Call of the wild: Mike Pandey;

A shot from Pandey?s Green Oscar-winning news feature, Vanishing Giants

Let?s say, Mike Hari Pandey is not your regular guy. For, regular guys don?t let dogs sleep on sofas in their office, describe silkworms as the world?s best designers, fall into a pit of pythons, get nearly mauled by lions in the jungles of Kenya or are almost trampled by wild tuskers in the paddy fields of Midnapore. But regular guys also don?t win a trio of Green Oscars, the latest coming at London?s prestigious Wildscreen Film Festival earlier this month.

But then Mike isn?t your regular, feel-good wildlife filmmaker either. His works do not create a picture postcard wild, they lay bare a world ravaged by humans. His latest news feature, Vanishing Giants, isn?t for the squeamish. You don?t have to be a member of Peta (People for Ethical Treatment of Animals) to be shocked at the barbaric entrapment and the subsequent torture of a young tusker.

Mike explains his motive. ?Truth needs to be told. No matter how harsh it is. Only then we can rectify it,? says the 50-plus filmmaker and conservationist.

Over the past three decades, Mike has pursued truth with the zeal of a child chasing a rainbow. He has followed his heart and his mind?s eye ? whether it was in filming wild elephants captured in Sarguja that made him the first Asian to get a Green Oscar in 1994, or scrounging the Gujarat coastline for three years which resulted in a much-feted film on whale sharks and led to a global ban on its hunting.

And, his heart has shunned the obvious. As a child in Kenya, Mike would walk into the crater of a dead volcano to find out what lay beneath even as other kids waited on the rim. A pathological urge for the curious and the willingness to lose all fear and surrender to the spontaneous moment has propelled him take huge risks in his career.

Lalman, his assistant for 20 years, tells you how they once ran in the paddy slush at night in Midnapore trying to escape an angry herd of elephants. ?We could have been sandwiched and crushed. It was a narrow escape,? he recalls.

Another time, when lensing a mother elephant with a baby in a Tanzanian reserve, Mike was almost mangled by a lion lurking nearby. The filmmaker was rescued by the elephant who thought her baby was in danger and headed for the lion. ?We were just eight feet away from the most terrible mauling on earth. We were so terrified we couldn?t speak for 30 minutes,? he recalls. ?It was a learning experience. In a jungle, the creature is supreme and the man insignificant,? says the six- feet, four-inches-tall filmmaker sitting in his New Delhi studio, Riverbanks.

There is a sense of groundedness about Mike that comes from living life first-hand. For him, the natural world is neither a predator?s terrain, nor a photographer?s coffee-table book workstation. The jungle is in his marrow. Even his analogy, much like Ted Hughes? poetry, inhabits the animal world. ?A good wildlife filmmaker,? he says, ?should have the patience of a vulture, the dedication of a mother elephant and the flexibility of a tiger.?

It couldn?t have been any other way. As a child, Mike grew up so close to Nairobi?s National Park, he could see giraffes and wildebeests from the bedroom and hear the lions and leopards roar all night. Sometimes, elephants raided their kitchen garden in the backyard where his mother, driven by a yearning for Indian vegetables, would plant brinjals.

His police officer father ? his grandfather, originally from Gorakhpur in Uttar Pradesh, moved to Kenya in the 1920s and served the British Army ? would take him to the park in their Land Rover. ?It was like being in a huge natural theatre,? he reminisces.

Somewhere in those impressionable years, amidst the smells and the sounds of an East African jungle, a passionate but enduring love affair between a boy and the animal kingdom was born. Armed with a box Brownie camera gifted by an uncle, Mike and his brother would go around freezing the wild moment like urban Mowglis with a lens.

He was Hari Pandey till then. The name he is now known by came from playing the role of a private detective called Mike Hammer for a school play staged to raise money. Mike acted out the part week after week. And as he aptly sums it up, ?The name stuck like glue.?

When out of school, he left nature behind, pursuing an aeronautical engineering course in Bristol as his father wished. Then one night, recalls Mike, he looked at his grimy, greasy fingers and thought, ?Will I just be a glorified mechanic all my life?? The angst coincided with an urge for some homemade rajma-rice. Possessed, Mike drove with some friends in an old Ford Zephyr from England to India to get his soul curry at source. The 10-day journey was about food. It was also about the free spirit which wanted him to chart another course.

He did. Mike first went to the London Film School, then spent another two-and-a-half years in Hollywood studying special effects and adverse condition cinematography. A stint with the BBC?s natural history section followed. Then, he met Rajiv Gandhi.

Mike doesn?t remember where exactly in Europe they met, though he knows it was during the Emergency. ?He first asked me, if I was an Indian and when I replied in the affirmative, he put an arm around my shoulder and said: ?Guys like you should be in India?,? recalls Mike. No sentence influenced his life more.

So he decided to return home. At that time, misfortune struck. His camera, then worth $56,000 and bought on loan, was stolen at the airport in Rome. He carried on with his homeward trek, anyway. ?You know,? says Mike, ?human beings are like cacti. We can thrive anywhere.?

Anywhere was Bollywood. As an assistant cinematographer, he handled the war scenes in Kamaal Amrohi?s lavishly mounted Razia Sultan and his special effects background helped him create a ghost in the Dharmendra starrer, Ghazab. But slowly, the jungle in him stirred to life. ?There is an invisible signal you follow,? he says.

Budget was shoestring and conditions harsh when he lensed The Last Migration in Sarguja, now in Chhattisgarh. Shooting for 200 hours shouldering a Betacam can be backbreaking work. When the Green Oscar came, it was also pathbreaking.

But the whale shark he had seen as a child one misty morning on the deck of a giant steamship SS Amra continued to haunt his mind. That day, Mike and his brother had peered over the edge of the vessel to witness the largest fish in the world. His search for the whale shark ? and a subsequent film which showed how they were trapped and massacred ? got him his second Green Oscar in 2000. ?The film was a global eye-opener,? affirms Mumbai-based environmental journalist Darryl D?Monte.

Now, after claiming his third Green Oscar despite some stiff competition from the big boys of natural history films ? Discovery, BBC et al ? Mike is aiming for wider horizons. He is working on his first feature film, Hakuna Matata (?no problem? in Swahili, a language he speaks). To be made in Hindi and English, it will be a cross between Born Free and Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Needless to say, nature would play an important role in the film, as it has in Mike?s life. As a filmmaker, he has looked at nature with empathy, seeking to heal its wounds through his craft. But he also has something for the homo sapiens. Mike always carries a kit for homoeopathy ? an enduring hobby ? whenever he heads for the wild. ?There are many who need help,? says Mike.

Like Elsa, a mongrel-boxer mix named after the Born Free lioness, who often sleeps on the sofa in his studio. She was found on the streets disoriented when a colleague brought her to the studio. ?Now she is a part of the family,? says Mike.

For Mike Hari Pandey, life clearly is all about His Family and Other Animals.