Several years ago, when I was in elementary school, my parents grounded me after they found out I had been trying to approach a snake. While on a walk around the neighborhood with my younger brother, I had seen a flash of orange out of the corner of my eye and turned to find a thin, hand-length snake peeking out of the leaf litter. The snake was breathtakingly beautiful and, drawn by some sort of magnetic impulse, I gingerly stepped closer and closer to get a better look. The snake, however, vanished as quickly as it had appeared and left me only with an image of an orange streak seared into my brain so enduringly that I still think about this incident more than a dozen years after the fact!
In the realm of snakes, I am the charmed rather than the charmer. Snakes have always fascinated me for reasons that I cannot quite pin down. Perhaps it is the diversity of venom, the unique method of movement, the smooth scales and molts... or simply some internal desire to throw my weight behind a largely under-appreciated and misunderstood animal. Whatever the case, I was excited last fall to move to India, which has one of the largest snake populations in the world.
