The wild side of a man’s passion

Again, like Farhan in 3 Idiots, Bangalore-based Amoghavarsha also gave up engineering to become a wildlife photographer.

Again, like Farhan in 3 Idiots, Bangalore-based Amoghavarsha also gave up engineering to become a wildlife photographer.

HT Image

After doing his engineering in computer science from Visvesvaraya Technological University, Belgaun in 2005, he worked as a software engineer with amazon.com for two years.

“While I loved computers, I realised that was not what I wanted to do all my life. So, I quit last year to take up photography, which has been my passion since childhood," says Amoghavarsha .

But unlike Farhan’s parents in the film, his parents, he says, were more supportive. Amoghavarsha goes to the forest thrice a week — mostly to the Western Ghats — to capture the magic of wildlife in his camera.

“Even as an engineering student, I often took my university classmates to nearby forests for photo-shoots,” he says. “Wildlife photography is pretty demanding; sometimes I end up staying in the forest for days together, just waiting for the animals.”

Amoghvarsha also organises workshop and photographic expeditions to forests for school students. “I want people to fall in love with wildlife through my pictures and get interested in conservation.”

While the young photographer is still far from being famous, he has worked as an assistant photographer for a movie, Secrets of the King Cobra, that premiered on the National Geographic Channel.