The mango yellow sun shimmered through the golden yellow grasslands of the Masai Mara. The wind whispered through the tall grass, each one dancing like a note in nature’s orchestra – an orchestra no human could ever compose.
Somewhere in these thickets, a cheetah cub jumped onto a rock. It was bursting with life – turning every insect into a game, every flutter into a case. Click! Dr Ramakanta Panda captured the moment. The joy-filled cub beside its majestic mother, both glowing in golden light.
“Life is so simple, yet so complicated,” Dr Panda said softly, his eyes still had that golden glow. He took a deep breath and began to explain how the story behind that photo completely changed the way he saw life and death.
It all started with a call from the cheetah team at the Masai Mara. A cheetah had given birth to six baby cubs – a rare scene in nature because 90 per cent of the cubs never make it to adulthood. By the time Dr Panda arrived, which was only a week later, only one had remained. The rangers suspected they had fallen prey to hyenas or lions.
Photo | Dr Ramakanta Panda
”The photo I took wasn’t extraordinary,” Dr Panda admitted. “It wasn’t about the picture. It is the story behind it that made it so special. I saw joy and death standing side by side – that’s nature, and that’s life.”
There was another such moment in our own land – The Kanha National Park. Years ago, Dr Panda got a call from the rangers there. Sivani, a young elephant was missing for a few days. The rangers looked for her in all her regular trails, but had no luck. All that was left was a faint track leading deep into the jungle.
“She couldn’t have survived,” the rangers whispered, but hope is sometimes stubborn.
Then, one quiet morning, the radio crackled – they found her. Shivani was alive. 25 kilometres inside the dense forest with her mother. She had another surprise for the rangers – a baby brother. Shivani was found playing wither her newborn brother.
Photo | Dr Ramakanta Panda
“Maybe she could feel her mother’s pain,” Dr Panda said, smiling. “Nature never forgets to fascinate does it...”
It was this deep respect for life, both wild and human, that eventually led him to establish Asian Wildlife Trust that not only works towards protection the country’s wildlife, but also help the forest workers and the families living around the National Parks.
Dr Panda’s own journey began in the bustling corridors of science. Inspired by the world’s first heart transplant in the 1960s, he decided he would be a doctor too. After years of hard work he went to become the surgeon with the safest hands with a success rate of 99.8 per cent.
Dr Panda has performed more than 30,000 successful heart surgeries out of which more than 6,000 are high risk. In January 2009, he led the Asian Heart Institute team and successfully operated then Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh. Dr Panda was awarded Padma Bhushan by the Centre in 2010.
Photo | Dr Ramakanta Panda
“In surgery,” Dr Panda says, “a cut even a millimetre off is a question of life and death.” His eyes glowed with pride as he explained the patience, discipline and the rough times he had to go through to get to where he is.
But even the gods need some time off he says. Photography began just as that – a pause between endless hustle.
“It wasn’t like I picked up a camera and I was a wildlife photographer,” he laughed. He went on to explain how he started photography in the early film days. “I once forgot to check if the roll was inserted properly and came back just to find the whole shoot’s roll empty. But it is these blunders that taught me more that any success did.” From macro photography to landscapes and then moved on to tame the wild. Dr Panda went through the levels with the same discipline and perseverance to get to where he is now. “Surgery is still my first love,” he says nothing can compare to the feeling of saving lives “But photography... is surgery to my soul.”
They say to make art is to make an emotion visible – something another heart can read. The wild has blurred the line between science and spirit for Dr Panda. “We think cubs are cute, but most of them never make it to adolescence.” He presses on the fact that this fragility is what reminds him how precious every heartbeat is – human or wild.
He paused looking out at the photo of the cheetah cub and said with a low voice. “We don’t need to do much to protect wildlife, just give them space, and they will thrive,” he said.
Dr Panda is still a surgeon – of hearts, of hope and of the wild. His scalpel protects the rhythm of the hearts inside the hospital walls and his camera captures and protects the rhythm of life that beats far beyond them.
