the things. From the real tigress to the politicians, the characters are very realistic.

The emotions  expressed by the actors don’t need words. We can just feel it. Another plus point is, it shows all the aspects of forest department- corrupt officers to hardworking foresters. Vidya’s personality was shown very . The stereotypical officers and local people’s struggles are the real truth and this movie expressed it in a simple plot. Also, the story is told in a easy yet beautiful way. Even in the end, the local people becomes the real heroes of the story. It is a story of kindness, greed, corruption, gender stereotypes and a true representation of a female forest officer in India…a representation of all kinds of forest officers in India…

No matter how dense the forest is, the tigress will find her way

Sherni, 2021 

 

So I mentioned camera traps several times. A camera trap is used just like a CC camera in the forest. Like, to find what happens in the forest when we are not there, they use this camera. This camera captures a picture if there’s a movement. Well, I thought of sharing some pictures of animals we found in our camera trap. Here are some:

All of these photos are from 2020’s winter. So there’s a story behind the leopard’s photo. We were checking these photos and at first we thought it was a cat. But on same day, we found pugmarks and finally learned that it is a leopard and by a photo that took before a minute the leopard arrived, we discovered that some neighbours were walked by just before a minute!

So that’s it for today. I hope I’ll write more on this topic. Have you watched ‘Sherni’? What is your opinion? Also, have you seen  big cats near your region?