Mott Hupfel

I arrived in Bangalore 5/15 to shoot the India/China section of Eating Animals with Christopher Quinn.  He arrived later so I went to Mysore to see the Raj’s palace and Tipoo Sultan’s summer palace.  I barely slept the first night due to jet lag but had a great morning drinking tea in the garden of my hotel while the sun rose.  Chris arrived and we had a day of planning and setting up and then we headed off to Gudalur, Ooty, Namakkal, and Puttaparthi.  We met Dr. S, a local Gudalur vet and our guide while in India, and headed straight to Gudalur.  We met and shot many different types of farmers there.  The idea is to tell the story that India is quickly moving from a more traditional way of agriculture to something much closer to the factory farming we do in the west, in order to feed the rapidly growing middle class.  We saw farmers that hit every point on that arc.  The most interesting was a guy named Subash who left a lucrative financial sector job in the city to return to his family farm to raise cattle.  He had a very optimistic and inspiring attitude- he felt that India would not go the way of the west because the traditional style of farming is only 1 generation back so there are still those alive that can teach the old ways.  There is a small group of people in India that recognize the value, to the environment and the people, of the traditional ways and he believes that they will prevail and that India will not make the mistakes that we have. Here is a picture of Dr. S.  He left a job with the Indian Gov’t in order to educate people about the dangers of moving to a more corporate farming model.

PS  They had Elephants and monkeys there