These hills don’t overwhelm you ...they don’t scare you with their majestic spawning opulence.

They don’t threaten you with their raw power, beauty and unpredictability. The Hills of Kumaon are warm and cheerful like an old rambling home you left behind.

You love it, and you want to spend all your time here, reliving their ancient stories, watching the riot of colour scatter as the sun goes down and the stars come up in the deck you grew up in.

The clouds call out to you, the hills lull you into a mystic trance, the breeze fills your heart with peace and happiness.

I grew up with a generous dose of Jim Corbett’s bravery - my home in Calcutta is still lined with Jim Corbett Omnibus and as a child I would sleep only when my father read to me from them. I fought sleep as my father declared –“Corbett just spotted two glowing eyes in the dark…. sleep now!”

After some frantic negotiating and desperate pleading he would read two bonus pages and I’d fall asleep eventually, somewhere between two piercing green eyes and a treacherous mountainous forest terrain that makes chasing the truant one impossible.

Once inside Corbett, you forget why you are here, the landscape changes every 50 meters, deep forest gives way to rocky river beds, grasslands merge into tall oak trees reaching up to the sky.

The trees look different, the trail looks more rugged, at times the place is aglow with bright sunlight and at times the foliage gets so thick that you can hardly make out if it is morning or evening.

Hidden away in this foliage was this humungous Tusker…quite oblivious to our intrusion. He stood there majestic – staring at us through the leaves.