SURVIVOR: Greenidge waits friends

This April India will play host to some unique guests from Britain. Six tigers will be specially flown in by British Airways to Chennai. The cats will then make their way to a rescue centre adjacent to Bannerghatta National Park in Karnataka. These are the Born Free tigers, rescued from various pet shops and circuses in Europe by the Born Free Foundation, founded by Virginia McKenna and Bill Travers who starred in the classic Born Free.

The tigers are currently at the Born Free sanctuary at Kent, which will be closing shortly. Bannerghatta had earlier played host to Born Free Tigers in 1988, when six tigers rescued by Born Free were housed at the rescue centre. Five succumbed to old age. Only Greenidge survives, awaiting the new inmates.

The tigers are being brought here as part of an agreement by the foundation, the Forest Department of Karnataka and Delhi-based Wildlife Trust of India. "The upkeep of the tigers will be borne by the foundation," says P.R. Sinha, secretary, Central Zoo Authority. A separate seven-acre facility has been created where the tigers can roam freely. There are also talks of "marriage" for one of the six, Roque, and the hunt for a "willing and receptive female" is on.

-Prerna Singh Bindra

OBITUARY

G.M.C. BALAYOGI 1951-2002

Ganti Mohana Chandra Balayogi was handpicked by Telugu Desam Party (TDP) supremo N. Chandrababu Naidu in 1998 to become the youngest and first Dalit Speaker of the Lok Sabha. His popularity was evident when after his untimely death in an aircrash on March 3, his body did a full circuit through Vijayawada to Hyderabad to Delhi so that people could pay homage before it was taken back to his constituency since 1991, Amalapuram, for the final rites three days later.

Balayogi's humility and willingness to learn (he learnt to speak Hindi but with a heavy Telugu accent) enabled him to deftly conduct business in a fractured Lok Sabha and won him friends from all parties. He conducted proceedings impartially during the confidence vote on the Vajpayee government in 1999.

The lawyer from Kakinada who quit his "secure government job" as a first class magistrate to join the TDP in 1982 had come a long way. Balayogi was too modest to speak about his origins and meteoric rise. The loss is overwhelming not only for the TDP, but also for the state's politically conscious Godavari delta.

-Amarnath K. Menon

Birthday Gift

ART LIVES ON: Raza with the winners

The capital's waning art season blazed briefly last week when S.H. Raza, the yogi of Menton, France, now in India for his 80th birthday celebrations, announced the setting up of the Raza Foundation to recognise and promote deserving talent in India. Convinced that the younger Indian artists are among the best in the world, the Parisian patriarch has chosen Seema Ghuraiyya and Akhilesh to receive the first Raza award of Rs 1 lakh each. The works of the two gifted abstract painters from Madhya Pradesh are showing at Delhi's Art Today gallery. The show titled Ishara, curated by Akhilesh, is easily the best of abstract art in a long time.

S. Kalidas

Heavenly Trip

It will be a quicker, more comfortable and picturesque route to the richest Hindu temple of Lord Venkateshwara at Tirupathi in Andhra Pradesh. Dopple Mayr of Austria, the world's leading builder of aerial ropeways, will set up the detachable gondola-type aerial ropeway to the hilltop temple. When completed by June 2003 the passenger ropeway (6.1 km) will be the longest in Asia and possibly the world.

For 30 years the ropeway project had been hanging fire. Now, the Andhra Pradesh Tourism Development Corporation (APTDC) has finally cleared the Rs 90-crore project. "The new route halves travel time from Tirupathi to Tirumala to 20 minutes," says APTDC Chairman C. Anjaneya Reddy, who expects the ropeway to boost temple tourism. It is designed to ferry 1,000 people an hour. For about one lakh pilgrims who visit the temple on auspicious days, this could be another blessing from heaven.

-Amarnath K. Menon