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“So a lot of people think that I got disillusioned by the cubicle job and quit but I loved my job actually, absolutely loved it.
By late 2004 Yahoo had grown - a great deal. From one small room where Kalyan was the fifth employee, the company now had 1000 people on its rolls and was no longer a startup. It was, a corporation.
Some days worked for 22 hours, some days for 3 hours.
“Unnecessary discipline. I like discipline, I’m for discipline when it increases efficiency but discipline for the heck of discipline is wrong.”
Kalyan quit Yahoo India in late 2004. He was 24 years old.
tinkering,
“I don’t have formal education in computer science. With photography it is all self-taught. With wildlife, I am not a biologist - again it is self-taught.”
radical
They said, “Well, you’ll have to pay.” I said, “I’m not going to pay - what can we do?”
The deal was: no salary, only food and accommodation.
“Morning I would go in the jeep safari, evening I would go in the jeep safari. In the daytime I would just take my vehicle and drive around in the forest. It was just the best time of my life.”
“One thing that has driven me quite a bit in my life is self-learning…
“The first time I saw a tiger, I just couldn’t pick up my camera; I was shivering so much. And this happened another 3-4 times!”
I heard something and looked up and saw it smiling at me from a distance of two feet. It was the scariest moment of my life, I think. I almost peed in my pants that day!
there were the ‘fear factor’ moments but it only got him more addicted.
“I decided to become an IT security consultant. Because I thought I would be able to spend 50% of my time in the city, and 50% in the forest.”
Sounds like the best of both worlds. But turned out, to be the worst! “I worked like that for the whole of 2006. And that was one of the difficult periods of my life. I could not do justice to either consulting or wildlife.”
Kalyan would be in the middle of the jungle and suddenly he would get a call from a client saying, “There’s an audit tomo...
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“I was not exactly depressed but I was not very motivated.
Among the many photographs Kalyan was continuously posting, there were several frogs. The BBC wanted to do a film on frogs and they when they googled the term, guess whose name showed up!
decided to plunge into wildlife, and photography, full time.
“They weren’t paying me much but I knew that I’ve got a break. And I’m ready to sweat it out for few years. I think that’s one problem with people also, they want to move up too fast…
The truth is you have to serv...
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“I started as a production assistant, just started carrying tripods,” he laughs. “But it was great because when the UK filmmakers came, whenever they weren’t filming, I would borrow the camera. Shoot a little of this and that. And they really liked my work.”
After a while, instead of coming down from the UK every time, they just asked Kalyan to shoot the footage! “I think you build that confidence, you build that relationship over time…” The operative word being time.
Technical skills matter, but maybe about 50%. The rest is how ‘sticky’ yo...
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Do they like you, do they trust you, do they believe ...
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“BBC trusts me enough to put me at par with their foreign crew. They pay me UK rate now, which is 300 pounds (T 24,000) a day. Initially they were paying me 20 pounds a day. Then they were paying me 50 pounds a day. But you kind of build that trust, you build that faith.
They know I can deliver.”
And to deliver one good picture, photographers actually have to shoot one hundred. But of course, there’...
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Excellence is a function of dogged, invisible effort. No matter where you go.
“Another thing that helped me make this switch - into wildlife photography - is my technology background. I offered to do many things - like build a web portal for them, set up a live blog for your production.”
‘The more you work, the better your luck is’.”
Some of the series Kalyan has worked on include ‘Mountains of the Monsoon’. The other is ‘Crocodile Blues’.
“Fundamentally everything is easy there.
Kalyan has found a way to sell his pictures in the local market. Which is really amazing in a country where we don’t have a culture of ‘paying’. More so in this age of digital cameras and Flickr, where everyone thinks isme kaun si badi baat hai !
“Everybody needs a calendar and instead of putting up something boring from State Bank of India, they actually get a nice-looking thing with wildlife pictures. I also sell prints on t-shirts.”
“BBC work is not more than 3 months in a year.
Kalyan does not take classes the ‘textbook’ way. It’s about practicals, not theory - the way he taught himself.
paranoid
There’s a lesson in this for every creative person out there. You can’t stop people from downloading your music or movie - or book - off the internet. But if you can make them your fans, your followers and your friends, you will find some way to make money from them, regardless.
I freely give my pictures, my licenses. I say, ‘Take it - if you like it you pay me.’ I have 20 times more clients than a guy who says, ‘Unless you buy it I’m not going to give you.’”
monetise
“I like to share my work, keep it free. I think if you’re good, things will get back to you. And for me, ‘being good’ is more important for me than making money, Because if you are good, you will make money. It just automatically comes.”
It took two years for Kalyan’s parents to accept his decision, and now they take pride in his work. But for those two years it was about a guy who did not care what people said, what people thought…
As for what he will be doing five years from now, ten years from now? Well, two ways to look at it.
“If I can continue to do what I’m doing today ten years from now, I’ll be really, really happy. I’m not looking for a promotion!”
“I think if you love something you can make it happen.
Find the door to your destiny, and put your best foot forward!
Second, you need to have passion - more than any qualification. Many people come to me and say, “I’ve done a diploma in film, tell me how can I work with BBC or National Geographic? I want to do wildlife films…” So I ask them, “How many forests have you been to?” They say, “None.”
