On the road from Mysore to Coorg, just short of the town of Kushalnagar, is Bylakuppe, an area that houses one of the largest Tibetan settlements in India. Established by the Indian government in the early 1960’s to accommodate some of the thousands of refugees who had fled to India, it is today home to several generations of Tibetans in exile.
As far back as I can remember, Bylakuppe was always a point of particular interest on the journey to and from Coorg. The neat patchwork of fields on a gently undulating landscape contained relatively unusual crops for the area – tobacco, cotton, and corn. Colourful bunting, which I eventually learned were Tibetan prayer flags, fluttered above small cottages. Tibetan ladies, dressed in their traditional fashion, raked drying corn cobs on sunny rooftops. These were, for the most part, just brief vignettes as we drove by on the highway, always with somewhere else to be.