Customer Reviews

Veerappan: India's Most Wanted Man

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In the book, the author Sunaad Raghuram has done one very important thing. And that is, he has very consciously avoided valourising or romanticising a bandit whose exploits are the stuff fiction is made of. This in itself adds a great deal to the credibility of the book and its worth.

This is a book which perfectly captures the starkness of banditry and its consequences, the writing style being a combination of deadpan straightness and descriptive expansiveness.
It tells us all we wanted to know of the infamous Veerappan in a manner which is quite seriously praiseworthy, page after page revealing vignettes of the man, his methods and madnesses which were hitherto completely unknown to the outside world.

Any aficianado of the thriller genre would lap up this book.

I came to this book knowing nothing about Veerappan other than he is a famous Indian bandit who has been at large for thirty years. Unfortunately, what could have been a fascinating account of the transformation of a poor villager to locally respected sandalwood and ivory poacher, to nationally famous extortionist and murderer and Tamil nationalist, instead devolves into a rather boring blow-by-blow report of his activities from the mid-'80s up to and including his famous kidnapping of the aging film star Rajkumar in 2000. Journalist Raghuram does a relatively good job of explaining the bandit's background and introduction to a life of crime, but once he starts detailing his crimes and the police attempts to capture him, the book takes on the stunningly dry tone of official reports.

Raghuram recreates the setting and execution of several dozen of Veerappan's murders-which total around 140, including many many assorted police officers. What emerges is not a tale of a modern-day Robin Hood, but one of a vicious murderer who steals to sustain his own band of forest-dwelling killers. His criminal activities escalated over time, starting with simple poaching, and then expanding to extortion and kidnapping. And once the authorities began to get serious about arresting him, Veerappan engaged in tit-for-tat retribution, killing suspected informers, ambushing police convoys with guns and explosives, attacking police stations, and even targeting specific officers.

The efforts made to capture him are given great attention, and while a certain level of individual police bravery and effort is noted, a more general bureaucratic incompetence underlies everything. The primarily stems from lack of cooperation between the southern states of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, where Veerappan operates. Nor is police brutality overlooked, as Raghuram notes the severe treatment of captured members of Veerappan's gang at the hands of the police, ranging from outright murder, to torture, sexual abuse, and indefinite incarceration.

Beyond the general dry prose, the book suffers from a arcane array of abbreviations and acronyms, all of which are explained in the glossary in the back, but make for choppy reading. Similarly, for a Western reader, the barrage of names is likely to be overly intrusive. Do we really need to know the full name of every forester and driver's assistant involved in the narrative? Another constant problem is that key to Veerappan's elusiveness is the geography he operates in, which Raghuram's text brings to life, but is supported by only one remarkably poor map.

Where the book really breaks down in Part V, the final 75 pages, which detail the kidnapping of Rajkumar. Here, the tale of Veerappan starts intertwining with the bewildering details of local and national Indian politics. It's too bad, 'cause Veerappan's new alliance with Marxist Tamil terrorist/freedom fighters is rather intriguing, but it all gets lost in a lengthy section detailing legal battles to keep captured members of his gang in jail.

This is the book for everyone who has been fascinated by Veerappan and is dying to read some initiated reporting rather than idiotic tongue-in-cheek exoticism in foreign press and Indians on web forums screaming "EXTERMINATE VEERAPPAN!...". Raghuram's account is extraordinarily well-written, and provides all the background a foreign reader needs on caste, geography and local history and politics to turn Veerappan from incomprehensible third-world moustache icon to an understandable criminal in a society you can relate to, populated by real men and women.

The writing is very clear and not at all floral; however the many south Indian names on each page combine with the dry English to give the text a real-world beauty quite different from (and superior to) any contrived romanticism. And indeed, what is romantic about this ruthless mass murderer and eco-bandit in a land of suicides and social ills?

Veerappan and his gang sort of remind me of the hole-in-the-wall gang in the U.S. old wild-west days. They hid out in the wild where nobody lived and few could go. The author, Ragburham, describing the seven thousand square miles of territory in the heart of south central India where Veerappan roamed at will, wrote "The jagged hills, the deep gorges, the vast valleys, and the thick undergrowth combine to make it an area that is not just inhospitable but almost inaccessible." It's a book of endless tales of the police attempting to find and capture or destroy Veerappan, but, like Osama bin Laden or the drug lords of Mexico and South America, Veerappan, with the aid of locals who are both indebted to and fearful of him, evades all efforts to neutralize him. The fact that the locals are almost as afraid of the large proportion of police who are corrupt and cruel as they are of of Veerappan makes them less likely to help the police and more likely to pretend to know nothing and to have seen nothing.

