The Fun. The Frolic. The Bonding. The Satire.

My first national park as an adult was Ranthambore, December 2021. The world was just exhaling after the first wave, and I had just been handed the greatest gift of my life, twin daughters. That trip was supposed to be one thing. It became something else entirely. A door swung open, and through it came friendships, lessons, contradictions, and enough material about human nature to keep me writing for years. Including about myself. Especially about myself. I am as guilty of every flaw I am about to describe. This is not a judgement from the stands. This is a confession from the field.

Word travels fast in these circles. Gossip travels faster. And people, wonderful flawed people, love to talk. We talk about each other in front of each other, and then with remarkable speed, switch sides the moment backs are turned. We enjoy the letting down. We take pleasure in the small collapse of someone else’s reputation. What we rarely stop to consider is how permanent those stories become. Brain tattoos, every one of them. Impossible to remove.

But this is also an ode. Nearly three years of wildlife, forests, people, and everything in between.

I have wandered these jungles alone, with tour operators, with government officials, with a mentor, and with more friends than I can count, some of whom are still friends. I have watched someone’s eyes light up seeing a tiger for the first time, and felt that same electricity myself standing in front of a melanistic leopard. I have seen how the system works, and where it bends. I have experienced deep trust, and watched it splinter. Wildlife photography, even in the short time I have been part of it, has shown me its full spectrum. The beauty and the ugliness. The generosity and the pettiness. None of it should be generalised, and yet all of it has taught me something.

My first steps into the forest were with a tour operator who built what felt like genuine friendship. I still think about what friendship actually means. Whether the expectations we carry into it are ever shared equally. Whether we set each other up to disappoint. Friendship, I have noticed, has started to behave like a follow and unfollow button. The bond lasted as long as it served. Then something fractured, apparently over a breach of trust, a breach that was not intended and that I have turned over in my mind many times since, wondering what I could have done differently.

These forests also introduced me to people whose stories quietly rearranged something in me. The simplicity and directness of people from India’s interior is something city life rarely cultivates. A school teacher who left a classroom full of futures to become a jungle guide. A forest guard who studied for his state exams under the only working lamp post in his village, the first from his family to enter government service. Imagine what that meant to his parents. Imagine what it cost him to get there. The forest has given a great deal to a great many people, in ways that have nothing to do with sightings.

The ecosystem has its own politics though. What lands lightly on one person lands heavily on another, and in these forests that line is thinner than you would expect. Drivers and guides who pour everything into their work, through dust and cold and heat, can be wounded by a casual joke that the person making it will forget within the hour. The Chinese whispers travel through here just as they do everywhere else. The guide who always gets the sightings quietly accumulates resentment. The one who comes up empty receives sympathy wrapped in a smirk.

There are rocking seasons and there are dry ones. There are friends you let loose with completely, who you then somehow never speak to again the moment you are back in ordinary life. There are people who have your back, and people who are standing right behind you holding something sharp. And underneath all of it runs the same question. Why? Why the gossip? Why the politics? Why the need to forge and break and rebuild? Am I here for the dopamine? Or am I here for the stillness? The unhurried observation. The slower reflexes becoming quicker ones. The rare, extraordinary discipline of sitting completely still, everything paused, waiting for a single movement in the grass.

I think it is both. I think they are harder to separate than I would like.

I had a mentor enter my life at the right moment, introduced by a friend who observed I had accumulated considerable gear and was using very little of it well. The comparison to a Swiss Army knife with most of the blades folded in felt accurate and slightly embarrassing. So I started learning again. The split second decision. The instant regret and the instant recovery. The awareness that sharpens when you cannot afford to be slow. These are not just photography skills. They are life skills. Removing 72 hours from the calendar every month for this is not indulgence. It is maintenance.

The nicknames we give the guides and drivers. The jokes that land, the ones that do not, and the big heartedness with which they absorb both. The window into grassroots India that these forests provide. Men who work a safari, then drive a taxi the same evening, building toward opportunities for their children that they never had access to themselves. There is no complaint in it. There is only direction.

The jungle has shown me how to compete and how to let go. How to wait and how to move on. How to sit with my own shortcomings without catastrophising them. Every dry safari carries within it the optimism that the next one will deliver everything. Every broken friendship leaves behind a question worth carrying. Every new bond formed between people who have no business knowing each other, connected only by a shared love of something wild, feels like evidence of something good in human nature.

These are my memoirs. My thinking, and my overthinking. You may not agree. It may not resonate. It may feel like too much, or it may give you a sharper picture of how I see things. Either way, it is what I feel, and I would rather say it than not.