founder’s story

Sunita Dhairyam (Jayapathy) has always had a deep love for nature and wildlife. This was inherited and nurtured by her wildlife artist grandmother and wildlife photographer aunt. She spent a couple of years in Zambia, studied in India, and lived in the USA, before setting up her current home in Bandipur. When Sunita built her home in Bandipur, it was also home to Veerappan, the infamous sandalwood bandit; though her family thought she was crazy, she says she bought the land purely for her love of wildlife and the view of the Nilgiris. She built her house on the land that she had bought abutting the Tiger Reserve. It was a small one room village house with no electricity, no telephone and an underground sump for water. The dream was to be a wildlife artist and focus on that. During her early years in Bandipur, she was commissioned to do wildlife murals for the forest department and the government owned Jungle Lodges & Resorts ltd. Once the free clinic started in the year 2000 on her farm, the formidable trials and tribulations of the local populations were brought to a forefront and she felt compelled to address these many issues, including the ever rising man-animal conflict. She was instrumental in setting up the Mariamma Charitable trust in the year 2007, and realising that funding for the Trust was going to be practically impossible to gain, she set up Temple Tree Designs a small proprietorship company, producing clothing, home décor and other art-inspired creations so that the wildlife conservation work that needed to be done would be more or less sustainable.