When the kurinji blooms

the stars for want of accommodation, blithely polluting wayside streams. Or if the town’s roads are a motorist’s and pedestrian’s nightmare. Or if its streets shock one by their total lack of sanitation, littered as they are with garbage.

Somehow these deterrents don’t discourage tourists from overrunning Munnar. Nor can they be blamed. For in its reckless zeal to promote tourism at any cost in this ecologically fragile hill resort, the tourism department has virtually put a halo on the kurinji. ‘It is not a mere shrub. It is a part of our culture,’ signboards loftily proclaim as one approaches the town.

The sheer irony of it hits one hard. Aren’t forests that induce vital rainfall a part of our culture, too? Then why have we allowed them to shrink so alarmingly, resulting in erratic rainfall and widespread drought? And why do the authorities blatantly continue to ignore the deforestation taking place in Munnar and its environs under the pretext of development? Opportunism and apathy are no doubt the answer.

‘Take back memories. Leave no trace’, urges another prominent signboard. Memories of being hounded by beggars and touts? Of gingerly picking one’s way through cratered roads dirtied by betel-stains? Of rapacious auto- and taxi-drivers and guides? As for leaving no trace, the domestic tourist fiendishly delights in leaving his ‘imprint’ wherever he goes!