Little Tibet
Its the Dalai Lama' s 75th. Birthday. I heard that Bylaguppe is having a big do. Reportedly, 45,000 Tibetans live there now ! This number amazes me. I remember the early days of the Bylaguppe Refugee Settlement near Kushalnagar. The refugees from Tibet had started coming to India around 1960 and the government settled them in camps in Karnataka and Himachal Pradesh. In our state, a hilly tract with wet deciduous forest belonging to the Western Ghats ecosphere, 250 Kms. from Bangalore on the Mysore-Madikeri route, was sanctioned for their colony ( I learnt from my father that some local landholders had made a noise about this allocation because they had been denied permission to develop plantations there and couldn't digest the fact that all that coveted land was going to charity !). The very first time I visited the place, it was all misty hills, rolling grasslands and lush woods which to a child's eye looked like a " foreign hill station...