When Ashwika met David

In a 12th floor flat in Kolkata, sometime in the mid-’90s, my father, a chartered accountant, who could not tell a cheetah from a leopard, was quietly assembling from around the world a library of videos he had absolutely no intent to watch. Attenborough’s Life on Earth. The Trials of Life. The Life of Birds. The Life of Mammals. Life in the Freezer. The Private Life of Plants. They were for his daughter, who, at five, had already filled her balcony with rescued birds, frogs, rabbits, squirrels and an ever-expanding guest list nobody had quite signed off on.

It is one of the small, immeasurable kindnesses of my life that Dad understood, very early, what I needed. He brought home the wildlife books and the Attenborough tapes, and let his feral daughter come home on monsoon days as muddy as she wished.

Sir David Attenborough did the rest.

I watched the tapes over and over on a small TV set. I did not know I was being shaped and marked. By the time I was about to graduate college, it was assumed I would slide gently into law, or banking, or, failing all else, teaching. Instead, I bolted into the jungle with a camera. I was going to be a wildlife filmmaker. This was not my decision alone. A man with a quietly ardent voice had for many years been sitting in my drawing room telling me where the gorillas slept, how the lyrebird could mimic a chainsaw, and how, miraculously, the dung beetle navigated by the stars. That man was Sir David Attenborough.

Cut to 2014. My first film, Sirocco: How a Dud Became a Stud, about a flightless, nocturnal, alarmingly amorous New Zealand kakapo parrot named Sirocco, won Best Newcomer at Wildscreen Film Festival, the Green Oscars of the natural history world. Everyone back home was over the moon. But the bigger moment, for me, was that Sir David was there. In a crowd of hundreds, I handed him a DVD of the film. I learnt later, from a senior colleague, who tried to spare my feelings, that all he watched was VHS tape. I’m not sure if anything has changed since then!

For the rest of those few days, I had the privilege of watching a legend at work. He learns his lines, yes. But no two takes are quite the same. He shifts a word here, a verb there, not because his memory has failed him, but because he knows, better than anyone else, which phrasing will carry the science most accurately. Between shots he sits with the script on his knee and quietly rewrites: a line tightened, a clause relocated, an emphasis nudged. Until it is correct. Until it is him. Well into his nineties, there were, ever so often, the small fumbles. He notices them before anyone else. They frustrate him. They are so negligible that you understand, with a kind of awe, the standard he has held himself to for seven decades.

The next leg of the shoot was at ZSL Whipsnade Zoo, where he was to do a piece to camera with a baby elephant. It was here that I think I saw the thing in him that makes him who he is. Wonder. The years have given him everything else — experience, wisdom, the deep sediment of more than half a century in the field, but what years tend to take from people, they had simply not taken from him. As the calf was led out by her keeper, he greeted her with such unguarded gentleness, such quiet, undimmed delight at being in the company of a small elephant, that something very deep in me went very quiet. He was wise, and still capable of wonder. There is no formula for that. You cannot fake it for a camera. It is either left in you, or it isn’t.

And yet even he has not been spared the modern impulse of armchair critics. It has become fashionable, in the last decade or so, for a certain kind of commentator and green activist to question whether Sir David did enough. They will tell you he preferred lyricism to alarm. That his programmes showed us nature gleaming when they ought to have shown it on fire. That his great talent was deployed too cautiously, for too long, in service of preferred neutrality. That his recent and full-throated advocacy and United Nations speeches came only after much of the damage was already done. There is something in the charge, but it misunderstands what he actually did, and what it was for.

How do you quantify the love a single man has created for the natural world? How do you count the children who, on a rainy afternoon in 1995, in a back room in Kolkata or Brisbane or Buenos Aires, looked up from a small television and decided, without yet having the words for it, that this was what they would dedicate the rest of their lives to? You cannot. There is no metric for it. There is only the evidence of the work being done.

You cannot defend what you do not love, and the world, before David arrived, did not love most of what it knew. We feared the deep ocean. We were bored by lichen. We thought sharks were monsters. He spent years turning that ignorance into intimacy. He gave the hummingbird and the polar bear and the platypus their close-ups. He took a camera down onto the Great Barrier Reef and made a generation see the coral as a living, breathing thing rather than scenery. He made the pangolin a household name in countries that had never seen one. And, very quietly, by doing so, he produced generations of conservationists.

I am one among millions. A conservation filmmaker, I tell stories that I believe matter. Then there’s the marine biologist on a research vessel below the Antarctic Convergence. The researcher tracking what’s left of the Tasmanian devil population. The conservationist in Bengaluru. The graduate student in a Welsh meadow counting bumblebees nobody has bothered to count before. None of us is famous like him. Most of us will never meet him. But ask any of us sincerely, and you will get the same sentence, with small variations: I grew up watching David Attenborough documentaries. I knew, by about 10, that I would dedicate my life to animals. He is the invisible thread that runs between every one of us who serves the planet in our own small way. An inspiration to everyday changemakers as well as Britain’s royal family, Barack Obama, Leonardo DiCaprio, Australia’s very own Steve Irwin, among many more. He made us all fall in love with the planet by introducing us to it in a way nobody else ever has. That, in the end, is the greatest act of conservation any one person has ever performed.

He turned 100 on May 8, 2026.

This is an extraordinary man. He inspired generations across the world. And he loves jam tarts and carries a very unsmart phone and cannot drive and has a cracker of a sense of humour. And above all else he is human.

A hundred years. Of one man. On one small planet. Quietly making the rest of us notice it.

So, on behalf of the millions he set in motion. For everyone, in every corner of the world, who picked up a camera or a pen or a pair of binoculars because of him. For the planet he taught us to love before we knew it needed saving.

There is only one thing left to say.

Thank you, sir. And a happy World Environment Day.