Sector 17 Chandigarh

I was about to close my eyes for a blissful nap this afternoon when the phone rang.  It was the guy from the city office to report a problem.  The problem was serious enough to make me drag myself out of bed and drive over to bail him out.  It took me an hour or two to fix his problem.

Our city office is in Sector 22 which is a stone's throw away from my favorite spot in Chandigarh, Sector 17.  I could not resist the temptation to hang out there for a while.  I have lived in Chandigarh (or its vicinity) for nearly 30 years now.  I love visiting the Sukhna Lake and Nek Chand's Rock Garden a lot.  I like driving around its tree lined roads.  I like shopping in Sector 22.  I have favorite spots for most things.

Nothing beats Sector 17 for just walking about, looking in to shop windows, walking into English Book Shop or Capital Book Shop for looking at books and magazines.  One can eat at many of the small snack shops that abound, or walk into fast food restaurants or even fine dining ones.

This is a fish shaped fountain in the center of Sector 17 plaza.  You can see a number of people just hanging around.

This is another row of fountains in the center of the plaza.  Just behind this fountain is the space where platform is usually set up for cultural performances from time to time.

You can see the famous Softy Corner which has been supplying softies and snacks to Chandigarhians as far as I can remember.  This tiny shop doles out softies, popcorn, cold drinks and several such stuff.

Just like the shop in this picture, Sector 17 is studded with little nooks loaded with bags, dupattas, socks, belts, caps, jewellery, cosmetics, umbrellas and stuff like that.  These are lovely to browse in.  Often a bag that looks funky and cute from afar looks tacky upon a closer look.  There are times though, when you could pick something trendy and pretty at rock bottom rates.

This is all what make Sector 17 such a fun place to hang out in.  Large expensive showrooms sit cheek-by-jowl with tiny shops selling budget stuff and pavement sellers who look bored when you pause beside their display.  They know you are just looking.

I took these pictures from my ancient beaten down mobile phone.  Predictably it croaked after these many pictures were taken.  Hope to be able to bring you an update on Sector 17 soon.

Jammu 1982

In 1982 I was living in Patiala with my father in the Punjabi University campus. He was the head of the Political Science department there. At one time his counterparts in Jammu University wanted to associate with him for something. Whatever it was, it resulted in a couple of junkets for my kid brother and I to Jammu.

On the first one, we took a bus to Jammu, it was a long six hour nerve racking ride. By the time we disembarked in Jammu it was dark. We took an auto to the University and checked into the guest house. All we wanted to do then was to be shown where the beds were and crash out. It was January and very cold.

In the morning I stepped out onto the little balcony attached to our room. It did not have a very good view, but it was nice to sit in the sun and sip some tea. After a while I went for a long walk to take a look at the city. The University had just shifted its campus to a new spot, so it had the look of a work-in-progress with the gardens and paths still under construction.

I walked out of the campus, went up the road until I reached the main road, and walked over the Tawi bridge. The level of the river was very low, non-existent one might say. The river bed was dry and filled with pebbles. A thin stream ran through the middle of the river bed, the only sign of the mighty Tawi.

At the end of the bridge I was rewarded by the sight of a magazine and newspaper vendor. I hopped over and bought a couple of newspapers and magazines. I walked on a bit and as it is in small towns, found myself covering almost all of the main part of the town in one walk. Oh I love such places!

It was extremely scenic with beautiful hills dotting the landscape. It was a town quite like the city I was to live in later, Chandigarh. Just as Chandigarh sits pretty on the foothills of the Shivaliks, Jammu sits prettily in the foothills of Pir Panjal. But that is where the similarity ends. Chandigarh is a modern, planned city, and Jammu is an ancient town.

Jammu is dotted all over with temples big and small. This, and the fact that is the gateway to one of the major shrines of India, Vaishno Devi, provides a lot of tourist footfalls to the place. However, apart from the plethora of temples, Jammu is a quaint little town, with suburbs with names like Talab Tillo, Nardani, Trikuta Nagar.

The city itself is a place one feels nice hanging about in. My first sojourn to Jammu was in the cold weather. But we returned a few months later, when it was warmer. This time a friend of mine had also come along. We went to every temple we could spot, and Jammu is dotted with temples. We went to Raghunath temple that is in the middle of the city.

It was a lovely temple dedicated to several deities. We had to walk through a typical small town market to reach it. There were grocery shops where the shopkeeper sits at the entrance of his shop. The buyers hover near the entrance and ask for things they want. There is no walking inside and looking at things on your own. Believe me, you save a lot of money this way, because you are not tempted to pick up things you don't want.

Then there were the Novelty stores that are another feature of small towns. Cosmetics, artificial jewelery, perfumes, bags and wallets, bangles, ribbons are lined in attractive mirror backed glass cases. Such shops always remind me of Prakash Novelty Store in Jamnagar whose owner was a handsome young man with dimples. He looked faintly like Joy Mukherjee. My friends and I could like him, but not love him because he was a lowly shopkeeper and we were educated princesses.

In those days mini buses were the preferred mode of transport, it seemed to us. These half-buses were often filled to capacity, though not packed as closely as the mini buses of Delhi tended to be. My friend and I took rides on these buses just for the fun of it. I liked the sound of the name Talab Tillo, and we went there just to see what it looked like. It was a typical suburb full of houses. We hung around for bit and returned back to our comfort zone, the Tawi bridge.

