On the 10th floor of Mafatlal Centre in South Mumbai, ‘pugmarks’ can be spotted everywhere. Hemendra Kothari, 65, the big cat of investment banking, is ready to show the trail right to its end. He first opens the door to a room named Kanha where hangs a rectangular picture of two young tigers frolicking in brown grass, about to paw each other. On the other end of the floor is Bandipur where tigers are swimming towards their prey with huge luminous eyes. Next is Ranthambore where a lioness is out on a stroll. These are three of the six meeting rooms of Kothari’s asset management firm of DSP Black Rock, and each is named after an Indian National Park.
Showing visitors around brings a glow to Kothari’s face — the kind that happens when an investment banker seals a billion dollar deal. Kothari has seen it all. Kothari comes from one of the original moneyed families of the city. His great-grandfather, Purbhoodas Jeevandas Kothari, was one of the founders of the Bombay Stock Exchange, Asia’s oldest bourse, in 1875. The family flagship for many years was DS Purbhoodas, the broking outfit. In 1975, Kothari expanded into other financial services and set up DSP Financial Consultants. His big moment came 20 years later in 1995 when he set up a joint venture with Merrill Lynch. Kothari did some of the biggest deals of those times including the 100-year Yankee Bonds of Reliance Industries, Lafarge’s acquisition of Tata Steel’s cement business and innumerable overseas floats and public sector divestments. He exited the venture in two tranches in 2005 and 2009. In November 2009, Forbes had put his net worth at $740 million. In 2008, he formed DSP Black Rock. Wildlife conservation is his latest passion. He now invests his energy more and more in his Wildlife Conservation Trust.
Kothari says he fell in love with nature in the year when “brokerage business wasn’t very interesting”. Right after BCom from Sydenham College in 1967, and before he joined his friend (late) Ashok Piramal at Morarjee Mills, Kothari and three friends had driven up to Nainital in Uttarakhand. “While coming back from Nainital, we decided to take a slight detour and go to Corbett National Park. As soon as we entered the park we saw a leopard on the road. We were there only for a night but the beauty of Corbett and its animals had me in thrall,” says Kothari. “During my school days, I used to go to Tulsi Vihar (close to Powai). We also had a house in Matheran. I used to go to Khandala quite often too. It felt good to be there with nature.”
After Corbett, Kothari started going to wildlife sanctuaries more often. Initially, the objective was “enjoyment and adventurism”. He attended the Himalayan Mountaineering Institute in Darjeeling, which gave him the opportunity to trek in the Himalayas. It was during his trekking trips that he developed an instinct for conservation. “That’s the time I started to develop this feeling to save tigers because for many years I didn’t see them and I missed seeing them.” But it wasn’t until a decade or so back, when he met Bittu Sahgal (a leading conservationist and now one of the trustees of his trust), that Kothari could put together a trust committed to the preservation, protection and conservation of wildlife across India. “It took two more years after I founded the trust in 2002 to actually get it active because I wasn’t finding the right professionals for the work,” says Kothari, sitting in his spacious ‘sanctuary’ from where waves can be seen crashing against the Marine Drive promenade.
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At present, his trust is working with 26 National Parks across 14 states. The nature of support varies from survival kits (equipment that enables the field staff to survive in the forest for three to four days), patrol-cum-rescue vehicles, specially-designed injury-proof carnivore trapping cages, integrated solar charging systems, LPG cylinders, water filters for forest outposts to basic necessities like winter jackets, gumboots, shoes, raincoats, bicycles, metal cots, trunks and uniforms. It has also instituted the WCT Wildlife Service Awards to motivate the forest staff along with agencies such as the judiciary, police department and eco-development committees that work hand-in-hand with the forest department to curtail man-animal conflict, forest degradation and poaching.
There is another reason. “Sometimes,” says Kothari, “a state government may appear reluctant to take help from us. They’re sceptical of our motive. They think my objective is to make business out of conservation by building lodges — something what Assam and Maharashtra first thought.” The awards are one way to persuade the authorities of the genuineness of his intention. “It takes time for people to understand the work the trust is into. Once people start accepting it, once they see what we have done in other states, they start trusting us.”
