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Deccan Herald
09-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Deccan Herald
Tracking otters along the Cauvery
Every time I go out birdwatching, there is invariably someone who spots a sunbird and identifies it as a 'hummingbird!' Generally, if one were to ask people about the exotic kangaroo or the beaver, we would likely get an elaborate answer about the animal. But asking about the smooth-coated otter, for instance, may result in a blank stare. This is a consequence of a plethora of accessible wildlife documentaries. As a result, we end up learning a lot about animals that do not exist around has a phenomenal diversity of life, and in recent years, there has been a sharp up tick in world-class wildlife documentaries made by home-grown filmmakers. These filmmakers spare no expense in documenting and sharing the grandeur of nature. Recently, two Bengaluru-based naturalists and filmmakers, Sugandhi Gadadhar and Raghunath 'Rana' Belur, screened one such documentary, My Otter Diary. They focus on the smooth-coated otter along the river Cauvery and have spent over five years trailing a family of are a group of semi-aquatic carnivorous mammals. There are 13 species of otters in the world today, and the smooth-coated otter (Lutrogale perspicillata) is widespread across India and parts of southeast Asia. Measuring about a metre long, they are stockily built with prominent whiskers and a curious way of popping their heads out of water or standing on their hind legs to peer at a perceived threat. Their sharp teeth can tear into fish or crack open crabs. While they can be shy, they are often encountered along sandy riverbanks, where they spread out, usually with their an a female otter, is the protagonist in this documentary, filmed between Srirangapattana and Shivanasamudra. Maya and her family are followed by Sugandhi in a coracle navigated by Shivu, a local fisherman, who, apart from providing profound insights into the life of the river, also chimes in with comic timing and rather sarcastic filmmakers had first encountered otters while filming another documentary in the Daroji Sloth Bear Sanctuary. 'Navigating the mighty Tungabhadra was a challenge. This, with other logistical issues, made us look for otters in other areas,' Sugandhi explained. 'Eventually, a friend of ours who had worked along the river recommended we try the Cauvery. And since we moved to the Cauvery, we have not looked back,' she added, documentary goes beyond otters, with footage that seamlessly transitions between the river, other forms of biodiversity, Maya and her family, and the filmmaker herself. This, combined with the narration and music, transports the audience as if they are amidst the wildlife is a painstaking process. 'We wanted to see how otters move underwater. The Cauvery is murky with pollution and sediments. So, we had to find these otters, place the underwater cameras, and wait for the otters to show up and hope they move in front of the camera. There were many days when we would get nothing on camera,' explained filmmakers have invested an enormous amount of time in entering the otter universe — using underwater cameras, remotely triggered cameras, and spending countless days just waiting for some action. 'Smooth-coated otters are not rare but can be elusive, and the film has painstakingly documented their behaviour, which is valuable,' explained Nisarg Prakash, a wildlife biologist who has studied and are what are called socio-ecological systems — they exist at the intersection of being natural and being used by humans. The documentary looks at this intersection without hesitation and brings out elements of fisherfolk and the otters both require fish, and this is often a point of conflict. Shivu, who is a fisherman, explains how the conflict has increased in recent times. 'I have seen fishermen retaliate in different ways — they have set fire to otter dens, thrown dynamite inside, and put out snares,' he number of fisherfolk has also gone up, and the riparian habitats where otters make dens are being reduced. Shivu has moved away from fishing over the years and now works part-time in T Narasipura in Mysuru district to eke out a living..'Otters continue to be poached in many places, and this film shows why it is important to conserve this apex predator and their increasingly fragile habitats,' Nisarg emphasised. The documentary could serve as a bedrock to identify and declare parts of the river Cauvery as an 'Otter Conservation Reserve' and ensure the habitat is protected from rampant land-use number of scientific papers will nudge people towards conservation as effectively as a well-told story. While being incredibly educational, My Otter Diary effectively tugs at one's heartstrings, making it accessible to audiences regardless of age or prior knowledge..A case in point was when a primary school child asked insightful questions about otters at the premiere at Swagath Shankar Nag Theatre, which was attended by nearly 550 people in May. The documentary also delicately portrays the complexities of biodiversity conservation by forcing the viewer to look through the lens of the otter, the river, and the people who depend on it..'What I liked about this film is how Rana and Sugandhi, much like Krupakar and Senani in their Wild Dog Diaries, follow the subject closely and let the observations script a compelling story arc,' said Kalyan Varma, a renowned filmmaker. 'It takes courage to spend years following a single family and hope that the story evolves, especially when the industry is becoming increasingly commercial,' he said. The documentary has already received two nominations under the 'In country production' and 'Music' categories at the upcoming Wildscreen Panda Awards, 2025. This prestigious award is often referred to as the 'green Oscars'.My Otter Diary can inspire individuals, as well as organisations, to create more such documentaries that offer a glimpse into the lives of local biodiversity. Such bodies of work are not merely records of nature but are ways to ignite new waves of done right, these documentaries can foster a deeper understanding and appreciation of the vibrant natural world right in our backyards — especially among children, and ultimately, and Sugandhi are already working on a Kannada version of their documentary to be screened among the local communities along the river. Such efforts are integral. They compel us to ask: What is our role in ensuring balance?.While awareness is the first step, it must be followed by meaningful engagement between people holding diverse views and the administration. Only then can the needle be moved towards conservation, and only then can finding a middle ground for both the otters and the fisherfolk becomes Otter Diary will be screened at the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE), Bengaluru, on July 11, 2024, at 4 pm. .(The author is an ecologist and faculty member at ATREE)
