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        The word wildlife film making in India brings to the mind the names Alphonsa Ray, Shekhar Duttatri and more recently that of Saravana Kumar. A person armed with all the right qualifications to study wildlife, he instead chooses to try and capture our denizens of the wild at their evocative best.

An alumni of the prestigious Wildlife Institute of India Dehradun, he was initially working as a trained biologist with the institute's best brains in documenting the amphibians and reptiles in the Western Ghats when the trigger bug hit him. 'I was part of the team from Dehradun, which discovered seven new species of frogs, including the false alba gliding frog. Exciting as it was it was working behind the lenses that really caught my imagination,' he says.         'But this fascination for camera work was triggered early on when I did survey work for IIT-Bangalore in the Annamalai Hills. After Dehradun, Alphonsa Roy approached me for providing the technical expertise for the film on tigers he was producing. From then, the journey into the world of wildlife has not slackened its pace for me,' he says.         Some one who has worked with bigwigs like Romulus Whitaker on films like 'The King Cobra,' he then branched out to do his own assignments with the BBC, the PBS, National Geographic, etc.

Saravana Kumar

       His latest work on the Indian wild dog, shot in Bandipur, Karnataka, for National Geographic has won accolades from all quarters. This work also has the distinction of being the first Indian film to be shot and edited in the field.

        Currently working on a project to document man's closest cousins (next to the ape in the human evolutionary chain) - the bats of the Andamans, he prefers still-photograhy to the more attention-getting art of wildlife film making.

        Sarvanna is also the founder of ecotone, started with the aim of documenting natural history and geography. 'After the tremendous response to the screening of a few wildlife films, we decided to collaborate with Satyam Cinemas to bring out quality films under the banner Alive Foundation.'

        He says, adding, 'Our latest efforts were to get Jane Goodall to come down to Chennai and interact with the people here.'