Gesturing with his hands, Ishan Shanavas announces that in a 500-metre vicinity of where we stood, there would surely be a rat snake. He has so far not been able to spot one in Thiruvananthapuram, he says, with a touch of disappointment, looking wistfully at the edges of tree branches as if to conjure one up.
If you shuddered at this observation, it is only because it is coming from a young man who knows what he is talking about. At 22, Ishan has not only managed to delve deep into the world of wildlife but also churned out a bestselling book on it. He is in Thiruvananthapuram as part of a book tour to visit schools and talk to students about wildlife conservation.
Ishan has visited about 35 schools and talked to around 8,000 students across south India, as part of his project called ‘Eco-Inspire’.
“When I showed a picture of a rat snake, students guessed [wrongly] that it was an anaconda or a black mamba, which are not even found in this continent. Some even suggested ‘basilisk’, which is a mythical creature. I hope this tour will be an opportunity to inspire,” Ishan says, quickly adding that he did not want to place himself on a pedestal.
On the contrary, he often sounds humbled in his book The Light of Wilder Things, especially in the presence of those who knew the wilderness better. He is also the first to admit when he makes an error. There is a part in the book where he wonders if his fascination with wildlife had only been a passing phase, when a second visit to see a tiger up close had not brought him the same excitement as the first.
“It was hard to write that. Four years would have passed since my first tiger sighting at Bandipur, when I was 14 years old. I was in anticipation of seeing a tiger again at Tadoba [tiger reserve]. But the circumstances were entirely different. In the first instance, it was a serene setting and it happened out of the blue, it was all so natural. In the second instance, at Tadoba, I saw a whole army of tourist jeeps before I spotted the tiger. It was this whole atmosphere of people chattering and watching the tiger in the midst of it all that gave me an uneasy feeling. I was afraid I was losing that part of myself that was in love with nature and wildlife,” he says with touching honesty.
He did work his way through it and found himself back in the cradle of forests and wildlife. A couple of years later – as a college student at Ashoka University – Ishan began writing his book. When his book became popular and his followers on Instagram rose, people – curious about this strange preoccupation – asked him how his interest in the wild began.
The tiger spotting at 14 was only a trigger for bigger adventures, but the love was kindled long ago – when as a child he went along with his parents to wildlife spaces and got his first leech bite at the age of three, when he watched Nat Geo instead of cartoons, and when en route to his father’s native place in Kozhikode, he woke up alert as they passed the Bandipur forest.
A more interesting theory is in his book. His parents come from two different religions and two different states. One is a Hindu from Karnataka, the other had a Muslim upbringing in Kerala. Ishan writes in his book: As you can imagine, I grew up grappling with many dilemmas around my identity. My passion for wildlife became a way of transcending them. Maybe the diversity of my upbringing steered me towards the diversity of the natural world. In nature, these superficial boundaries crumble. You aren’t left with any cultural constructs, only the strict laws of the wild. Animals, trees, mountains – they don’t have religions. They are just what they are.
Brought up in Bengaluru, Ishan was taken from his city school and packed off to Rishi Valley in a corner of Andhra, where conventions took a back seat and he felt at home. Living in a hostel next to a forest allowed his passion to grow without bounds. He leapt out of classroom windows in pursuit of a monitor lizard or a tree snake. He woke up watching a monkey or even a wild boar perched on his window sill. Above all, the rebel in him was elated by the absence of exams until Class 9, a joyride he had missed on account of coming to Rishi Valley too late.
Somehow, fear does not feature among the plethora of feelings he nursed for the wild. Respect, he says, is a better word. “If I see a cobra, I respect it. As long as I don’t do anything untoward, it wasn’t out to get me,” he says. But that kind of awareness takes time, he admits, and Ishan appears to have learnt sooner than others.
He describes incidents in the book where he was stunned by the lack of knowledge of the grown-ups around him who were supposed to know better – a teacher who did not stop a pet cat from attacking a snake but stopped a seven-year-old Ishan from intervening, or an older woman in a safari bus who wouldn’t admit that the animal they spotted was a wild dog, not a fox.
An older Ishan faces a different conundrum from the seven-year-old who watched a snake’s unnatural death. With surprising maturity he ponders over the bigger question of intervening in natural deaths, when he comes across a rat snake struck by a thorn. His instinct told him to rescue the reptile, but his logic questioned the move. Won’t it be interfering with nature? Among naturalists the world over, this remains an eternal debate. Should you save a creature’s life in the wild if you could?
Ishan has a similar response to human-animal conflict – not a conclusive one but a more meditative approach. “It should not be looked at as a black and white issue, one needs to sympathise with the last remaining animals while also sympathising with the victims of these conflicts,” he says. In his reluctance to hold one species responsible for the plight of the other, Ishan appears to show more maturity than diplomacy.
In the same breath, he speaks for the misunderstood people on the ground who work day and night to protect wildlife – the forest guards and persons involved in NGOs who guard the animals with their life but get none of the adulation that a 22-year-old like him does.
“I do a small part, but they are the silent heroes,” he says.