For the last 124 years, the picturesque town of Udhagamandalam (Ooty to most people), headquarters of the Nilgiri district of Tamil Nadu, has hosted the Ooty Flower Show in mid-May — a horticultural extravaganza that at least 300,000 visitors attend each year. Now, with Covid-19 having locked down the country, Ooty’s flower show, as also the prestigious Ooty Dog Show, will be cancelled for the first time since Independence.
The effective cancellation of this year’s tourist season is a crushing blow, not just to Ooty, but to all of the Nilgiris. In this scenic mountain district at the northwestern tip