Bengali professor in Guinness Book for frog stamps
He is a boy from Ballygunge, who studied at Don Bosco school Park Circus, but spent his summers and monsoons watching frogs! Rather tadpoles, metamorphosing into adult frogs at his grandmother’s place in Assam. This passion for frogs and their life-cycles did not leave him even as an adult. Indraneil Das, herpetology professor at Institute of Biodiversity and Environmental Conservation, University Malaysia Sarawak, still harbours and nurtures his childhood passion. This has led him to create a world record, by collecting more than 1,600 stamps only on frogs from across the world.
His passion takes him to the Guinness Book of World Records. His years at Oxford University and later at Harvard studying amphibian ecology, helped him go places and painstakingly collect stamps over the past 45 years! Now he has a treasure trove of frog stamps from 195 countries. Some stamps date decades back that were collected by Das as a child. Not just stamps, he also has a sizeable collection of anything to do with frogs --- from crystal frogs to frog T-shirts and even shoes designed as frogs.
Das also observed large countries like India, despite having a rich bio-diversity, have hardly ever issued stamps on frogs. India has only five such stamps. Whereas, small tropical countries like Ecuador has 25 stamps on frogs. Incidentally of the 7.764 living amphibian species of the world, India is home to 410. Das has virtually every stamp on frogs from even countries like Zimbabwe, Liberia and Peru. No wonder his passion punch landed him in the Guinness Records.
