Snake man of India Romulus Whitaker on his love for creepy crawlies Premium

At the Bengaluru launch of his book Snakes, Drugs and Rock n’ Roll, Romulus Whitaker talked about long association with creepy crawlies and more.

Romulus Whitaker recalls a rather imprudent experiment he often conducted at school, which involved mixing ammonia water and iodine crystals. “While it is still wet, it is fine. As soon as it dries out, however, it will explode,” he says at the Bengaluru release of his book Snakes, Drugs and Rock n’ Roll, a hilarious, enthralling account of his rather eventful early life.  

Thankfully, his explosive-making career ended while he was still at school, the only major ramification being the singeing of his eyebrows and hair during one of these experimentation sessions. “I was lucky not to have been blinded. That God of Idiots still smiled upon me,” he writes in the book, the first volume of his autobiography.

The munificence of this preposterous divine power comes up again in the laughter-filled event at Champaca Bookstore in Vasanth Nagar, Bengaluru, where the book was launched. “You must have prayed a lot to that god. At least in those first 24 years,” says ecologist Suhel Quader, whom Whitaker and his co-author (and wife) Janaki Lenin were in conversation with at the session. “I still do,” responds Whitaker with a guffaw. 

As a young man, Whitaker seemed to have a habit of getting himself in trouble. Some were even life-threatening – from shooting himself while hunting cottontail rabbits to trying out peyote cacti, getting snagged by a fishhook and carrying a snake on a flight in a paper bag. “There are a lot of adventures, things that are not advisable for you to try at home,” agrees Quader,  summarising the book, which captures Whitaker’s life from his exploits as a child to his early twenties. 

Whitaker’s book sheds light on his early years growing up in the U.S., his later childhood and schooldays spent in India and his brief attempt at college in the U.S. “Just like high school on a bigger scale. It was so boring,” he recalls  

He soon dropped out of college and embarked on a series of eclectic jobs over the next few years, including a two-week-long career as a travelling salesman, an even-briefer stint at a catering company, some adventures at sea, a rather enjoyable job at the Miami Serpentarium and a reluctant enlistment in the army, all the while dreaming of returning to India. “This book ends when he returns to India at the age of 24,” says Quader, adding that Snake, Drugs and Rock n’ Roll is not easy to put down once you pick it up.

The year was 1947. Whitaker, who lived in the tiny village of Hoosick in northern New York state near the Vermont border back then, was all of four when he brought home his first live snake in a jelly jar. “I was a creepy-crawly maniac, bringing home ants, cockroaches, beetles and anything I could find.”