Like a stuck record
I find myself strapped in the wretched pilot’s seat, shouting ‘Mayday, Mayday’ as my flying behemoth plummets nose-first towards the Earth to certain death
“When mountains fall, they crumble into rocks. When people fall, they crumble into stories.”
Sky in the Deep
As in the quote above, we are falling, crumbling into stories. I am too. I am a piece of vinyl, once shiny and singing true. With time, my gloss has worn off and I have developed many a scratch. These scratches make the phonograph needle jump and skip a groove or two; I too do that sometimes. It can also get my playing stylus stuck. When that happens, I repeat a groove, over and over. Sometimes, I am a stuck needle too, wretchedly so… For my stylus and I are strapped in the pilot’s seat, shouting ‘SOS’ as my flying behemoth plummets nose-first towards the Earth and to certain death. I keep screaming – ‘Mayday, Mayday, Mayday’. No one listens.
Shimla is sinking, I repeat ad nauseam. But before you raise a collective crescendo, insisting you have known all along, beware. This is one instance where being aware beforehand is not deserving of a pat on the back, it justly merits a boot on the behind. Knowing of impending doom and letting it happen nonetheless is far worse than not having known.
In this gloomy Monday morning note, let’s get to the point. In our nation of 150 croreplus people, lakhs upon lakhs have been quietly watching while the hill-sides around us crumble. That’s not the bad news, for we have all known this for a while. The bad news is our total lack of apathy, our inaction on this front. As educated individuals, we have failed collectively and quite miserably. But then again, perhaps we haven’t – perhaps we never really cared at all. Shimla: The latest victim
‘Queen of the Hills’ they called it, nestled in the nascent Himalayas just off ‘City Beautiful’, Chandigarh. As with most other Indian hill stations, it was gifted to us by the English, as were Mussoorie, Nainital, Lansdowne and
other tracts of hilly land in North India with climes that suited the brittle-mannered and built Rajguys who ruled over us for centuries. Before you take affront, yes, it was Indian backs, forearms and other muscles that did the heavy digging, but the concept, planning and virtualization came from the East India chappies. If you want a parallel, don’t claim to be Bill Gates just because you did some coding work on Microsoft Windows.
Anyway, Shimla was built to sustain and be home to 25,000 people. Today, in its lean months, it houses over 3 lakh souls. Come the peak season and 10 times as many people descend on the hapless Queen, her ugly progeny visible from afar in the form of concrete dwellings, tenements and buildings that are putting paid to her former majesty. Ironically, this Queen is thirsty, even though she has to her credit a heyday when she supplied water to millions. Just 25 years back, I recall driving from Shimla to Delhi, watching snaking tankers queueing up to fetch water for the Queen’s hotels, for she and her Kingdom had all but run dry.
Today, the Queen’s girth cannot be imagined, it has to be seen to be believed, pose and petite ravaged by time and life’s travails.
Her famous ridge is now infamous, even notorious, turning noble heads and bodies only for the wrinkles and folds that scar her once-pristine countenance. A lifetime of excesses and indulgence is nursing a disaster in the waiting. As and when the ridge falls, it would mark a beginning… of the end.
Not the first to fall
We are not helpless, we are not impotent, we are not blind – we are a vitiated mix of all these traits. Around us, mountains are crumbling, teetering on the brink of certain collapse. We watch nonchalantly. The only discount we make is to stop raping the land and building more on her disintegrating frame in daylight hours, when our lustful actions are visible to all. We have reverted to type, preferring to do the defiling in the dark of the night, with bulldozers and earth-movers belching out diesel exhaust gases while most sleep.
Look at Joshimath, the holy town in Uttarakhand where devastation has descended, its houses developing cracks and roads quivering as fissures and fractures appeared, wide enough to put a fist through. The local authorities shamelessly ticked this off as a ‘passing phenomenon’, till a pattern emerged and
a deadly rout intensified, maiming Karna Prayag, Nainital, Mussoorie, Rishikesh, Gupt Kashi, Uttar Kashi and many other upper Himalayan regions.
The overbearing and unpalatable truth was that once subsidence began, little could be done to stop it. That’s because despite our Macarena manifestation, we cannot stop a mountain from moving once it decides to. What we have done is build highways and hydel projects such as one at Tapovan, which was planned in good faith, but involved tunnelling below existing hilly townships. Residents soon reported of crumbling houses and complained that indiscreet blasting was impacting human hearing and bursting underground aquifers. But the ‘development’ continued. We are further exacerbating subsidence and weakening a once-pristine ecosystem by building a 15.1-km-long throughhill tunnel between Devprayag and Lachmoli, touting it to be the country’s longest. This ‘fantastic’ new line will have 12 stations, 17 tunnels, 35 bridges and be completed within a year. Over that year, we need Goliath to hold and stop our moving mountains. What can be done now?
Not much can be done, not in the places that have already fallen prey to our greed for land and more buildings, hence profits. Look at what’s happening around us, barely a fortnight into this year’s mountain monsoons. It is almost a laughable matter that North India’s popular hill stations, all of which were bursting at the seams just a month back, are all empty today. Why? Well, because there is one big, bad wolf who really likes his own skin – we call him ‘man’. Having seen what has happened over the last few years in our hills once it starts raining, people have put their fancy cars in reverse gear to wait out the proverbial storm.
That’s just as well, for if early signs be an indicator, Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh have already given up on their capacity to withstand the onslaught of water. Flooding has begun and mountains are swaying and lilting before they crumble. Bridges are falling and trees are blocking highways. Cars are getting swept away and roads are hastening for their meeting with the maker. Hotels are empty and discounts are at lifetime highs. Harvests are being lost and there’s next to no one in the hills to cry over them. The only thing in abundance, suddenly, is water. It is everywhere, not just in our reservoirs and pipelines.
We are responsible for this mess, all of us. We have individually and personally worked hard to create this demise – a deadly arsenal of waste, greed and death, one that is biting our softened behinds. The only thing we can do is stay away and let the mountains be, as they lick and try and heal their gaping wounds. Man has already taken from the mountains their natural ornaments of foliage, gurgle of streams and lavishness of nature. All that can be given to them now is time. That’s a big ask, though, for we never have enough of that for our own selves, leave alone others. But we have to somehow find some to give back to nature.
The hill-sides around us are crumbling. That’s not the bad news, for we have all known this for a while. The bad news is our total lack of apathy and inaction. As educated individuals, we have failed rather miserably on this front