The Passage of Time

Bhavnagar is among those few towns of Saurashtra where you can still wake up to the sound of peacocks and prabhatias (morning bhajans). After being weaned on dust, noise and squalor of cities like Delhi and Ahmedabad, I found Bhavnagar quite quaint when I moved here in the early 90’s. Here life moved on at its most leisurely pace. People still travelled in tonga’s instead of zipping around in Marutis. The town and its people still retained the old world charm – ageing bungalows with their tiled roofs and wooden arches, nestling among groves of Neem and Copper pod trees, in whose foliage Painted strokes and Spoonbills bred every winter

One of my favourite haunts in Bhavnagar, was, and still is the old Gandhi Smriti Library. This is no slick British Council library of Ahmedabad or the posh American Centre library of Delhi with their computerized catalogues, whirring air conditioners and the air thick with silence and snobbery. Instead here you find old books with yellow pages and tattered margins giving off that aroma of nostalgia which only old books can give , creating an ambience of the bygone era – when Saurashtra was more proudly called ‘Kathiawar’, the land of Kathi Rajputs, shepherds and bards. On languid summer afternoons you can find yourself almost alone in the library with only the cooing of the pigeons on its wooden rooftop for company. Occasionally you might find an old Gandhian, clad in Khadi, peering into the bookshelves; he might even come and sit down beside you to inquire about your reading interests. As the afternoon slips into evening the old librarian comes ambling down to switch on the lights for you and to ask you whether you were doing fine!!

My friends living in metros often mock me for living in such a ‘not happening’ place, and I tell them that they are not aware of what they were missing. But like the rest of the country, Bhavnagar too is on the path of ‘development’. The old bungalows are being demolished to make way for multistory buildings and malls. The builder’s lobby has its greedy tongue licking away at the open fields and skies of Bhavnagar. With the trees – their homes destroyed the Strokes and the Spoonbills visit us in fewer numbers. Traffic has increased two-fold and I wonder how long will it take for Bhavnagar to turn into the monstrosity that our metros have come to represent...

The above write up has appeared in the 'Indian Express'