24-year-old man eats live snakes

Nagpur: Man biting dog makes news, goes a media cliche. But here's a man who eats - not dogs, but live snakes!

Meet Shyam Atulkar, a 24-year-old who catches snakes, and even eats them live at times.

On Friday, some people in the Ajni railway quarters here came rushing to Shyam and took him away to a house nearby where a big snake had slithered inside a pit. Shyam went to catch the snake and returned soon after with a seven-feet rat snake twined around his neck.

His newly married sister-in-law Arti had wanted to see Shyam catch a reptile. "My husband had once told me about his brother's prowess but I was curious to see Shyam holding a reptile in his hands," Arti said.

Prodded by onlookers, Shyam also started gobbling up the reptile but soon relinquished the feast in deference to an elderly man's advice. "I liked the taste of snakes, especially the tail-end, which tastes like raw mutton," he said. "The head and neck tastes somewhat bitter because of the poison."

Son of a railway employee, Shyam started catching snakes as a six-year old child in village Simjera of Betul district of Madhya Pradesh.

Though he could not talk till the age of nine due to some disability, catching snakes was his favourite sport, his mother Sonubai recalls.

Once, when a snake, choking in Shyam's tight fist, bit him, he retaliated in the only way he could think of at that moment - by biting the animal. The snake died a short while later, reminisces Shyam's mother.

The young man insists he has almost stopped eating snakes now, says he hasn't kept count of the number of snakes he has caught and eaten in the last 15 years at various places in Madhya Pradesh including Multai, Amla and Junnardeo, where his father was posted.

Shyam says he has performed the bizarre feat twice at the Mahadeo mela (Religious congregation at the temple of Lord Shiva) in Pachmarhi and donated lots of reptiles to an institute in Jabalpur that collects snakes and the venom for research and medicinal purposes.

A repentant former tormentor of snakes, Shyam claims to have mastered the technique of extracting venom from the reptiles' poison glands. "I have often swallowed the poison neat, either straight from the potli or from a cup," he says, adding that it never had any effect on him except for momentary giddiness.

Shyam claims to have also preyed upon all types of lizards "including the wild, black variety that is more poisonous than snakes", he claims. "Once I also bit a ferocious dog that had gone on a biting spree in our locality in Junnardeo," he recalled. The dog, like all his reptile victims, died instantly.