NEW INDIAN EXPRESS (Chennai, India) 26 December 13 ‘Miss Snake Charmers’ on a Rescue Mission (Jayanthi Pawar)

Madurai: When you meet 27-year-old Manimegalai and her friends Nagalakshmi and Selvakumari for the first time, they would come across as an ordinary band of young women in Madurai. There is nothing to suggest that the threesome love to court danger.

Naturally it comes as a surprise that the three are the unofficial ‘Miss Snake Charmers’ of the temple town. Whenever a snake slithers into a house or bushy surroundings in schools or hospitals, Manimegalai & Co receive a distress call and they land up individually or together within no time to rescue their “hissing friends”.

“Rescuing snakes is not my occupation, it is my passion,” says high school dropout Manimegalai, a native of Ramanathapuram, who has now founded the Tamil Nadu Snake Research Wild Animal Rescue Trust.

Her first encounter with a snake was not invited. “At age 12, I was bitten by a bamboo pit viper. My homeopath-father saved me. He also told me not to harm reptiles as they can’t speak for themselves,” she says.

That’s when she began loving other living beings. She joined a snake catching training programme, but had to quit as she was the only girl in the camp. “But I was destined to take up this job as shortly after that people in my neighbourhood sought my help to rescue a cobra. I then started rescuing snakes voluntarily and accepted money,” she says.
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