Veerappan apparently has a natural talent for leadership and planning criminal operations, which makes his ambushes of police patrols and assaults on police stations come off smoothly like well-planned military operations.

He started his career as a poacher, thief, and smuggler of high-value wood and ivory, but he gradually progressed to murder, kidnapping, and association with Tamil-separatist revolutionaries.

This was an interesting book, but not a spell-binder which I couldn't put down. I was put off somewhat by the lists of tongue-twisting Indian names, and, as a Christian, I was uncomfortable with Veerappan and his gang sometimes worshiping stones, and other dark practices. For instance, the author describes one occasion on which "Veerappan and his men were away performing a special pooja at a forest temple to the goddess Kali. Propitiating the goddess, know for her appetite for blood, was a ritual they performed every new moon night."

It's an interesting book for those who want to know a little more about how the poor live in the remote jungles of India.

as a veerappan fan i found this book very good. Author sunaad did not fall in either veerappan side or on police side. He mentioned atrocities of both sides. There are few not clear or false items but other than that book is very good and a must read for all south indian news followers. as veerappan got killed by police recently. i am really interested if the same author can write a book regarding his death. i am sure veerappan did not get killed by police encounter and police is not telling the truth.

My god rest Verappan's soul.

I was so terribly curious to know more about this bandit called Veerappan. And finally, my desire to understand the man and his methods has been fulfilled by this gripping book.

This is a book for all India-watchers who have the inclination to know the country beyond its computer software credentials! It is amazing how one man, the bandit in question, can do all the things that he has done.

The author, Sunaad, deserves a pat on the back for having recreated the entire story without once slacking in the narration.

All in all, a fine read, this book!

Well, I always wondered why anyone had not attempted a biography of a man who had taken a whole country's imagination with him for so long. And boy, was the wait worth it!

Sunaad Raghuram has achieved what not one other journalist on the trail of the bandit has. And how does he do it? With style, aplomb, finesse and authenticity.

Starting by detailing the history of crime in Veerappan's part of the world and going on to describe vividly the many chilling incidents in the bandit's story, Sunaad does a fine job of unravelling the whole scene layer by layer.
This is a book which will remain in memory long after it has been closed. More so for readers of Indian origin who would probably know a thing or two of the story's setting.

This book by Sunaad Raghuram tells us the real story of Veerappan, sifitng so perfectly the wheat from the chaff, as it were. Handling a subject which is essentially given to hyperbole and exagerration-as indulged by vast sections of the media- is definitely not easy.

But Sunaad Raghuram does it with professional ease and gives us a remarkably believable account of the brigand who has been bestowed with almost super-human abilitites.

His writing style is direct, to the point, without any frills and throrougly riveting. An exhaustive work; one which leaves you with almost everything that you always wanted to know about the bandit who has been like none other in the world's history of crime.

This book is all about how a hard-nosed journalist has gone about unravelling the story of one of the most intriguing men in the world of crime today.

Wonderfully descriptive and finely balanced in the treatment of the story, this book is one of the best works in the crime thriller genre in a long time. Just go for it!

Veerappan-what kind of a man could he be to have not just eluded law enforcers for decades but also inflicted unimaginable horrors on entire forces of policemen who have gone after him? Can any terrain be so inhospitable that a man can get away every time after committing the most heinous of crimes? What is it that makes Veerappan a lord of the jungle who cannot be touched? Lastly, can any man survive for so long in one of the densest and forbidding jungles of the world and how?
Do these questions sound absoultely theatrical and far fetched in the context of the modern world?

Well, this book tells us how shockingly true it is for one man to have done the most horrendous and at times quite awesome acts for any human being in this world.
Reading the book gives one a serious rush of adrenalin, a sense of uncontrollable curiosity to go further and understand the methods and madnesses of a bandit, the like of whom the world has perhaps never seen before.
Sunaad Raghuram's handling of the story and its narration is exemplary in the sense that he never once gives you the feeling that he is overstating a fact or exaggerating or even creating a halo around the protagonist.

No wonder he is the first journalist in the world to have done serious research on the phenomenon called Veerappan that is obviously so far removed from the day to day reporting of the man and his deeds almost always laced with half-truths stemming from a hollow understanding of the core points involved. Really a remarkable achievement for a first time writer.