IT was difficult growing up with Raj and Romesh Thapar. They were larger than life and attracted a wide variety of people like magnets. It meant that our home was hugely busy. I grew up listening and watching and becoming a recluse. My sister had the gift of the gab, and Raj and Romesh were both highly social and intensely political.

Probably their best quality was not to interfere in the choices we made. Advice was given but not dictated. I ended up following wild tigers and discovering new facets of their life and behaviour and soon after I started got both Raj and Romesh to watch them. And they loved it. It was for them a new experience. This was an area of life they were far removed from. I do not think they would have ever even dreamt that I would end up serving tigers in the jungles of India. Thirty years have gone by since they passed away.

In these years there has never been a moment when I have not bumped into someone who did not know Raj or Romesh. Their remarkable ability to engage with the world around created for me an environment of goodwill, be it with politicians they knew or bureaucrats or leaders of the corporate world. And this in the field I worked in.

I was invariably asked if I was Raj and Romesh son, to the point that it was embarrassing. In a strange way they commanded love and respect across so many layers of life that it was uncanny. I have never encountered that with anyone else. They had friends in every corner of the world who went out of the way to support and help all the causes I have engaged with. I remember when I first travelled abroad at the age of 16, I was hosted in Rome by Roberto Rossellini and looked after by his daughter Isabella. In Paris it was Jean Riboud’s home that I lived in – all people that I was later to realize were hugely known across the continents. Somewhere Raj and Romesh had touched their lives. I think much of this was due to the time and space they gave people. Today, most of us are so preoccupied with our very self-centred lives that our interactions with others are usually very cursory. However busy they were, Raj and Romesh found time for people; no one was ever shrugged off.

I recall that my first real break after graduating from university was courtesy Charat Ram, a friend of Raj and Romesh. He ran Shriram Chemical Industries in Kota and sponsored our first documentary film on Jaisalmer. We did five documentaries and when we filmed the wildlife of Rajasthan for him, Ranthambhore and tigers entered my life. Without this connect would I have ended up following tigers? I do not think so. Such are the ways in which life works.

 

There are so many examples of the connect my parents had which impacted me that it would be impossible to retrace all of them. But here are a few. Before tigers came into my life, I worked on short films. Raj and Romesh knew Komal Kothari in Jodhpur who ‘guided’ our films like no other. I can still see Raj and Romesh rolling around on a bullock cart in Borunda village near Jodhpur, Romesh reviewing a branch of the Central Bank of India and Raj engaging with Rupayan Sansthan that Komalji ran.

They also connected me to Sir Denis Forman, someone I knew from a young age till his death recently. In the late seventies, he was Chairman of Granada Television and he gave me some of my best breaks and, in those years, made sure I had lunch with David Attenborough who inspired me to continue my passion with tigers and Indian wildlife.

A year after my parents passed away I wrote to an old friend of theirs who had created Telco. I needed a truck to start a primary health care programme for the villages around Ranthambhore. Sumant Mulgaonkar was to send me the truck in two weeks. It was the beginning of my work with Ranthambhore Foundation.

I remember in 1992, when I was struggling with a crisis in Ranthambhore, I happened to meet Lovraj Kumar, an old friend of Raj and Romesh. He heard me out and then next day walked me into Kamal Nath’s office and said, ‘Kamal what are you going to do about this.’ Kamal turned to me and said, ‘You will be on my steering committee of project tiger.’ With him I had some of my most productive times at the Ministry of Environment and Forests – the beginning of a 23-year engagement with Union government policymaking. Would that have happened without Lovraj?

In the same year 1992, many years after Raj and Romesh had died, I met Bhairon Singh Shekhawat, the Chief Minister of Rajasthan. Ranthambhore was experiencing a poaching crisis and while I sat with the chief minister, he regaled me with stories of meeting my parents and how much he respected them.

 

Deep down inside, the respect people had and still have for them overwhelms me. They bonded deep with people; ignited individuals to run with new ideas for a new India. They were enablers who were always willing to help and at whatever cost. That is precious, very precious in this strange world we live in today.

After all my engagement with two prime ministers – I.K. Gujral and Dr Manmohan Singh – was based on the Raj-Romesh connection. It was like they had created a thick layer of trust that I could walk on and this put me beyond suspicion. Now at least I could talk and throw out ideas at those who ruled and they listened.

I am now in my mid-sixties. My life’s work has been very different from what Raj and Romesh did. But their goodwill across so many shades of life cushioned and at some level even gave direction to my life. It is truly amazing. I still dream about my parents and in those dreams I am always in conversation with them, in debate and discussion. That fine-tuning of the mind comes from the rich experiences that I lived through with Raj and Romesh. It is a great feeling because they float in and out of this life I have been so privileged to lead.