Hindustan Times
26-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
Bengaluru's long relationship with its 280 lakes
Recently, I saw the premiere of 'My Otter Diary' by acclaimed wildlife filmmaker and National Geographic Fellow, Sugandhi Gadadhar and her producer-husband Rana (Raghunath) Belur. Filmed over five years, the film explores the symbiotic relationship between otters and the river Kaveri. Otters, says Sugandhi, are to the river what tigers are to a jungle: they are apex predators who preserve and enhance the ecosystem that they belong to. The worst time for our lakes was in February 2017 when Bellandur Lake caught on fire, thanks to the large amount of toxic waste released into it (File photo) The screening was held at Shankar Nag theatre in MG Road and the entire wildlife community was in attendance. Through the film, I got to know the river Kaveri in all her glory. Kaveri looms large in the minds of this city and state. For Kodavas in particular, Kaveri is their home and reigning patron goddess. Which made me wonder, is it because of the river Kaveri that Bangaloreans love their lakes so much? Lots of things fail in civic activism in our city, but stray dogs and lake restoration command passion, witness the rejuvenation of Puttanahalli lake and others. Why do Bangaloreans love their lakes so much? Architect Naresh Narasimhan has a nifty narrative to explain this. He says, Bengaluru is perhaps the only large city in the world that has developed on a plateau with nary a natural object nearby. Most civilisations were established beside rivers. Ditto for large cities of the world: the river Seine flows through Paris, the Hudson through New York and the Nile through many great African cities. Bengaluru, on the other hand, became a city because it was at the crossroads of trade routes. This is why, says Naresh, the old city area or Pete (pronounced pay-tay) is full of trading communities including Marwaris, Settys and Mudaliars. To protect the Pete, Bengaluru's erstwhile rulers built a kote (ko-tay) or fort. Once Bangalore thrived, the rulers began building thottas or gardens including Lal Bagh and Cubbon Park. In order to water the gardens, they established lakes or keres. This nifty pete-kotte-thotta-kere model of Bangalore's development is something Naresh speaks about often. Bangaloreans love lakes because we built them. They are all man-made with bunds holding the water in, and sluices to connect one to the other. Civic evangelist V Ravichander quotes the legend of Kempe Gowda as an additional reason. The story goes that when Kempe Gowda decided to establish his dream city on the plateau with hillocks where Bangalore exists today, his mother is supposed to have told him: 'Keregalum kattu, maragalum nadu' or 'Build lakes, plant trees.' Kempe Gowda did just that, building hundreds of lakes and gardens. By some accounts, Bengaluru used to be a city of a thousand lakes – one crowdsourced initiative put it at 1521 lakes. What is more reasonable is that we used to have some 280 lakes of which only 80 currently remain under the ambit of the Bangalore Bruhat Mahanagara Palike (BBMP). Even calling them lakes is a misnomer. In an evocative 2014 paper by Professor Meera Baindur, titled 'Bangalore Lake story: reflections on the spirit of a place,' she talks about a holy man who used to come and sit under a tree beside a kere to conduct rites and rituals. This tight and daily connection that Bangalore's early people had with the kere in their neighbourhood does not exist anymore. In public presentations and in paper, researcher Rohan D'Souza has stated that a kere refers to an ecosystem rather than a mere water body. It is literally larger than life in the Kannada imagination. The good news is that Bengaluru's keres are slowly making a comeback, thanks mostly to Resident Welfare Associations (RWAs) that have taken it upon themselves to improve the ecosystem. The worst time for our lakes was in February 2017 when Bellandur Lake caught on fire, thanks to the large amount of toxic waste released into it. Cut to 2022 when the 'Lakeman of India,' a Bangalore resident, Anand Malligavad, helped to restore Kyalasanahalli Kere. As an aside, let me ask if part of the problem is the fact that most of these lakes have long, barely pronounceable names? Malligavad, even today, continues to be at the forefront of lake restoration. D'Souza documents how government bodies treat water bodies such as Rachenahalli Kere, thus making them accountable. Civic activism has also kept real estate developers away from lakes, not always and not always successfully, but not for nothing either. What next? As an immigrant to Bangalore, although one who has lived here now for nearly 20 years, I remain fascinated by the hold that these lakes have on the city's collective imagination. But in order for lakes to revive or even survive, people need to have a connection with it that goes beyond just morning walks. Unless people are able to relate to each kere as a living ecosystem that gives them something, why would you want to save it? (Shoba Narayan is Bengaluru-based award-winning author. She is also a freelance contributor who writes about art, food, fashion and travel for a number of publications)
The Hindu
06-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Hindu
‘Otters and fishermen have been living together ever since man took to fishing'
