for my darling baby

Take it up from 1411 – Save the Tiger


My daughter , who is in 2nd standard, is a very worried person for the last one week; she has been selected to enact a play on ‘Save the Tiger’ in her school. Now that is not what she is worried about, she has memorised the number 1411 which is the number of Tigers now remaining in India. She gets teary eyed when the television ad of a small little tiger cub, who seems lost and helpless without his mother appears on the TV. I can see the genuineness of the worry, her innocence and concern for the small cub, the resonating sound of gunshot in the ad made her say, ‘Mama his mother must have been killed’.

She now recounts our trip to Jim Corbett last summer wherein we had gone for a safari into the deep jungles of Jim Corbett for a fair amount of time , but could not see anything apart from some deers, monkeys and an elephant, now she knows why they were not to be seen.

She is looking forward to act in the play and wants to take her play to all the hunters who will see it and magically stop hunting Tigers for their skin!! I wish I could also have that kind of optimism in me, in spite of her concern and worry she is very sure that their play is going to save a lot of Tigers, and I too wish the same. I wish we the grown ups also had the same kind of genuineness of feeling and the same kind of optimism to do something, even the smallest effort will count, to increase this number (1411) or at least to retain it at that.

I am afraid whether my children will have to travel to a museum or flick through magazines and books, or rely on ‘Discovery channel ‘ or ‘National Geography’ channels to show their children what a ‘Tiger’ was, and how our Country had so many of them but we could not save them due to a few hungry hunters, poachers and corrupt people.

I wish and hope along with my child that our zoos and forest reserves and all of us Indians will really rally together and preserve these precious creatures , our national animal , from becoming just a memory , framed photographs or ending up on the wall as a priced possession at a shikaris mansion.

Let us ‘Save the Tiger’.. let us save our National Animal and let him roar away to long life, lots of off springs and a green forest to reign over…………