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For people living inside and on the fringes of the national parks and other wildlife sanctuaries, the trust, in association with the Hemendra Kothari Foundation, has introduced vocational courses and programmes to develop soft skills, mentor entrepreneurship and develop managerial capacity. In addition, medical camps are being held for them to counter problems like malnutrition, goitre, respiratory infections etc. Last year, the trust covered 798 villages across 12 national parks serving about 45,572 people. “Forested areas have degraded because of the man-animal conflict. Then we realised that since there are no real jobs for them, they cut forests. By cutting timber, they are trying to make ends meet,” says Kothari. “There was an urgent need to create jobs for them; so we started skill-training in a small way, particularly in the crucial areas where more man-animal conflicts take place.”
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The impact of all this is yet to be assessed. But it seems to have helped in some other way. Kothari claims that in September 2009, when Cyclone Alia hit the eastern coast and threatened 2.3 million lives, his boats were the first to reach the villages in The Sundarbans with medicine, water and food. “You have to be prepared to act and to put your money where your mouth is,” says Kothari who has reportedly set aside Rs 100 crore for specific projects and charities and has put this in his will in case he is not able to do it in his lifetime or something happens to him suddenly.
Anish Andheria, who has over 20 years of experience in running conservation, research and nature education projects, and who has seen many businessmen visit the forests, says that when it comes to actual wildlife conservation, Kothari is one of a kind. “I’ve come across many businessmen who were mesmerised by what we did 11 years back in the sanctuaries. But no serious money came from them. Kothari was himself doing ad-hoc donations for some time until he got into it full time. In the last two years, after he quit DSP Merrill Lynch, he has become more active as a conservationist. He is only going to get busier as a conservationist with time,” says Andheria, director of Kothari’s Wildlife Conservation Trust and Sanctuary Asia.
Kothari is next off to Kenya with his two daughters for a safari at the Masai Mara National Reserve. “I’m very fortunate that my family, my two daughters, care about forests like me,” says Kothari whose elder daughter, Aditi Kothari, is a trustee of Wildlife Conservation Trust. In Africa, Kothari is hoping to witness the Great Migration — the annual migration of zebra, Thomson’s gazelle and wildebeest from the Serengeti — which takes place between July and October along the river Mara.
Kothari recounts how, the last time he was in Africa, he had a spellbinding moment: “We were in an open vehicle. On our left, we saw a leopard perched on the branch of a tree and his cub was on the next one. We were admiring the two for quite some time till we realised something huge taking a round of the car behind us. It was a lion. The lion started to climb the tree, trying to get hold of the leopard. You should’ve heard the growl of the two wild beasts on the cusp of a fight. The leopard urinated seeing the lion trying to get her. We reversed our vehicle because we thought either the lion or the leopard will fall into our car. Of course, the lion can’t climb up very high so the leopard lived to see another day, but the lion did astonish us by climbing at least 15 feet up.”
Before you have the opportunity to recreate the scene in your mind, Kothari lets you in on another one of his wild experiences: “Once, when I was riding an elephant at six in the morning, we saw a hungry lioness. We knew she had two cubs, which she had hidden behind a tree. Spotting a herd of chital, she went for the kill but halfway she realised that a leopard was making a move on her cubs from behind. Angry, the lioness abandoned her kill, turned and charged towards the leopard. It was a great sight as the leopard ran away to the steep hill while the lioness walked back to her babies.”
Although it’s bleeding obvious, from his adventurous anecdotes and the way he articulates them all in one breath, Kothari mentions that he operates in a higher state of consciousness when he is in the lap of nature. “When the tiger is in the vicinity, one can hear the calls of alarm coming from a chital or a langur. These are all exciting things. Then you see the tiger coming out from behind somewhere after waiting for an hour maintaining pin-drop silence. This is some kind of meditation. You sit over there and forget everything. Forest is for me like a blood-pressure pill. If not for the restrictions, I would build a house in the heart of the forest and live there for months together.” This must be the subconscious reason behind building six National-Park-branded rooms at his office.