My friend was a devout sort and it was her wish to go to Mata Vaishno Devi. We asked around and tried to get help in getting there. It was the time of Navratri where the rush for Devi Darshan is at its peak. Every one we talked to advised us against going there. This was much before the temple and its approach was renovated by Jagmohan, later to be the Governor of J&K, and the locals were very apprehensive about letting two young girls and little boy loose on their own during peak time on a rough road to the shrine.

I remember going down to the Tawi river, a thin stream, and stepping carefully among large stones to get there. It did not occur to us to go to Bagh-e-Bahu a beautiful garden a little way off. We were content to see the beautiful lights of the garden from a distance.

We even spotted Kashmiris there. We had read about fair faced apple cheeked Kashmiris and it was wonderous to look upon them. Their cheeks are red because of the cold weather they live in, but it does look striking. The local shopkeepers, alas, seemed to look upon them as simpletons.

All these years later, I still think of Jammu as a town I could live in, and have always wanted to re-visit. I hope I do get to see it again. Maybe even compare how much it has changed now, after all these years.

Holi

After I left Gujarat and settled in Punjab, one of the first things to strike me, when Holi rolled around, was the lack of any kind of prolonged celebration.  Holi was celebrated for just about half a day, with people dousing each other with colors and bathing by noon.  By afternoon, everyone had lunched and napped.  That was the end of the Holi, with only some wet colored splashes on the roads to remind you of what had just happened, all that faded within a few days with passing cars and layers of dust.  There was no sign of the other Holi, the one that spawned this celebration that springs from the legend of Hrinyakashyap, Holika and Bhakt Prahlad.

According to the legend, Hrinyakashyap did great penance to Lord Vishnu and was granted a boon wherein no one could kill him, neither a man nor an animal; he could not be killed during the day, or the night.  This boon made him arrogant, and he asked everyone to pray to him instead of Lord Vishnu.  His own son, Prahlad, refused to pray to him.  Because of this, Hrinyakashyap tried to get him killed, but each time Vishnu saved him.  Hrinyakashpap had a sister Holika, who was granted a boon to protect her from fire.  She offered to help her brother out by sitting on a burning bonfire with her nephew in her lap.  However, with Vishnu’s intervention, the fire burned Holika and spared Prahlad. That is when Vishnu took on the avatar of Narsimha, half man and half animal, and sprang out of a pillar to kill Hrinyakashyap at twilight, when it was neither day nor night.  The grateful people took to celebrating Holi by burning a great bonfire of wood on the full moon day of Phagun.

Our little community, consisting of a cluster of houses around a large open courtyard, and some families living in an adjoining building also organized a bonfire each year. It often fell to us children to arrange for the wood and dung cakes for the bonfire.  There was a big group of us, 3 girls and 4-5 boys.  We had to make dung cakes, pick up wood, go around gathering wheat for the Prasad.  We had to plan for this weeks in advance.  The boys looked around old construction sites for bits of abandoned wood, picked up old ladders and bits of wood that were rotting in people's backyards and broke them into pieces.  They looked for dried branches that had fallen off trees.  Some wood was also purchased by the older men arranging the bonfire.  The girls got around to gathering cow-dung.  That was not hard, because there were lots of stray cows in Jamnagar, all of them obligingly providing us with fresh dung.  We patted out the cow-dung mixed with hay in various shapes, round ones, leaf shaped one, triangles.  There were large cakes and smaller ones.  We even made dung cakes with holes in the middle, rather like a doughnut, for a dung necklace to be hung around Holika’s neck.  These were laid out on the roof to dry and carefully gathered up again once they were thoroughly dry.  We needed a huge mound of these, and I remember spending many afternoons doing this on the roof of my friends house

On the D-day, a shallow hole was dug in the compound where the bonfire was to be set up. It was about 3 feet wide and two feet deep. On one side of this hole a small niche was dug out.  This is where a clay pot containing water, wheat and sugar was to be stowed.  This was symbolic of Prahlad, the one that survived.  The wheat and sugar for the pot was to be contributed by the all the houses lining the compound of our site, just a handful per house.  The boiled wheat would be dug out next day and distributed again as Prasad.  I remember a very high bonfire being built, with wood and dung-cakes.  It was surely four of five feet high. A makeshift image of Holika was created with wood, with rope and dung necklaces around her neck.  The bonfire was lit at night and the flames reached high as we fell back and danced and watched.

On the night of the Holi, we were to stay awake all night and keep an eye on the fire.  The weather is quite nippy during Holi in Punjab, but in Jamnagar it is warm.  We passed the night talking and playing antakshri till dawn.  This is when the Prasad was dug out, and we took our share of it and went home.

This was the day of the Holi as most people know it, to be celebrated with colors.  We returned after breakfast with our packets of gulal, pichkari and color bombs.  It was a point of honor to allow yourself to be colored till you were black, and not give in to an urge to cry.   The children could be distinguished only by their gleaming teeth. We were not allowed to wander far where ‘rough’ Holi was being played, with ashes, cow dung and dunking people into tanks full of colored water.  We were happy to run around with our pichkari filled with colored water, hands packed with gulal, spraying groups of other reveling children, and being sprayed by them in turn.  I returned at noon, and allowed my cousin to bathe me.  It was painful to be scrubbed till I was raw, with my cousin muttering a string of curses to the other girls for having colored her little sister so ruthlessly.

Festivals all over the world celebrate something good, the birth of a messiah, victory of good over evil, a change in seasons that is the harbinger of prosperity.  It is good to participate in them, but also important to know WHAT we are celebrating, so as to appreciate it more.