“Catch them young”, there is an old adage, while studying in Dr. Alagappa Chettiar College, Karaikudy, I had the fortune to come under the tutelage of Professor Ekambhara Nath Ayyar and Professor N. Balakrishnan Nair. Once when I went to the house of Prof. Balakrishnan Nair to receive a few reference material, I was asked to wait for a short amount of time as he was inside a darkened room, driving a few bats fluttering inside the room. When he came outside, he had explained that he had been experimenting with bats in relation to echo-location. This kindled an interest in me for the study of bats.

Much water flowed in the river Godavari when I met Prof. Dr. A. Gopalakrishnan, Father of Bat study in India, during a meeting of Board of Studies in Zoology, Marathawada University, Aurangabad, he accepted me as a research student, and I worked on the breeding habits and sex cycle of a species of bat and earned Doctoral degree from Nagpur University during the year 1969. My work showed, to some extent, that there is similarity in reproductive behavior of bats living in temperate countries and tropical countries

“I have found this work excellent, for the method and critical examination and judgement. The dates are very numerous, precise, and covering a sufficient extent of time. The text is comprehensive, well written, hence, it is easy to understand and agreeable to read. I believe this work us ‘classic’ in the field of the research concerning the reproduction of tropical bats. I have no negative criticism to express in the matter of this thesis” – Report of Dr. A. Brosset,

“First of all I would like to congratulate Mr. A. Madhavan for handling a great amount of material for study and for the way he has written up this thesis. Not many people nowadays are interested in doing this type of research that requires such long periods of time to collect the necessary materials, yet this is the type of research that is needed in the field of reproductive biology to help solve the many problems that still confront us” – Kenneth Duke, Department of Anatomy, Duke University Medical center, USA