I was not a born wildlife lover, as I was brought up on the farmlands of Punjab, where there is no wildlife. But my first real wildlife experience, a month in Kanha National Park, during my training days, got me hooked onto wildlife forever! Immediately after that I opted for specialised training in wildlife management, which laid the foundation of a very fulfilling and rewarding career. The focus of my career in the Indian Forest Service has been on wildlife management. All my travels, in India and abroad, have been aimed at studying wildlife management, and exposed me to the diverse approaches to conservation practiced across the world. I have been one of the very few protagonists, among foresters, of using wildlife tourism to help preserve wildlife. I was perhaps the lone advocate, and practitioner, of active wildlife management, involving management of animal populations through capture and translocation - as opposed to a passive one restricted to anti-poaching alone. The achievements I'm most proud of relate to the reintroduction of locally extinct species back into their former habitats. I planned and executed the reintroduction of tigers into Panna tiger reserve, gaur into Bandhavgarh tiger reserve and black buck into Kanha tiger reserve, after these species had become locally extinct due to human as well as ecological reasons. The crowning glory, however, came when we successfully introduced two orphaned tigresses, raised in captivity from infancy, in Panna, and changed the course of conservation of large cats forever. Tigers can no longer become extinct in the wild, as we can create de novo wild populations from zoo-bred animals now
.