Maverick traveller

Mark Shand’s passion for vintage cars and elephants has blossomed into a love affair with India.

His first trip to India, in the 1960s when he was 16, was supposed to be a two-day stopover. Instead, Mark Shand, well-known elephant conservationist, maverick traveller and brother of Camilla Parker, Prince Charles’ wife, stayed for six months—the beginning of his love affair with India.

Shand, now innumerable India trips old, is currently shuttling between the country and England in his present role as the moving spirit behind Cartier’s Travel with Style Concours which will see various classic cars vie for the judges’ attention in Delhi’s Jaipur Polo Club later this month. At the press conference for the preview of the cars, among various sober speeches and comments, Shand’s statements evoke laughter: “Vintage cars are like elephants — they are both cranky, large and have big appetites.”

Among Shand’s various travels, his most famous is probably the one he undertook across India atop his elephant Tara, which he chronicled in his book, Travels on my Elephant. That also marked the beginning of his other passion — Asian elephants. Troubled at the rate at which they are disappearing, Shand has worked extensively to raise awareness and set up charitable organisation Elephant Family for the conservation of the Asian elephant.

His latest effort was the Elephant Parade, organised in London last year, which saw 260 funky elephants, designed and decorated by various artists and celebrities, being auctioned. Part of the £4 million raised through it is being spent on a 6-kilometre long, half-kilometre wide elephant corridor in Wayanad in Kerala. An elephant corridor, as the name suggests, is a clearing that would enable them free passage, removing the necessity to trample through human habitation.

To clear the corridor, now nearly complete, about 600 people were relocated and given houses and land, an effort that has so far cost £2.5 million . “Elephants are losing their habitat because of encroachment. In India, a person kills an elephant and an elephant kills a person every day. If I were to go to my grave having secured three big populations of elephants, I’d be very happy,” he says.

Shand is also involved in another elephant effort, a more light-hearted one—turning Travels on my Elephant into a movie. The screenplay has been written by Sooni Taraporevala and filming might begin by the end of this year. He has just been to Assam for a location recce and efforts are now on to find two elephants which look like Tara to star in the film. “I won’t use Tara in the film;I’d never put her through that,” he says. Tara is currently esconsced in Kipling Camp, close to the Kanha Tiger Reserve, where Shand says she lives like a diva. He had bought Tara on a whim from some sadhus in west Bhubaneswar, a case of love at first sight, though he clarifies that he did not see her face and had actually fallen in love with her behind. “Something drew me to her like a magnet,” he muses.

After his innumerable adventures (when I ask which was the most hair-raising, he replies in characteristic style: “Running this concours”), Shand says he is now ready to put his feet up. “I’m getting too old for this. My daughter’s 16 now, and once she goes off to university, I can relax a bit more,” he says. But the inveterate traveller that he is, it is more likely that he will have a few adventures more before he hangs up his boots.