About Me
When I was a small boy, I watched The Jungle Book and it was love at first sight. I wanted to grow up to be Mowgli and play with Bagheera, Baloo, Kaa, etc., like many other kids do. I would give up sweet sunday morning sleep to watch the National Geographic specials that used to air on National Television before we had Animal Planet and NGC on our television sets. The dream eventually came true.
Though originally from Vizag, I've been in Bangalore the last 14 years and now this is my home town. I'm a mechanical engineer by qualification but that pretty much ended with college. I worked for a few years with a dot-com company taking care of application security and saw it grow from 5 to 1000 employees, after which I bailed out.
I wanted to take a sabbatical for few months and decided to work as a Naturalist with Jungle Lodges at BR hills. What started out as a stint for a few weeks extended to a month, then two, and eventually I ended up spending more than 8 months in the forest. These have been the best times of my life. I've seen tigers hunt sambar in middle of the night, a few metres from me, stared leopards in the eye, spent hours with herds of elephants, and spent time learning jungle lore from the local tribals and forest guards. You really have to be there to experience that life.
Towards the end of 2005, I won the Sanctuary Wildlife photographer of the year award and that really made me take up wildlife photography very seriously. Soon after that I had a chance to exhibit my BR hills photographs to President of India Dr A. P. J. Abdul Kalam. Along the way I worked with BBC Natural History unit via Icon films for more than a year in the Western Ghats. My work has appeared in many publications worldwide, including National Geographic, BBC Wildlife, Wildlife Conservation, Sanctuary Asia, Maxim (you heard it right) and other magazines, and also various Biological Science text books.
I'm part of the team that runs India Nature Watch, an online community which hosts the largest number of wildlife photographs in Asia. I'm also involved in setting up MigrantWatch, Restoration websites and natural history databases.
I like to collaborate with wildlife scientists, researchers, policy makers, activists, and educators on fieldwork, books, and film projects. I have also done numerous road shows and photography slideshows and exhibition to spread the message of conservation. A rainforest education and information center has been setup in Valparai, in the plantation area within the Anamalai Tiger Reserve using many of my photographs. My photographs have appeared in various educational posters and books on the Western Ghats and the northeast India.
Currently I'm a freelance wildlife photographer, filmmaker, naturalist, and a natural history consultant. I specialise in natural history and conservation subjects and work with organisations like Icon Films, BBC Natural History Unit and non-profit organisations like Nature Conservation Foundation and VGKK. I also do web stories for the BBC as their Earth Explorer
I believe that art is a powerful agent of change. It makes us curious, and curiosity leads to engagement and conversation, which in turn may lead to action..
Other Pages
|
|
|
