KODAIKANAL, India — On its own, the \o7kurinji \f7is a modest little flower, nothing you'd expect would send grown men into fits of rapture.
But blanket entire hillsides and valleys with it -- millions of blue and purple blooms as far as the eye can see -- and suddenly civil servants are transformed into poets.
"We were walking in early morning and it was covered by mist, and suddenly the mist cleared as if somebody lifted a curtain," said S. Theodore Baskaran, a naturalist and retired postmaster. "And suddenly there was this vast landscape of flowers in front of us, the whole landscape up to the horizon covered in blue.... It was a very dramatic and kind of a transcendental experience."
Such \o7kurinji\f7-induced euphoria is an infrequent occurrence, and not just because the flower is found in only one place on Earth: the chain of mountains in southern India known as the Western Ghats.
Unlike the annual bloom of poppies in Southern California's Antelope Valley, the delicate \o7kurinji \f7appears just once every 12 years.
Baskaran has witnessed its glories only twice in three decades: in 1982, when he stumbled across the flower for the first time, then again in 1994. This year, he looked forward to having an opportunity to fall under the \o7kurinji's \f7spell once more.
But anticipation among \o7kurinji\f7 lovers has given way to dismay with the discovery that human intervention is robbing the flower of its natural habitat at a rapidly accelerating rate, through encroachment and the introduction of nonnative species in the high-elevation grasslands where it flourishes.
In many parts of the Western Ghats, the \o7kurinji \f7bushes that enliven the hills every dozen years are fighting to survive, increasingly squeezed by invading newcomers onto scattered, shrinking patches of land, like lakes of color steadily drying up.
For some, the swift devastation is nothing short of catastrophic, a rupture not only in the natural world but also in cultural tradition. The \o7kurinji \f7is celebrated in the ancient literature of south India, and some hill tribes revere it to this day. The members of one tribe even calculate their ages according to how many of the spectacular mass flowerings they've witnessed.
To watch the unraveling of such an established thread in the fabric of local life is painful, said John Britto, a botanist and Jesuit priest here in the state of Tamil Nadu.
