Simba

I want to talk about us in this post. And as usual, I have chosen a photo which I consider a gift to me because sometimes, you don't take the photo. The photo takes you. And this has been such a photo which really taught me a lot in a split second.

Here in Tanzania, the word lion is just a word. But Simba is a sensation. I mean, when you say lion, people might not understand the English word. But when you pitch in the name Simba, which is a fictional character that doesn't exist in real life, everyone living here would instantly recognise it, whether they know about Lion King or not. So this photo was taken on day 2 of my recent visit to Tanzania's Selous game reserve and this particular photo is very special and will stay in my memory for a long time due to myriad reasons.

The first being that this photo was the turning point in our game drive. Entering the reserve at about 9 o'clock in the morning, there were no animals to welcome us except Impala that you find everywhere. Obviously I kept my calm and stayed patient waiting for that moment to present itself in front of my eyes, and I knew that it would, since I felt the energy since the time we started planning our itinerary. All I had to do was wait and be quick. So as we came across another safari jeep on the opposite side, we asked if they spotted a lion, and the response was a relief after the exhausting search for the animals resulted in just two elephants and some wildebeest. We followed the other jeep to a promising location where a lioness was spotted resting after a meal. As we approached the tree under which she rested peacefully and gloriously, I couldn't wait for the jeep in front of us to move so that I could get a proper vantage point for my attack. After some 10 minutes of patient waiting, we finally got to a point directly in front of the lioness, and the next two seconds were the most disastrous and disappointing seconds in my photography journey. The moment when my autofocus system tracked her eyes and locked the target, she made a move which frustrated me so much. She lied down like a household cat. Living in a city with extremely fast-paced lifestyle, I sometimes feel I've forgotten what patience really is, and this was one of those moments. Disappointed, we decided to break for lunch as our tummies growled like a lion. And I was convinced that we wouldn't see the lioness again, and felt that the whole trip was such a waste since I knew that I would capture the others except the empress of the forest. But being human, I gave into the feeling of hunger and switched off my camera.

Then after lunch was done in a carefully chosen baboon-free spot under a tree, we decided to give our luck a shot and went back to the same location to see the lioness. And the next few moments were the best moments in my photography journey so far. My worst moment, shortly followed by the best moment. I saw the lioness sleeping in the same place. Obviously, I was initially sad since she was still sleeping and I wanted her head to be held up. But as we stopped right in front of her, she rose up, and instantly my target was locked and I started firing. Not really, since I could fire only a couple of times before I checked my shots. And as I did that, I thought that maybe I have got a good shot. But not convinced 100%, I decided to shoot again, and immediately, she slept again. This time however, as I paid attention to the details in the photo, I realised that I got the shot right on focus. And I was grateful to the 1200D and the 70-200 that got it, since the area was covered in tall grass which blocked the lioness's face. We then continued on with our game drive after I was partially satisfied.

But looking at this photo after I was able to give it some shape, in its current form, I am startled because of many things. The first being this- it was almost as though the lioness knew that I got the shot, because she was awake for just a couple of seconds, and she was awake for exactly the perfect couple of seconds. Like there was absolutely no connection between me and the lioness before that shot. She almost knew when she had to be awake and what pose to give, when to close her eyes, it's just perfectly synchronysed without any technology. And the fact that we made it perfectly in time to see the lioness awake quite quickly after lunch itself startles me. Actually, the moment I confirmed the worthiness of my photo after zooming into it on the LCD display, I could see that this photo could speak volumes. And I hope it has.

There are many takeaways from this photo. The first is that things will happen at their own pace, but what has to happen would definitely happen, and what shouldn't happen will definitely not happen. What do I mean by this? Well, you see, if I would've got the image in the first visit, I wouldn't have come back to the same place again. And I would've missed this beautiful pose where she's hiding herself in the grass. I wouldn't have got this photo if she was awake for a couple of seconds during the first visit. I would've ended up with an average photo of her being awake and giving a lackadaisical pose. But because she slept just when I was set to pounce, that made me decide to come back with the adamance to get that shot. I mean, I was that close to the moment, but snap- it went away. It was because it didn't happen before that I came back knowing that the moment is there, uner that tree. I knew that it would present itself if I had some patience and some trust to go back to the same place. So in life, things happen for a reason. And things don't happen for a reason. Most of the time, we ignore the reasons saying that there can't be any. But realise this- our conception of the existence of a reason is a function of how we were brought up. It's a result of what we learnt, who we interact with and so on. So just because sometimes you feel that something happened without a reason, it doesn't mean that life is unfair to you. There is a reason behind every single movement of every single atom in this universe.

The second takeaway is this- look at how calm the lioness is. When I took this photo, she was surrounded by some 5-6 safari jeeps which the lioness knows could be a potential hunter wagon. But she chose to not move a muscle in fear, resting boldly, fearlessly and gloriously. That's the sort of boldness and audacity we need to have. Often we succumb to societal pressures and don't debate on ideas which we know would be right. Sometimes we don't have that fire in our belly that gets us going from the morning because we feel there's no point in trying to prove something when no one is ready to listen to it. But if people like Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela gave up, the world wouldn't be as liberal as it is today. If people like Henry Ford gave up because everyone thought that beating Ferrari was absolute nonsense, we wouldn't have had the Ford GT. If the wright brothers never kept going because they wanted to achieve their goal, we wouldn't have had air travel. So the point is to keep that fir in your belly burning and using it to achieve good in this world. We need to be stubborn on our ideas when we believe that it can make life better. We need to be more respectful, but less accepting when we know that our idea will change the world. We need to keep pushing fearlessly when we know that it's our territory and that no one else would dare dream of doing anything.

There could be more takeaways from this, but these are the ones that I feel are most relevant to people of today. So I hope that the photo has been a visual treat and the lessons that I learnt from one photo could help someone among you readers to make better decisions and improve their quality of life, for that's what gets me going in the early morning- helping others improve their quality of life.