05/09/2026
Imagine Jaisalmer in summer. The temperatures would peak at 48 Celsius by 2 PM. Pradip would haul us out of our rather basic hotel rooms by 5AM. We’d bundle into a car and set off into the deep Thar desert — the dezz as he would call it. Parking at some arbitrary place, we’d start exploring. Walk over dunes and into valleys, called NaaNs, watch a brilliant agama change colors, wait for gerbils to pop out of their little holes, peer at bushes that were found on only one dune systemm, pick up seeds, walk through arroyos, gawk at owl pellets, rest in the shade of a few moringa trees (imagine finding them on dunes!), look for birds big, small, medium, startle a saw-scaled viper, surprise a desert fox, and eventually climb down in ungainly ways from those dunes and return to our humble hotel by 10AM. Rest a while and then repeat at 4PM until the milky way bands across the sky.
To be out exploring with Pradip means to constantly peer at little things, marvel, wonder, and know. The polymath perfectionist that he is, his company pushes you to do better, be better. And then there are his jokes. Hearing them for the nth time — by when you can complete his sentences — still makes you chuckle. I met Pradip at a time when I had just started exploring the water ethic of the deep Thar and I would go back almost every month for more than a year to explore the desert with him and with the naturalists Harsha and Payal. There was no greater education, no better way to begin to understand that precious and underrated ecosystem, than with a self-taught, curious, and brilliant man like Pradip Krishen.
Arati Kumar Rao Arati Kumar-Rao Pradip Krishen somildaga Malini Saigal
Image Credits - Arati Kumar-Rao
