Sally Gillespie talks to the Peeblesshire author about her life, her passions, her new book and India.

Meeting Mrs Dobbie is an invigorating experience. Seems if she doesn’t like something, she sets about changing it. Imagine.

Her latest project is to save India’s tigers, a creature for which she’s felt a lifelong affinity. Along the way, she hopes her country of birth will take more care of it’s wildlife generally, blossom into a economic powerhouse and clean up on it’s treatment of women.

Taking responsibility and thinking of others is big with Aline – right alongside standing up for the underdog and a palpable distaste for injustice.

What’s so invigorating is there’s not a whiff of the sentimental about Mrs Dobbie, this self confessed child of India’s Independence. I’m not sure what the stats are on colonels’ daughters and products of the English public school system tackling, head on, South Africa’s apartheid system… She did, aged 20-something. Listening back to the tape recorder I’d given her to hold, it kept cutting out at vital bits. Turned out it was where she was gesticulating, passionate about one of her causes – wildlife, discrimination, India, people, the environment or those tigers...