About

As you would have already guessed Jun­gle Book is my blog. A place for me to ram­ble on like a stream in the woods. Mur­mur­ing at times, at times roar­ing into a water­fall and at oth­ers silently flow­ing as though frozen still under a gray win­ter sky.

Jun­gle Book talks about the Indian jun­gles, the birds and ani­mals that make it home, about men who want to make their homes in it and about me who vis­its these jun­gles col­lect­ing pho­tographs like a hunter-gatherer.

Wildlife pho­tog­ra­phy and hunting-gathering has a lot in com­mon. For one, in both cases, you go into the wild look­ing for some­thing. While you are find­ing what you want, you pick-up any­thing that catches your inter­est. When you find what you need you take back as much as you can carry. After you have exhausted what you took you return hop­ing to get more than before. The cycle repeats itself.

If hunter-gatherers had chis­eled down their chron­i­cles in stone and passed it down to us, it would be one of the most hilar­i­ous and adven­tur­ous clas­sics of all times. Sadly, all they left for us was a few pieces of tools that we don’t even know how to hold, for­get use. On the other hand, wildlife pho­tog­ra­phy has  become so sophis­ti­cated that it lacks all humour. Though some­times the ani­mals do act funny, that’s exactly when i look away; miss­ing the pho­to­graph that would have ruined their pub­lic life.

Wildlife pho­tog­ra­phy, unlike glam­our pho­tog­ra­phy, comes with a set of respon­si­bil­i­ties. Respon­si­bil­i­ties which you can­not shrug off with­out caus­ing a shake of the cam­era. And we all have come to learn, most of us the hard way – shak­ing cam­eras do not make good photos.

You can see a col­lec­tion of my hunted-gathered pho­tos at www.meethil.com