Sugandhi Gadadhar still remembers her first encounter with a smooth-coated otter while on a family vacation alongside the Cauvery many years ago. As a child, the Bengaluru-based National Geographic explorer, photographer, and wildlife filmmaker often went to play on its banks. 'It was one of those occasions when this thing (the otter) suddenly popped up from the water,' she says. 'The memory of that stuck in my mind for years.' Later, when filming other wildlife, she returned to that memory, 'this mirage-like thing' she found herself unable to shake off. 'I wanted to learn more about otters,' says Sugandhi, who has just released a documentary, My Otter Diary, co-created with her partner, wildlife filmmaker Raghunath 'Rana' Belur. 'That is when we started looking for otters to study in the wild.' The fact that otters are not so easily spotted 'because they are so shy and sensitive' lent to the challenge, she says; especially since 'there were not too many documentaries focusing only on otters in India,' chimes in Rana. He adds that most of the studies around these carnivorous, semi-aquatic mammals were set in the region around the Chambal in central and northern India and in Goa. 'There were surveys done along the Cauvery, but not too many had studied the behaviour, in terms of one family,' he says. My Otter Diary does precisely that, offering insights into otter behaviour, the threats and challenges they face and the complex relationship they share with the humans who inhabit the same patches of the river they do by following a female otter, Maya, and her family. 'That is what interested us: just spending time with them to understand what they do, how they behave, what their relations are and how they are feeling,' explains Rana. 'Rather than going around the river or going to multiple places and looking at them, we just thought of looking at one family's point of view.' How it began Rana and Sugandhi, the co-founders of Aranya Parva Creations, a production company specialising in natural history documentaries, began thinking about otters back in 2018. They had been making a short film on bears for the Karnataka Forest Department, shooting along the Tungabhadra river, close to Hampi and the Daroji Sloth Bear Sanctuary, recalls Rana. Since the Tungabhadra Otter Conservation Reserve, India's first otter conservation reserve, was created in this area, they started exploring for otters here, but they soon had to give up on this idea due to 'different logistical reasons,' says Rana. 'So, we started looking at different places, one of which was along the Cauvery.' It also helped that they already knew people who had studied or worked along this stretch, one of whom was the wildlife biologist Nisarg Prakash, who has conducted surveys and written about the otters along the Cauvery. Through Nisarg, they met Shivanna 'Shivu', a fisherman who lives and works along the river Cauvery, who, with Sugandhi herself and the many otters, is a crucial character in the documentary. 'We also needed to navigate the river and were looking for someone who could take us boating,' he says. Once they started boating with Shivu, they began enjoying his company and his wry sense of humour, so they asked him to work with them, explains Rana. 'He would wait for us in the mornings and take us out daily. ' Life by the river In 2020, after spending nearly two years traversing the Cauvery, looking for signs of otters, they found Maya and her family. 'It was around the time of the pandemic, so we actually took a house in a local village there and stayed in that village for the next five years, instead of travelling up and down,' says Rana. They fell into a routine there, something that the film also captures: leaving home at 5-5.30 am to reach a spot at the crack of dawn, waiting for Maya and her family to appear. 'While you know that this is when they come out or return to their den, they don't always stick to that pattern. It was not every day that we saw otters, so that was a challenge,' says Sugandhi, while Rana chips in, saying that otters' movement patterns depended on many things, including when the fishermen lay out their nets. 'Some days, we would stay the whole day, some days we would wait until we got a gut feeling that they had come and gone, and would not come back that day,' he says. Over the next five years, they would stick to this routine, garnering footage of otters feeding, playing, mating, fighting and bonding, to tell a deeply compelling story of this beautiful animal, currently classified as Vulnerable by the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. My Otter Diary, the research of which was supported by the National Geographic Society, TVS Motor Company and Globetek, also explores a more universal theme in a nuanced way: the negative impact of current 'development' models on wildlife and indigenous communities, often pitting them against each other. 'Otters and fishermen have been living together ever since man took to fishing, but the problems they are now dealing with are different,' explains Rana. The Cauvery, which is under stress due to a combination of factors, now holds fewer fish, which 'both the fishermen and otters are trying to get to, so that is where the conflict is arising from,' he says. This 52-minute-long film, which has been co-produced by Oxford Scientific Films and is being distributed by All3Media International, hopes to kickstart a conversation around these issues, raise awareness about otters and simply have more people rooting for Maya and all the otters, says Sugandhi. Otters are apex predators in the riverine ecosystems they inhabit, like tigers in forests, and therefore, play a key role in maintaining the health of this ecosystem. But many people simply do not know enough about them, she states. 'We want the conflict between otters and fishermen to at least come down, if not stop. Both are victims, but they have not caused the situation,' she says. 'So, we want these conversations to begin and hopefully some action to happen.' My Otter Diary will be screened at Bangalore International Centre on June 7, 11 am to 12.30 pm.
