With more than 300 awards including three Green Oscars, Mike Pandey is undoubtedly one of the greatest wildlife and environment filmmakers of India. His works revolve around spreading awareness about biodiversity and species conservation
Sitting in River Bank studio office in a plush colony in south Delhi, waiting for Mike Pandey, as I looked around I am amazed by his collection of books, the awards adorning the walls and, above all, his favourite equipment, the camera. Designed with wood as the central theme, the office reflects Mike’s passion and interests. Born and brought up in Nairobi, Kenya, Mike’s relationship with the camera started when his uncle gifted him a Kodak Browning Box camera on his seventh birthday. The Pandey household in Kenya was in close proximity to the Nairobi National Park, which served as a source of inspiration for Mike and his fondness towards the wild grew.
Mike learnt the technicalities of camera while assisting directors in Hollywood, USA, and has also worked as director of special effects for films such as Razia Sultan, Betaab, Gazab, and so on, after his arrival to India. But Mike has always found solace in the wild and could not stay away from it for long. His love and passion for nature pulled him into the vortex of Indian wildlife. He has produced numerous documentaries that talk about the plight on animals in the flight and why conservation is an essential part of maintaining the ecological balance.
In 1994, he became the first Asian to win a Wildscreen Panda Award, also known as the Green Oscar, for his film The Last Migration — Wild Elephant Capture in Sarguja. The film depicts the 42-day-long capture of a herd of wild elephants in Madhya Pradesh. Fifty minutes long, the film has none of the savage, in-your-face, raw beauty of other wildlife films. While talking about the documentary, Mike shared an experience with elephants in Kenya. “While filming one of the documentaries in Nairobi National Park, a group of deer came charging towards us. We gathered our equipment and ran towards our jeep panicked. Suddenly a female elephant came between us and the charging dees and saved us. This is one incident which reinstates my faith in the wild,” shares the celebrity shutterbug.
When asked one significant aspect of filming in the woods, Mike says that filming in the forests is not like filming in the studio and takes a huge amount of dedication, perseverance, patience, and, most importantly, a driving force.
Sometimes one has to wait for hours, days, weeks or even months before catching a glimpse of an animal or the creature.
Talking to Mike gives you a lot of revelatory moments. The passion with which he speaks about his subject, the enormous amount of knowledge and the humbleness of sharing all that with world requires more than appreciation. One of the creatures that are close to his heart is the horse-shoe crab. According to the various research, the horse-shoe crab appeared on earth nearly 526 million years ago and can still be found on the eastern coast of India. Mike tells various pharmaceuticals companies still use its blood for sterilisation companies and television is the byproduct of its eyes. He even shared that NASA used the white blood of horse-shoe crab during one of their space missions of which Sunita Williams was a part.
One thing that saddens Mike deeply is the speed with which vultures are diminishing from the planet and how they almost disappeared from India because of a certain chemical imported by a foreign pharmaceutical company. Mike says this planet does not belong to us; we share it with millions of other species on this planet. We have been here for about 80 thousand years on this planet. What about other creatures that have been here for millions and millions of years? We must learn to respect them.
The internationally acclaimed documentary filmmaker remembers his days in Kenya with much fondness as it was in the African lands that his love for wildlife started. Mike remembers how as a child he used to capture images and show it to the family, weaving a story around them. The Masai Mara is his favourite wildlife destination and he loves the African coffee as well. “I find myself lucky to have been born in the beautiful land of Kenya and spending my initial years of life there. After spending 19 years there, I came to India, the land my parents belong to, but my roots still lie in the African subcontinent,” shares a nostalgic Mike.
When asked about the filming conditions now, as compared to when he started, Mike says that visa rules have bettered and now it is relatively easier to get filming and equipment permissions abroad. The advancement in technology has also helped in making better documentaries. He believes the real paradise lies in the wild where everything is in balance and in sync with nature. He strongly recommends responsible tourism. “When borders separate people and ethnicities, travel is something which helps them to reconnect,” says Mike. While he agrees that travel brings a lot of integration between the distant lands, he also affirms we should be careful of the environment around and try not to leave any carbon footprints behind.
Another documentary that bagged Mike his second Green Oscar in 2000 is Shores of silence – Whale Sharks in India. The film became instrumental in banning the killing of whale sharks on Indian shores. He also won a National Award for Best Film in the “Exploration & Adventure” Category, 2005, for this documentary. Mike shares another interesting anecdote that inspired him to make this documentary. The whale shark found off the eastern coasts of Africa and Kenya taught him this lesson in the deepest way, he says. It was as a child, on his many journeys across the Indian Ocean that he spotted whale sharks. He imagined them coursing around in the ocean and going between the African Shore and the West Indian shore exactly like the ship he was on. Years later, he found one dying on the Indian coast,” he says.
“As I grew into a wildlife filmmaker, the memory of this impressive blue grey mysterious fish kept haunting me. Almost as if calling out to me, I set off on a search. The journey was made into the film,” he says.
Mike Pandey is currently working on his latest film, The Return of the Tiger, which is supported by Bollywood actors, Amitabh Bachchan and John Abraham.