Over an occasional telephonic chat, a school friend of mine who I have not met after 1985, reminded me of the brilliant sunlight that one could get in Gujarat. These images however is not of Joydeep, but of the outcome of that conversation – I picked up my first telephoto lens within the first week of shifting home to Ahmedabad, slightly below the 23.26o parallel at 23.02oN. Other than a couple of dents and lots of monkey crap on our two year old SUV these simians are a charm to watch.
Phoenix dactylifera was the first scientific name I had learnt in school before Passer Domesticus, Columba livia domestica, Corvus splendens splendens and then onto Haliastur indus, Phalacrocorax niger, Phoenicopterus roseus . Admittedly, I did have a penchant for complicated names, and never shied from bragging the expansions of KLM and KGB. Srikumar Chatterjee was a senior scientist with the Zoological Survey of India’s Calcutta branch and was a co-passenger with my parents to and from his workplace in the same “chartered bus”, during the early 1980s, when I was introduced to him. Much before I learnt about “ornithology” or picked up a Dillon Ripley or Salim Ali, Srikumar’da had introduced me to a group of individuals with a vested interest in nature and conservation. They called themselves “Naturalists” and formed a club “Prakiti Samsad” or Nature Team. My tryst with birds, cannot be complete without a reference to the influence that the zoologist & good friend Srikumar Chatterjee had on me in those formative years, although I must say, that none of these made me a wildlife enthusiast anymore than anyone else. Srikumar Chatterjee was a member of the early Indian expeditions to the Antarctica and while many journals refer to photographs shot by him, there are hardly any of his photographs on the internet. I have a copy of his famous Albratross over the Antarctica shot circa 1982. Having lost touch with him, I tried to track him down a few years ago, when I got to know that he died of depression, a year after he returned from the Antarctica expedition. Wildlife photography is not my forte, but who doesn’t love nature.
