Posts by: Kalyan Varma

Finally a blog post after many weeks. I’ve been so busy, I’ve barely had any time to sleep. We had a mini bird survey at BR hills. It went really well and I shall write about it very soon LOT of new photographs to post-process. Will take me atleast another week to catch-up. Made a 4 day trip to Munnar and Thattekad in between and I got to photograph some of the rarest birds in India. I barely covered foss.in this time around. The BR hills calendar is the official foss.in calendar (thanks to SANIsoft for sponsoring them). If you…

President looking at my Wildlife photographs When the President Abdul Kalam was at BR hills, and after seeing the forests and the wildlife photographs, he spoke about the concept of Carbon credits and how it was giving incentives for companies to reduce their carbon emissions into the atmosphere. The concept is pretty simple : A company that exceeds its limit of carbon emission, has to buy these extra credits from companies who have either reduced their emission or from people who have switched to using renewable energy. After that he mooted the idea of ‘Forest Credits’ in similar lines. He…

For the coming new year, I’m putting together a table-top calendar of some of my best Wildlife Photographs. The plan is to get this printed with one of the best printers in India with the best color and paper quality. Also want to use this as an opportunity to raise funds for the conservation projects at BR hills. To cover the costs of this good quality printing, I need some large-scale orders. Basically looking for some corporate orders of 500+ calendars. Do let me know if you or your company is interested in these calendars where part of the profits…

The photo exhibition at BR hills did happen and I did get a chance to interact with the President of India, though it did not happen the way I wanted it to. The security at the place was a mess and all the press folks had formed a circle around him, which make things really ugly. But anyway, he really loved the photographs and his personal favorite was this photograph of the very charming soliga girl (which I had photographed last week) and the mother tiger. He was really inspirational to listen to and believe it or not, he almost…

Looks like the WWF exhibition has finally come to Bangalore and it is being held this weekend at Taj Residency. I have no idea how many of my photographs are being displayed, but there should be quite a few. If you are in that area, do swing by between 11am and 8pm on the 14th and 15th of Oct. However, I will not be around at the exhibition. The President of India is coming over to BR hills this sunday to attend the 25th year celebrations of the local tribal NGO : VGKK. I’m displaying/exhibiting my BR hills photograph for…

Note to self : Do not drink Red Bull in any form an hour before you go to bed. It’s close to 5am and still not a wink of sleep 🙁

The Ungulate conference at Munnar went really well. Got to meet some of worlds best wildlife biologists, scientists, photographers, filmmakers etc. Ofcourse, I also planned the trip to go see the Kurinji Flowers which are in bloom and the Nilgiri Thar and to do some ground work on another project. But the weather was not on my side. It was wet wet wet and my new gear got fully drenched in the rain.. including my bag.. the big lens.. everything. To make matters worse, the place was infested with leeches. Till date, leeches got me many times on my foot…

Starting today, I’m off to Munnar to attend the 4th World Congress on Mountain Ungulates. This is the first time I’m attending a wildlife conference in my life and I’m eagerly looking forward to meeting a lot of people and attending lot of the session. I’m going along with Sandesh Kadur to do a small expedition there. Will write about it once I get back. See you next week.

I’m at the GPLv3 Conference at IIMB and it sucks. People missed the whole point of the conference. The conference is about what-to-have and what-not-to-have in the next version of GPL. However, the last 2 days, people have been just asking “How do I run xxx in linux” to “What do you think about M$”. Currently I’m in the DRM panel and someone asks RMS “Why free software” and he is going on and on about how he was in MIT and how he lost freedom.. the usual stuff. Somehow he/she does not get boo’ed while someone got boo’ed coz…