Book excerpt – 'Gifted: Inspiring Stories of People with Disabilities'

Book: Gifted: Inspiring Stories of People with Disabilities​
Authors: Sudha Menon and VR Ferose
Publisher: Random House India/304 pages

Chapter: Hans Dalal

Opportunities come to people who take the road less travelled. While at Ranthambore, the people at the NGO asked me about myself and when I told them that I was a sound engineer, they happened to mention that many of the poachers operating in the jungle were musicians from the Moghya tribe who played a range of instruments, including bagpipes.

I was intrigued and fascinated. As part of their rehabilitation programme, the poachers were being taught some income generating skills, including handicrafts using locally available raw material, but it struck me that it was possible to engage with them more deeply by involving them with their music. When my course was complete at that camp, I stayed back a couple of days and recorded some of their music to take back to Mumbai with me where I made a couple of my musician friends, including Sid Cuotto, listen to it. It took me a year but I eventually convinced Sid to go to Ranthambore with me a to do a proper recording with the poachers. The sequence of events as they panned out after that is hard to believe. Our tickets to Ranthambore were confirmed and at a party that evening, we ran into Sughandha Garg, an actor and filmmaker friend of ours who heard our story and promptly signed up to go with us! In fact, she woke up her father at midnight and had him book her tickets. It then struck us that another photographer friend, Natasha, could help, too. If we were shooting a film, we might as well do stills, we thought, and got her on board as well.

It was a memorable time shooting with the poachers. Six of them and two kids had gotten together this informal band that performed at community weddings. Part of this group was this extraordinary guy who, in the middle of nowhere, played a bagpipe made out of camel skin and a contraption made out of his shirt, with a pocket still on it! A traditional bagpipe has four pipes, this one had only one pipe, but the basic concept was the same. To see a guy play a bagpipe in the middle of Rajasthan was a strange and unique experience.

We shot them with a Handycam, some of them singing and the others playing their instruments, and decided that we would figure out what to do with the footage once we returned home. We never realized it but after almost a year on the editing table, we had an extraordinary thirty-minute documentary on our hands plus an album of techno-tribal music called With A Little Help which was then remixed by different artists!

We made a 1000 DVD copies and gave it to Tiger Watch so that they could sell them and fund their future rehabilitation project for poachers. As I saw it, the rehab project could be a self-sustainable one since the poachers were contributing to it with their music.

That was only the beginning of my tryst with tigers and my love for the jungles. I've spent the last five years on the ground, roaming around in jungles, learning all about wildlife conservation, the reasons why human beings turn poachers, and the uneasy relationship between man and animal, each trying to protect themselves. In 2010 alone, I made nineteen trips to Ranthambore. I have worked as 'tiger tracker and guide' for guests in hotels around wildlife sanctuaries and volunteered in some twenty protected forests for tigers because when you do that, they involve you in a lot of other activities that increases your understanding of the problem.

Excerpted with permission from Random House India.