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Rom Whitaker - Biography
To Rom Whitaker, hunting snakes has always been a passion. He caught his first snake when he was just four. This was in the country estate that he shared with his mother and sister in northern New York State. Although wary of snakes herself, his artist mother encouraged him tremendously and soon he started bringing home garter snakes and milk snakes. Then came the Big Move. Rom's mother married an Indian and moved the family to Bombay, India when Rom was seven. For the next ten years Rom went to boarding school up in the mountains in the south, smack on India's favorite biodiversity hotspot, the Western Ghats. Weekends were spent hunting snakes in the surrounding jungles, while weekdays were spent looking after a 12 foot python that lived surreptitiously under his bed at the dorm. Somewhere in between the two activities, he attended classes. Rom returned to the United States to do his degree. A year later, he called it quits and headed out across the country for Miami, doing odd jobs along the way as a cutlery salesman, merchant seaman, carpenter's assistant, Bloomingdale salesman... Once in Miami, he made a beeline for the Miami Serpentarium run by the legendary snakeman, William Haast. Rom was hired on the spot and then followed a couple of years of living with snakes, learning from the master, jiving with other snake hunters, exploring the wilds of the Everglades, Okeefenokee, and grooving on the folksy ballads of Bob Dylan in coffee-shops. Life just couldn't get better for our snake man. That was where the Vietnam War caught up with him. "Two years in the army or three years in prison" - Rom opted for 2 years in the army. But the officers must have detected the innate lack of respect Rom had for organized violence, so they put him in charge of blood banking in El Paso, Texas (rattlesnake country) and later at Camp Zama, Japan (mamushi land). After his mandatory two years, he sailed back to India aboard a Greek freighter. Soon after alighting at Bombay, Rom set up a snake venom extraction venture outside Bombay. On one of his field trips to Madras to buy snakes, he was introduced to the Irulas, the tribal snake catchers. Rom moved his operation to Madras city and formally started India's first Madras Snake Park. Its novelty value drew lots of tourists and celebrities. Rom became a familiar figure in this conservative city. With a sand boa coiled through his wild white hair, and his psychedelic colored hippie clothes, people gawked at Rom as he pulled up on his motorbike. And to everyone's amazement he swore in Tamil, the local language! That was enough for Rom to be "IN". Rom extended his interest to other beleaguered reptiles - crocodiles, sea turtles, plus lesser known, little, exotic reptilian critters in the Western Ghats. He wrote about creatures that nobody had even paid attention to before. Conservation was still an idea unborn in India. Then Rom set up Madras Crocodile Bank, a gene pool for all the world's crocodilians and India's premier research centre for herpetology. Thousands of endangered crocs were bred here and rehabilitated to the wilds, many young careers in herpetology were launched, many forests were saved by relentless campaigning. It was at this point that Rom discovered the Andamans. India guarded these islands jealously and no foreigner had set foot on these islands for a few decades after the British left India. And that's where Rom wanted to go. The price was his US citizenship which he gave up readily for the privilege of visiting the islands. The kind of "development" that the Indian government was exporting to the islands, prompted Rom to start up an NGO there, Andaman and Nicobar Island Environmental Trust (ANET). ANET did everything - coral reef surveys, botanical surveys, mammalian surveys, island ecology studies besides sea turtle surveys, croc surveys, the works. Never one to stop and dwell on his achievements, Rom then got contracted by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations to help set up a network of tribal crocodile rearing stations across Papua New Guinea. Rom surveyed the country to assess the wild population, worked out the logistics and helped set up a Management Plan for the country over 2 hectic years. Then FAO sent him back to the island, to the Indonesian administered Irian Jaya, to do similar work. Subsequent years saw him travel to Bangladesh to see if a lizard leather industry was sustainable (it was not), to Mozambique to set up a village level croc farming operation, to Borneo to survey the wilds for crocs. He was canoeing up remote streams, jumping out of helicopters onto croc nests, trekking over mountain ranges in search of elusive reptiles. Rom was Asia's reptile man, straddling conservation, scientific study, sustainable utilization, and captive breeding of rare species. Then came movies. Dissatisfied with the reach of his books, papers, brochures and talks, Rom was caught by the magic of the silver screen. He teamed up with old school friends, Louise and John Riber and colleague Shekar Dattatri to make a series of movies on snakes, snakebite, the Irula Cooperative he had helped set up. Eventually he produced a children's feature film in Tamil called 'Boy and the Crocodile' - India's most popular children's film to date. He traveled to the United States to sell more film ideas and in the corridors of National Geographic Television met Carol and Richard Foster who were keen on returning to India where Richard Foster was brought up. Together they produced 'Rat Wars' for NGT. Later Rom followed that by teaming up with film maker Janaki Lenin to make the highly ambitious 'King Cobra' - an Emmy award winner. It was the first film ever made featuring a single species of snake and most of the sequences were filmed for the first time ever. More films followed - 'Spunky Monkey', 'Thunder Dragons', 'Muggers of Sri Lanka', 'Snake Hunter'(now as presenter) just for National Geographic EXPLORER besides several others for other television channels around the world. Feeling a bit over-stretched, Rom quit the Croc Bank in 2001 as its Director; he still remains on the governing Trust. He and his co-author, Ashok Captain recently came out with India's first comprehensive color field guide to snakes, published by their own company Draco Books with propriertrix Janaki Lenin. He continues his interest in film making and recently presented several films made for BBC, Animal Planet and National Geographic by Icon Films in Bristol, England. These are: 'The King Cobra and I' 'Supersize Crocodiles' Dragon Chronicles' and, just released (December 2nd, 2008) 'Crocodile Blues' about the plight of India's critically endangered gharial crocodile which is an ongoing preoccupation. Rom recently established the Agumbe Rainforest Research Station in Karnataka for research, conservation and research in this Biodiversity Hotspot. There he is heading a long term study on the ecology and behavior of the king cobra for which he received the prestigious Whitley Fund for Nature Award (UK). Rom just received another big award: the Rolex Award for Enterprise (http://rolexawards.com/en/the-laureates/romuluswhitaker-the-project.jsp) for his project on establishing a whole network of rainforest conservation bases around India. All of this keeps he and his dynamic team, including his two sons Nikhil and Samir very very busy. |