Brothers in India save birds of prey (Jainism)

All That Breathes, Goats & Soda, NPR; Crystal Q., CC Liu, Dhr. Seven (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

Like Prince Siddhartha Gautama, who became the Buddha, I came from Afghanistan to India.

Oscar-nominated film profiles two brothers who save fallen birds of prey

Kamala Thiagarajan (Goats and Soda: NPR), Feb. 5, 2023

Raptors (Javed Dar/Xinhua via Getty Images)

The story of two bird-saving brothers in India gets an Oscar nomination and an HBO premiere (Feb. 7th, 2023).

Wildlife Rescue is a clinic run by brothers Nadeem Shehzad and Muhammad Saud in Delhi, India, for injured black kites. Over the past 12 years, they've treated nearly 26,000 of the flying raptors. The brothers are featured in a new prize-winning documentary, All That Breathes, which was just nominated for an Oscar and is premiering on HBO on Feb. 7th.

Shaunak Sen was stuck in a traffic jam one evening in 2018 when he looked up at the hazy, polluted skies of Delhi and saw dozens of raptors, birds with brown feathers, gracefully circling overhead.

Then one bird just dropped to the ground in mid-flight. "After I went back home, I had to Google it," Sen says. "What happens to birds that fall out of the sky in Delhi?"

The answer led him to two Muslim brothers — Nadeem Shehzad and Muhammad Saud — who would soon become the subjects of his award-winning documentary, All That Breathes.

Shot over a period of three years from 2019, the documentary last year won both the Golden Eye Award for top documentary at Cannes and the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. And now it's been nominated for an Oscar for best documentary feature film — only the second Indian film nominated in that category after Writing with Fire in 2021.

The film tells of the brothers' lifelong struggle to save an unusual bird — the meat-eating black kites that have made the smog-ridden Delhi skies their home...

The capital of India is filthy

Ahimsa (nonharming) is key to Jainism.

"Birds are plummeting from the sky. Delhi is a gaping wound, and we're a tiny Band-Aid on it," says Nadeem, a wildlife rehabilitator and the elder of the brothers.

"The scraps from slaughterhouses and meat-processing plants are dumped in Delhi. This, and the huge amounts of garbage that pile up every day, attracts hundreds of these scavenging birds.

They come from Russia, the steppes of Afghanistan, and Mongolia." The brothers were particularly drawn to the black kite, Nadeem says, when they found an injured bird as kids but couldn't get treatment for it.

Compassionate Jains do not deal in meat

Compassionate Founder of Jainism: Mahavira

In 1995, a bird hospital run by the Jain community (see Jainism) nearby turned it away because it is "a non-vegetarian bird," says Saud, the younger brother.

Jains, whose central tenet is non-violence (ahimsa), are staunch vegetarians. Their vegetarian hospital didn't have the capacity to provide the birds with their primary diet of murdered animal flesh.

Most people tend to misunderstand raptors, Saud explains: They think of black kites as vicious hunters. But they are also scavengers — very helpful with cleaning the mountains of garbage that pile up in Delhi, he says. More

• Support what the Jain hospital could not