By Ganesh Saili
Choose any weekend to walk in Landour-Mussoorie, the combined stink of roasted chicken, burnt cordite, and smoking clutch plates is guaranteed to ruin your day.
A stranger accosted me. He sidles up to me to ask if I live here.
‘Yes!’ said I hurriedly, in the manner of a reluctant bridegroom, I nod my head to say: ‘Yes I do!’
‘Are there always so many tourists?’
‘Yes!’ I admit. ‘It’s worse on weekends,’ I snap, hoping he will move on. But he doesn’t, and careens on, ‘Know somewhere I can start a Korean-eatery?’
Come to think of it, ‘Kimchi’ is the only thing missing in a hill station crawling with tourists.
How to escape? I wonder.
‘It’s worse than Chandni Chowk!’ exclaims Ankita, whose son took five hours to get back to school, normally the journey takes no more than an hour from the valley below.
Once upon a time, to holiday here, showed you had money. But today by the time the place finishes with you, it means you once you had money! Lately, the rat race of building spindly structures has begun.
‘Was it always like this?” Ask author Madhu Gurung from Dehradun. Of course, it wasn’t.
In the early 1970s, Ruskin Bond was editing Imprint Magazine from Maplewood Cottage. Occasionally, I would tilt at the windmills, retype some, pink-slipped others, which left a few for publication.
One day, huffing and puffing up the hill from Barlowganj, a police constable asked: ‘Does Ruskin Bond live here?’ He thrusts an envelope at me with a curt: ‘Kaptan Saab sent this!’
Remember it was in the days of the Emergency and it could have been anything! A court summons or even an arrest warrant. Fortunately, it was neither. It just had an article. The title still rings in my ears today, India Good! Everybody King! It was s listing of the government’s five-point program which never saw the light of day. Yet every month, as punctual as a star, it would reappear in the mail. What has stayed with me is the title – it’s a precious solution to the problem besetting us.
Mussoorie Good! Everybody King can explains the huge car that lumbers by to miss running me over by a whisker.
A diddle of contractors, riding a construction boom are reputed to build a hotel overnight, Trouble is the rooms are would so small that the furniture is painted on the walls, and the walls are so thin you can hear folks changing their minds. The air is polluted with a cloud of dust which hangs around. It is born from the grey-blue gravel illegally quarried despite a Supreme Court ban quarrying in Hathipaon.
How does one explain hotels rooms without tariffs; taxis without meters; and eateries without menus?
‘When we finished our holiday, we found a little cash left over, simply because we had forgotten where we had hidden it ourselves!’ complains a visitor.
It seems that the U.P. Roadside Act is not for Uttarakhand. Which explains the ‘why’ of rickety structures clawing at the sky. As if afflicted by old age, the Mussoorie Dehra Development Authority can’t see what any child can. With the plaster still wet on some of the newer constructions. Obviously, they, came up without clearance.
Why am I getting so hot under the collar?
After all, this is our home; this is where I have now learnt to weave through rows of cars while ducking two-wheelers – scooters and bikes in thousands rented from as far afield as Rishikesh. When the next earthquake strikes, you will find the hue and cry raised by the violators of our laws will be the shrillest.
Friendly suggestions? One does get dime a dozen from well-meaning old boys:
‘File a Public Interest Litigation in the High Court in Nainital!’
‘Ban scooters & private vehicles. Use shuttles instead!’
‘Go to the National Green Tribunal’
Instead, I turned to my friend Professor Dr. Sudhakar Misra, now retired in the Doon.
He always has a solution. But this time around, he too is stumped and says: ‘What can one do when the fence eats the field?’
Ganesh Saili, born and home-grown in the hills, belongs to those select few whose words are illustrated by their pictures. Author of two dozen books, some translated into twenty languages, his work has found renown worldwide.
