Great Snakes!

Herpetologist and conservationist Romulus Whitaker has penned the first volume of his autobiography-Snakes, Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll: My Early Years-and it's a rambunctious read 

- Bhavya Dore

Romulus Whitaker has too many answers. The question: Any favourite snake species? "There's lots and lots of favourites," he says. Then offers up two: the eastern diamondback rattlesnake and the indigo snake. These and others star prominently in Snakes, Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll: My Early Years (HarperCollins), an account of Whitaker's wild and wondrous life in India and the US, co-written with his wife, the writer and filmmaker Janaki Lenin.

Whitaker, 80, often known affectionately as the 'Snakeman of India', is among the country's best-known conservationists. He established the Madras Snake Park, the Madras Crocodile Bank Trust and has worked extensively on India's rainforests. In 2018, he received the Padma Shri.

Snakes... is a chatty, delightful, anecdote-driven book of a richly lived life-the first of three planned volumes-and details Whitaker's childhood and adolescence.

Whitaker was born in the US in 1943 and raised by a single mother in New York state, before they relocated to Bombay when she married an Indian, Rama Chattopadhyay, son of Harindranath and Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay. "I felt like I'd landed on another planet," he writes. "My new home and country were far more exciting than anything I had experienced in the States in my eight-year existence." The wildlife bug had already taken root in America.

In India, it blossomed further. Whitaker hung out with fishermen in sleepy Juhu, shot sparrows in Worli, kept a pet snake and delighted in the pet shops of Crawford Market. He went to boarding school in Kodaikanal where he embraced the fauna of the Western Ghats.

It was always going to be a life with animals. There was no plan B. "Never," he says. "I'm totally obsessed. Still."