Sherni

Sherni (Amazon Prime)

A movie that held us in thrall. 

This is the story of a committed Divisional Forest Officer (Vidya Balan), acting in the capacity of a Wildlife Warden. It takes us through trials & tribulations of foresters duty bound to protect our forest, flora & fauna. How rapacious politicians, kowtowing officials, poachers & a ballooning population encroaching on forest lands undermine our ecosystem, is portrayed with objectivity..

It is a sad saga of tigers & other animals engaged in a losing battle for survival. And a fast paced drama of a female officer trying to do her job consciously. The settings, scenes & issues seem surreal. The end had a sobering impact on us & may be on others too who have watched this movie. 

How the forest department functions now is obviously quite different from what it was meant to be & had been so from its formation around 1860, and continued to be so in the first few decades of independence. It used to be a paramilitary type, disciplined body of smart gentleman-officers and men devoted to scientific management of Indian forests. They worked in the harsh tropical, malarial forests with elan and dedication. Physically fit, they toured on horsebacks, bicycles & foot. Jeeps/Land Rovers were given to very few officials in remote postings.The movie shows current culture where officials, politicians & poachers dash around in noisey SUVs, lights flashing, making a big racket in silence zone, throwing forest etiquette to the winds & generally trampling on the serenity of forests. 

There are tigers in India who are now hardly tiger-like; mostly in national parks; surviving on life support systems akeen to lCUs in hospitals. They are a caricature of former selves that once proudly roamed Indian forests, so is the forest bureaucracy. Foresters are correctly picturised as a bunch of sloppy and compromised functionaries, a ghostly shadow of upright officers who managed our forests once upon a time.

 

While the country's forests have shrunk to one third of what they were, the forest officials and staff appear to have tripled in the meantime! The movie brings home an unvarnished image of depredation underway. 

We record our appreciation of outstanding work by the director & cast, as also others who made this watchable movie possible.