Missing veerapan

Last year , Veerapan , the notorious sandalwood smuggler , was shot dead in cold blood after a twenty year chase through dense forests on the borders of Karnataka and Tamil nadu .

I vividly remember a newly wedded me driving down those very roads cutting through two wildlife sanctuaries Bandipur Tiger reserve and Madhumalai elephant sanctuary on my way from Mysore to Ooty on the state highway . My cool as cucumber 150cc Kinetic Honda automatic bike served me well through those adventure years as it never broke down , never needed servicing , and would give me thirty kilometers to a litre without fail .
In the age of hundred-kilometers-a-litre bikes , the Kiney was a little anachronistic , but was a part of many of my driving expeditions . Had driven it earlier through the thick forests in Dandeli , the forest reserves west of Dharwad . There were bad roads , uneven terrain , heavy rains , strange forest sounds and plenty of monkeys . The forest was so thick that one couldn’t see the sun in broad daylight . We had driven one complete day through the forest chasing the monsoon . We would find an occasional pit stop in the form of a shack with water dripping through it , serving tea and deep fried onions bhajjias. The bike stood through thick and thin with me .
That 160km journey from Mysore to ooty through Madhumalai and Bandipur was one such . From Mysore , the winding road breaks through the shallow vegetation and into the thick green cover quite dramatically . It was rare to see people on the roads , some said it was because of the tigers of Bandipur , some said it was because of the elephants of Madhumalai and some said it was because of Veerapan ,the bandit .
We took the bike journey without much care , no tool kit , no medicines , had no mobile phones then , no maps , no nothing , just the two of us , me and Nal and a small bag stuffed with some clothes and books . Passing Madhumalai was scary – there were three hunting preserves within the sanctuary – Kargudi , Masinagudi and theppakkadu . The road skimmed its borders and cut though Kargudi . We hits the ghats with a stunning hairpin bend that took us about fifteen metres vertically straight above the road we just crossed by .And then another that put us up by another twenty metres , making it a great breathtaking journey for us . There were 56 hairpin bends along the way taking us two thousand two hundred metres above mean sea level , a third of Mount Everest ! Driving through landslide signs , hurriedly erected army bridges and utter greenery was sheer ecstacy . The bike rode the hills like breeze and we took a good part of six hours to climb upto Ooty .From there we chased the toy train down to Coonoor , which with its lush green tea-plantation hillsides was quite a spectacle .
People in Ooty scared us with Veerapan tales , warning us against venturing out at night . He had killed over a thousand elephants , hundreds of police men and presided over the forests of these sanctuaries like a reining deity . Newspapers would talk about beheaded soldiers of the Special task force from tamil nadu trying to nab him , there would be hushed tales of a Veerapan sighting on some side of the hills , some dead tigers , some skins recovered in a truck driving out of the wilds .Then Veerapan kidnapped Rajkumar , the superhero of kannada cinema following it up with the abduction and killing of a former Karnataka minister . It sent shivers down the sides of many a cop who braved all of these to capture and kill him after a fifteen year long chase .

Those days , late in 1994 , the sanctuaries had very few tourists and fewer jungle lodges making it a brilliant experience . It was not even on the 1000 places-to-see-before-you-die list of local Mysoreeans too.

Today , the economy has boomed , people love going to wildlife sanctuaries as tour package deals , partly because they need a breather from the rising heat , stock markets , realty prices , gold prices , capitalistic rat races and partly because Veerapan is no more . There is unabated construction , jungles resorts are coming up by the dozen , there’s a lot of crowds and tourists are coming in droves . There’s a lot of pit-stops on the highway where many shops have come up . Traffic is beginning to get denser than the wilds , there are traffic jams on the state highways . Hair pin bends no longer seem so , as the buses after buses make you inch up , missing out the thrill of the turn . The thriving IT BPO industry in bangalore and Mysore is in need of a weekend break . The forests beckon .

It is not truly wild anymore .

Veerapan smuggled , poached , murdered , and so deserved to be shot . But , he also made sure that the drive through the great forests was thrilling , refreshing , breathtaking and that the wilds stayed uninhabited by man .