His father was a Tamil writer and reformer A. Madhaviah who worked with the Salt and Abkari Department of the Government of Madras.
[1] His father voluntarily retired from Government service and started a press from which he published a Tamil magazine called Panchamritam.
His family lived in Mylapore, and in those days it was covered in shrub and teemed with bird life, jackals and blackbucks.
One of his older brother's who was married to the daughter of Sir T. Vijayaraghavacharya of the Indian Agricultural Research Institute at Pusa, took Krishnan to his father-in-law for advice.
[1] Krishnan took up this position and the works he undertook included being a schoolteacher, judge, publicity officer and a political secretary to the Maharaja.
He was once asked to speak at the Indian Institute of Science at Bangalore and in late February, the Tabebuia trees were ablaze in flowers.
He was aware that he was different from most conservationists of his time – who were either European or were from the Indian aristocracy of Muslims and Rajputs often former hunters – in being a vegetarian.
His equipment was, according to naturalist E. P. Gee, 'a large, composite affair, with the body of one make and a tele lens of another, and other parts and accessories all ingeniously mounted together by himself.
In a 1947 essay, Krishnan wrote, ...The average educated adult knows little or nothing of the teeming plant and animal life of the country, and cares less.
School education is solidly to blame for all this.In 1967 he asked several university graduates to name two red-flowered tree or an exclusively Indian animal.
Nobody passed his test and he wrote is there something radically wrong with the education and culture of our young men and women that they should not know the answers to these reasonable questions, or is it that I have become a monomaniac and am therefore unable to perceive how unfair my questions are ?Writing about the Indian consciousness of nature he wrote the public (both literate and unlettered) has no interest in the great national heritage of wildlife, of which it knows little and for which it cares less.He refused a paid invitation from Air India for a trip to London for eminent Indians.