- Lived:
- 12 November 1896 – 20 June 1987 · Bombay (Mumbai) → the whole subcontinent, one bird survey at a time: Hyderabad, Travancore, Kutch, Sikkim, Bhutan, and back always to Bombay
- Field:
- ornithology and conservation — the founder of systematic bird study in India, and its most effective defender of wild places
- The Big Idea:
- Nobody had ever actually counted India's birds — where each species lives, what it eats, how it breeds. A man with no degree spent fifty years finding out, wrote the book that taught a country to look up, and used the standing it earned him to save forests and wetlands that still stand.
- In their words:
- "My love for birds is not of the sentimental variety. It is essentially aesthetic and scientific."
- If you remember one thing:
- The Zoological Survey of India turned him down because he had no degree — and Indian ornithology is now, almost in its entirety, the work of the man they rejected.