You can spend long hours listening to smart motivational speakers re-packaging yesterday’s cliché as new-found wisdom. Or you can enrol for an expensive tutorial that promises to help you locate your life’s ‘purpose’ and ‘mission’. Or you can tell those speakers to take a walk while you head to the nearest wildlife sanctuary. That’s what Swamy Viswanath did, with an outcome that he claims was life-transforming. Along with friend and writer N.V. Krishna Kumar, they have come out with a coffee-table book, Whispers Of The Wild, a commendable debut.
It was apparently a botched-up surgery that prompted Viswanath to get his priorities in the right order. Prone on a hospital bed, he realiwed that there was more to life than success markers in a corporate career, and decided to head towards the healing embrace of the woods and its creatures. A lot of us have similar thoughts, but there are too many things to clear, too many promises to keep, and we stop short of turning inclination into action.
As coffee table books go, Whispers is well produced – without quite being in the sumptuous class. But it’s the quality and composition of the photographs that will hold you in thrall. Viswanath covers many sanctuaries in his arc - Madumalai, Tadoba, Ranthambore, Kanha and the legendary Masai Mara. In each of these places, there is little action, few ‘kills’. For some, that may seem opportunity missed. But for me, it’s the hair-trigger pause where the world is taut with tension that was fascinating.
Prose sings a haunting duet with picture. It is sometimes said that a picture is worth a thousand words. Actually, that phrase is of uncertain pedigree. It is certainly untrue when the words in question are as carefully curated as the text accompanying the pictures in Whispers. Krishna Kumar is an advertising writer of the old school. He has a feel for words and an understanding of the nuances of the language that is Greek to today’s AI-inebriated lot of wordsmiths. He loves words the way a connoisseur loves old wine. Along with his co-author, he has elevated wildlife photography to the level of philosophy. After reading a while, we not surprised when we come across lines like: ‘if we wait with respect, we may gain truths far greater than ourselves.’ Yes, the book is about wildlife. At a deeper level, it is about life itself.
Writers seem to come into top form when they experience close encounters with beasts. The legendary Valmik Thapar in ‘Tiger Fire’ describes a tiger as ‘he leaps silently, smoothly into the grass and is gone - a long streak of flowing liquid fire’. Kumar could match ace for ace.
Drawing this corollary between life is certainly not new. Many have walked this way before. Shakespeare did it centuries ago with ‘tongues in trees’, and so did Blake when with the arresting imagery of ‘Tyger, tyger’ he immortalised the incendiary beast. But what makes Whispers of the Wild different from others in its genre, is its obvious honesty. Here is a book whose magnificent pictures and matching prose carry the ring of truth. The authors have benefited from the life lessons that the beasts and the birds taught them. The book says - you too can.
Title: Whispers of the Wild
Author: Swamy Viswanath and N.V. Krishna Kumar
Publisher: Notion Press
Price: ₹2,085
Pages: 137
