Salim Ali’s mark
Lt Gen (retd) Baljit Singh

In the Headquarters Western Command Library at Chandimandir recently, I chanced upon a book, A Company of Birds, by Loke Wan Tho, published in January 1958. It was the kind which you quickly want to take home, drop down on your favourite reading chair and then open one page at a time, deliberately.

But in the instant case, I remained glued to the title page itself. For, there is this citation to one "Col Baljit Singh, with kind regards" in the hand of and signed by the world renowned "Salim Ali.12.xi.63."

Salim Ali was known to be frugal with money and gifts. So, obviously his inscription would only be in the nature of a very special autograph. And the recipient of that generosity had to be at the least, a congenital bird-watcher to have so won Salim Aliesteem.

So far so good, but then who was this colonel? The thought nagged me for days.

And then an evil thought crossed my mind: "Why not claim the book ostensibly lost in 1972?"

I had sinned no doubt but the very next moment, I did summon courage and command, "Get thee behind me, Satan". The book has since been shifted to the reference section, never again to leave the sanctuary of the library.

The title leaves nothing in suspense about the subject-matter, except whether the presentation be in the narrative or the visual format. Happily for the reader, it presents a prefect blend of the two crafts. The upper half page is given to a photograph followed by description, and at times an anecdote relating to the bird or to the travails of bird photography. For instance, the temperature inside the "hide" could be touching 45`B0C and humidity at 90 per cent; or driven to play mind games with an inquisitive cobra who chooses to climb up the camera tripod just when it was time to capture the bird on the film! And on offer is some of Loke’s best output from regions as far apart as Kashmir, Singapore and New Guinea.

Bird photography by Loke and later by his wife Christina was to place them among the world’s outstanding photographers. Loke’s black and white images of the nesting White-bellied Sea Eagles in the Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society will remain the finest ever. And Christina’s coloured, full-page images to support the text of Birds in my Garden by Sir Malcom MacDonald, the British High Commissioner, at his residence in New Delhi, was an instant bestseller in the 1960s.

This passion and perfection of photography could be understandable from a person whose life’s calling it was. But it would place a practitioner of this art form in the class of

"Great Masters", particularly when the products were "the result of the holidays and leisure hours of a businessman," as stated by Loke in the introduction.

Now Loke was the scion of the family who owned huge rubber-plantations and tin-mines in Malaya. He was schooled in Switzerland, from where he moved to Cambridge

University. He fled Singapore barely hours before the Japanese occupation in 1942. Unfortunately, a day later, the ship was targeted by the Japanese and Loke suffered 60 per cent body burns. A doctor asked him, "I want to put Atropin in your eyes; you’ll certainly go blind if I don’t, but there’s still a chance if I do?" Loke could muster the strength just enough to say, "Go ahead and put the stuff in!"

And in the spirit of the Biblical injunction, "Let there be light", a weak later, his vision began mending, as also the body skin.

By now he was a refugee in India. As luck would have it, his school teacher from

Switzerland, Jack Gibson, was also teaching in India. One evening Gibson invited Loke to dinner where Salim Ali was the other guest. They took to each other at first sight and as they say, the "rest is history".

When the war ended, Loke returned to Singapore, resurrected the family business and on the sidelines also created some of the finest avian photo-art. He also moved into the club of the world’s billionaires, in his own lifetime.

I have at last succeeded in tracking the enigmatic Col Baljit Singh to the 8th Light

Cavalry Regiment. He was an instructor at the National Defence Academy, Khadakvasla, when in 1963 he befriended Salim Ali to help inculcate among the cadets the love of the outdoors. The Colonel’s daughter, the wife of a fellow General Officer, has vividly recollected Salim Ali’s visits to their bungalow on the NDA campus. And the Colonel’s widow gifted some of his books to the Headquarters Western Command Library.

Hopefully, the Colonel, the Thos and Salim Ali would have formed a bird-watchers club in Valhalla.

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