Star snake catcher Vava Suresh vows to stop profession unless reporters apologise

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The News Minute| March 22, 2015| 11.25 am IST

He is the snake catcher from Kerala credited with catching almost 38,000 snakes till now, a snake catcher so popular that he has a mobile app for people to contact him. But in a dramatic development, Vava Suresh has declared that he is planning to stop "snake catching" following few negative news paper reports that have apparently hurt him.

News stories which were published in two Malayalam news papers Chandrika and Deshabhimani had alleged that Suresh sucks the venom out the snakes he catches and later sells it.

Suresh told the online news portal Marunadan Malayali that if the news papers don’t apologise he will stop his work April 1st onwards.

“I can’t touch snakes while this insult hangs on me” he said.

In the report he said that he claims that he kept aside 28 years of life for snakes, without expecting anything much in return.

Suresh also told the media that he will file defamation cases against the reporters.

Recently he had caught a king cobra and some reporters and natives had asked him to display the snake in front of the public. But Suresh declined saying he had no time and later displayed it to the public in front of the forest officers.

Then the local editions of the two particular news papers reported that Suresh’s act was suspicious and alleged that he was selling snake venom.

For the last twenty-eight years, Suresh has been catching snakes, and for fifteen years he has been doing it as a social service rather than a profession. His services have become so popular that he even has an android app called "King Cobra".

In an earlier interview to The News Minute, forty-year-old Suresh had said that he first caught a snake when he was only twelve. That too a cobra! “I was walking to my school when I saw a snake. My instinct was to catch it and put it away from the road. I never thought that would become my profession,” Suresh says.