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SOME hundred years ago—or was it two hundred—a lone Englishman chanced upon a rhododendron hill in Kumaon, and did whatlone Englishmen do when they chance upon a lovely spot. He set up a hill station. A gently curving Mall Road on the highest ridge, full of snug English cottages tucked away in forest groves, all with names like Fair Lawn and Rosemount and Snow Ridge and Mount View and Windy Hollow and Home Farm and Pine Lodge, all with extensive gardens, and plum orchards and pansy patches, with outhouses and sculleries and kitchens and larders for the Indian help. Discreetly hidden in the foliage, some fine stone churches—combing Anglican design and Kumaon stone craft. Then the Ranikhet Club, a sprawling arcaded structure with a fine wood spring dance floor and a well-stocked bar, overhanging trophies of man-eating tigers. At the far end of the Mall, the lower bazaar. As always, the English view of the world was gentle, civil, cultivated, tasteful and utterly English—the closest approximation of country life in Sussex. Ranikhet, as with all good colonial things, was but an extension of the Anglo Saxon dream.

Rants and Raves

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...And An Indian Nightmare

THE Englishman had forgotten one thing. It was not possible to get to lovely Ranikhet from Delhi without experiencing an unfortunate blemish called Moradabad, one of the world's unloveliest places. However hard anyone tried to bypass it, Moradabad stood resolutely blocking the path. And like Ranikhet's legendary beauty, Moradabad's ugliness is also historic. After almost a quarter-century of being the 'Armpit of Uttar Pradesh', the city claimed the title of 'Arsehole of the world' for virtually 10 years running—a title it wrested from Calcutta. (The Miss Moradabad contest takes place at the city's sewage treatment plant—the only hygienic place in town). How it achieved this legendary title is not difficult to see. For whichever direction you drive in, the city greets you with a sulphurous stench of decay and a refuse dump of plastic bags and vultures the size of Agra. Beyond that a drain choked with a purple rivulet of raw sewage like one of the larger tributaries of the Ganga, and scores of children and adults fishing in it for bits of food, some dead fish, anything.

But to be fair to Moradabad, two years ago, a thoughtful district magistrate planted a eucalyptus sapling at the city's busiest junctions. It was a symbolic gesture of such optimism that it struck an instant chord with the citizenry. For a year the wayward innocent tree fluttered under the ill-tempered dose of monoxide and soon became like the limbless that roam the street around it. Till another thoughtful citizen decide to move the tree to the district magistrate's own compound, where it now lives. If Moradabad has a soul, it is there in a tiny shrivelled bit of green trying desperately to survive in a dead, rotting city.

Rants and Raves

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Rigours Of A Regiment

BUT to return to Ranikhet, as soon as the British departed from its salubrious climes, the stone houses were quickly and quietly refilled—like original Johnny Walker bottles—with spurious local stuff. Indian gentry from the plains in dire need of summer cottages thronged up, filling the stone larders with dal and rice rations, tinkling the verandahs with the sounds of their own silver tea services. Hotels appeared in the local bazaar: Doon Hotel, Spring Dale Manor, River Side Inn, built against blank hillsides and offering quiet and reassuring views of concrete retaining walls. Restaurants changed menus; idli, sambar and Bengali sweets replaced mushroom-on-toast. On the army golf course, the clubhouse was locked up and the nine-hole course converted to a picnic ground. The bus station rather than the club became the hub of Ranikhet's social life.

The army presence in Ranikhet cannot be discounted. At every turn is a reminder that this is the home of the Kumaon Regimental Centre. Multicoloured emblems, yellow shields of raging tigers stare down concrete gate posts. Starched colonels move about curtained Ambassadors like contractors on a building site. Army jeeps and trucks with stiff regiment flags and insignias spray their diesel fumes into pine forests. And on the golf course, retired brigadiers tee off before hitting the bar. I remember some years earlier when a sudden monsoon deluge had wiped away road links to the centre of town and everyone was left stranded in their far-flung cottages. Even then the army was not to be easily swayed from its routine by this civilian calamity. The roads lay wrecked, crying for some quick repair, but the jawans carried out their daily exercises; running up and down the broken hillsides, jogging and exercising while the CO teed off in the rain. Just to remain fit and ready for the next Indo-Pak war. The Army is truly an Indian institution.

Rants and Raves

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A Shoe Box Of A House

IN many ways the indigenised hill station looks, acts and minds its manners like its English ancestor—there is the Annual Gladioli and Flower Show at Chaubatia, retired colonels still tap their sticks on the sidewalk for the evening walk and discuss the price of rum in their time, the Army's main activity is still golf. But below these seemingly innocuous acts of wellbeing, there is a darker side of Ranikhet. The presence of NGOs and development agencies signals a deeper decay. On each trip up I notice more and more of the forest disappearing, water in short supply, absence of fuel wood. Like Moradabad, plastic bags and raw sewage now cover the hill below the bazaar. And beyond the fringes of the old town there lie houses built by IAS officials once posted to Ranikhet. The officials have moved on, and doubtless acquired more houses in more beautiful surrounds; but their earlier intentions remain, discarded ruins, sentinels perhaps to what Ranikhet will soon become.

Some years ago my wife and I decided to build a place for ourselves there as well. Given our minuscule budget, and given that there were so many lovely stone cottages around, all with hearths and fireplaces and bay windows and columned verandahs, it fell on us to make a moral statement about the true state of the world. The house we built was in brick and concrete—a modern economic shoe box, that said without ambiguity or paradox that there is ugliness in the world. There is a God, sure, but there is also Moradabad.

Rants and Raves

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