NAGARHOLE TIGER RESERVE

India has many game sanctuaries and is the only country where both tigers and lions can be found as well as leopards. The most interesting area growing up in India to me was the tiger hill country in the South-- the states of Karnataka, Tamil Nadu. Coorg has a special hold because of the lore of man-eating big cats that I read voraciously as a kid. The cats are more threatened by encroaching humans who have steadily reduced their territory. A typical tiger requires more than 10 square miles and that of course is difficult in these modern times.

My son Vijay and I made a foray into Nagarhole from Bangalore, 250 kms away on Jan 22 & 23. While these distances are short by US standards, the Indian traffic conditions and jet lag made this longer and more stressful. But we ended up in a lovely Home Stay abode which was absolutely fantastic. We watched the Australian Open tennis semis on the small TV in the guest house we stayed in. Our driver Mustaffa-- was from Coorg, but was a Tamil-speaking Keralite. Nice fellow. My son was kind of surprised that I can converse in all these languages. Little did he know that I was struggling to form sentences.

In the evening we went to the forest. Our driver, Johnson, a Tamil, always stole a glance on the side view mirror to see that his hair was arrayed right. (BTW: Traffic is on the left and the steering wheel is on the right. Makes it EVEN MORE difficult to drive in India.)

It was kind of disturbing since I thought he needed to be more prepared in the jungle. Like stepping on the accelerator if a disgruntled animal were to take exception at starers. We got into the reserve at 4:00 PM. One thing about a jungle: if you do not have a compass you are pretty well lost. Fortunately, we had a guide and we tried and tried to see if we could spot a tiger. They are of course very elusive and with the noise that a jeep makes I was quite confident we will not see any. But we did come across a mother elephant and her calf that caused me more concern since I knew that mothers are more protective and she could have easily outrun the jeep. I figured that she may be used to gawking. We headed back at around 6:00 PM.

Our hosts -- Deepak and Anuradha Carambiah-- invited us for a splendid dinner consisting of chicken curry, chicken biryani, puttu-- a Coorg dish, dhal, chappati, rice, potatoes. It was quite filling and we wisely declined the dessert. Deepak revealed the sorry state of affairs in Coorg, where there was a high degree of alcoholism (they both lost their respective fathers to alcohol consumption) because of sheer boredom where work ceased after 10 AM at the coffee plantation. He provided a rich vein of stories on the Coorgs, their hold on the land and their general failure to convince the State to help repair the roads. My brother Vijay gave me a book titled the "Hills of Angheri" written by one of our high school classmates, a Coorg, who gave up a promising career in medicine to be with her folks. She was the class cutie if I remember right. Our host had especially harsh words on the Coorgs who served with the Central government and who he claimed gave the farm away. I could have heard the same complaint in the US about State rights being taken aways by the Big Bad Feds, The next day as we were driving back a drunken Coorg almost walked on to our speeding car and if not for Mustaffa's quick evasive maneuvers, it would have been a nasty accident.

We left Coorg somewhat despondent that we could not spend enough time. But the sadness had also to do with my own rich and vivid memories as a child of the Coorg I had never visited. The maneating tiger and leopard stories, my own experience of hearing tiger roars from the hills of Ooty when we were living in Coimbatore. Coorg is a good representation of the globalization that has upset the traditional coffee plantation industry while the best and brightest have fled to greener pastures in Bangalore.