Kasauli: No longer a summer destination

Kasauli on July 1, 2012

VIEWPOINT

AMITABH SHUKLA

Kasauli in Himachal Pradesh has myriad attractions and charm for a quite holiday. This is a place where perhaps you can be a part of nature and listen to the chirping of a variety of birds and the chattering of a lot of monkeys around. You can go for a walk and would be privileged only to hear your heartbeat, the sound of the wind hitting the trees and the crunching of leaves when you walk over it.

The sunrise and also the sunset could be mesmerizing, a magical experience. In a slow motion, the sun comes out from behind the mountains in the morning displaying a unique colour, giving you the view of a life time. The pale yellow light of the receding sun too is an experience to cherish as the provider of light and energy takes a break and rests for the next 12 hours.   

The Pakora wala who also sold Jalebis

But there is a rider. You can experience the solitude and much more only when you go there in the off-season when few tourists are around. Kasauli may not be the place to be in the peak tourist season. This is what I realised after reaching the hill station, nestled in the Shivaliks, 60 kms from Chandigarh.

With an extended summer vacations for the schools, I decided to drive down to Kasauli on the first day of this month – a Sunday. The drive from Chandigarh is a breeze on the newly constructed four-lane Zirakpur-Parwanoo highway. The road signages, which were missing when the highway was inaugurated a few months ago, have been put in place now.

Every turn in the mountains has something new to offer. It is a different landscape, a different valley, a new milieu, a completely new setting. Taking a left turn from Dharampur lands you amid tall pine trees. The colour of gold dominates as the pine needles had fallen and the mountains were yet to be lashed by rains.

The serpentine road takes us to Kasauli and the PWD Rest House where I was supposed to stay for the next two days. While the journey was extremely exciting, the destination was not. It was brimming with people, blowing horns, driving haphazardly and playing loud music on the narrow mountain roads. Some of the fellow tourists wanted to snatch what nature had to offer rather than becoming a part of it.

The Mall Road, leading to the small market of Kasauli, was full of people. Walking on the road was a pain rather than a pleasant experience. What made matters worse was that vehicles too were climbing on this Mall Road even as it was full of pedestrians struggling to come to terms with the sharp gradient of the hills. Blowing of horns, noise, children crying to grab attention of their parents, salesmen calling the tourists to sell their wares…This is what I had intended to avoid in the plains and had come to seek a temporary relief in the mountains.

Invasion of hundreds of people on the small hill station on a Sunday led to a complete collapse of whatever little civic infrastructure the popular Kasauli had.  There was no parking spot vacant in the parking lot of the bus stand, rather it was overcrowded. Vehicles were parked all along the road for a kilometre. Those not accustomed to hill driving made matters worse by parking haphazardly, not knowing to give way and creating problems and risks for not only themselves but also others.

On the Mall Road, tourists – mostly from Punjab and Chandigarh and a few from Haryana as the registration number of vehicles indicated, were haggling with the vendors selling everything on this earth. Children were blackmailing their parents for a toy being sold or the eatable being displayed. Some of them were crying at the top of their voice to grab the attention of their parents and force them to buy the stuff they wanted.

Being a day of mela for the locals, pink coloured Jalebis were being fried and then soaked in sugary syrup in plenty. Potato and chilly Pakoras too formed a part of the local delicacy which the tourists as well as the locals were enjoying. Then you had Tibetans selling momos and Maggi. A resident of Punjab had entered into a verbal duel with a Tibetan woman selling momos asking why Onions were not being served with the popular snack. The irritated woman simply replied back saying raw onion was not served with momos in any part of the world. 

Everyone seemed to be in a hurry to eat, make merry and return back. No one really seemed interested to soak into the beauty of the hill station. Walking a few hundred metres on what I thought was a lesser frequented pathway, I finally saw a person who was enjoying the solitude. The middle aged person had spread a towel and was lying down, looking at the trees and the hillocks and singing an old song, a tribute to the impending monsoon. His wife and two kids watched him. “This is life,” he told me as I stopped and watched him. I nodded in agreement and joined the chorus for a while.

The weather may have been pleasant than the plains which were sizzling, it nevertheless was humid and one started sweating after climbing a bit. The locals described the weather as unusual, something which they had not seen in recent years when it hadn’t rained in the last week of June and kept the 5000 odd inhabitants of Kasauli indoors.

Room No 5 of the PWD Guest House where I was putting up, saw a power failure in the afternoon. I enquired and found that power cut had become common for the last two months in the entire belt. This forced me to go shopping and get a candle and a match box – something which I had not bargained for while coming to Kasauli.

The caretaker of the Guest House warned me to keep both the buckets in the bathroom full as the water supply was extremely erratic. “If you do not use it judiciously, you face the risk of running out of water in the middle of your bath,” he warned. I took the message seriously and filled the bucket immediately after entering the room.

I got the message. It was time to curtail the two-day break and return back the very next day. This is what I did, promising that I would not come to the hills in the peak season when there is no difference between Kasauli and Delhi or for that matter Chandigarh, Rohtak, Panipat, Jalandhar and Ludhiana. (July 9, 2012) 

 http://www.dailypioneer.com/state-editions/chandigarh/79075-kasauli-no-longer-a-summer-destination.html