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SATYAMANGALAM FOREST, India - By car, it's just a few hours from Bangalore, the buzzing hub of India's technology boom, to some of Asia's densest forests. They are mountainous places at the other end of Indian life: few people, fewer roads and foliage thick enough to swallow a newcomer in minutes.
It's ideal country for a bandit, and for 25 years the smuggler and poacher known simply as Veerappan made these forests his home, becoming India's most-wanted criminal and embarrassing a generation of politicians unable to bring him to justice.
In a nation where tradition and modernity are forever battling for dominance, he lived like a medieval bandit - albeit one who profited from the international trade in illegal ivory and other inroads that globalization has made into Indian life.
But in the end, the modern India won.
Roads had been edging deeper into Veerappan's territory, some 4,000 square miles of rugged terrain where the southern states of Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Kerala meet, and security forces had grown more sophisticated. Thousands of soldiers had been deployed against him. His gang, which once numbered more than 150, had dwindled to less than a dozen.
Late Monday, more than two decades of running ended: Security forces ambushed Veerappan as he headed to a doctor's visit. When the shootout was over, India's most famous outlaw was dead, along with three members of his gang. ''JOY,'' shouted a one-word headline in The Asian Age.
Among those who feared him, the response was more muted.
''He murdered so many officers,'' said N. Rajju, a forestry guard at a mountaintop checkpoint deep in the bandit's territory. He and his colleagues, Rajju said, seldom set foot in the forests. ''He could have kidnapped us at any time.''
And now? ''Now we are free,'' Rajju said.
Banditry is nothing new to India. It gave the English language the word ''thug,'' after a caste of criminals hunted by British colonials, and parts of rural India are still unsafe to travel after dark.
Veerappan was, perhaps, India's last great bandit, a swashbuckling criminal with a flair for the dramatic.