Keya Sarkar: A village for free

PEOPLE LIKE THEM

When I tell people I meet that I live in Santiniketan, more often than not they are visibly envious (there are, of course, those who think Santiniketan is an area in Delhi or a building in Kolkata). People taking the stress of cities, breathing in all the toxins, listening to all the honkings, are often wistful for a life amongst nature.

They are so right. Whenever back from a trip to a city, my SMS to friends in Santiniketan reads, "Back in paradise". As I cross the small town of Bolpur and enter Santiniketan, I close my eyes and come to know where I am by the smells. Each garden is distinct in its trees and the season determines what sweetness of perfume will greet you at every bend.

While much of Santiniketan is characterised by old-style architecture, fashionable at the time when Tagore built the town, there seems to be a growing fondness (especially among rich Kolkata doctors who have acquired houses here) to remodel them into Swiss chalet type cottages. There are times when I've, in a childlike wish, wanted to climb the sloping terraces and stick some cotton wool to complete the aspirational image! The same chalet lovers have cut down old fruit trees in houses that they have acquired to put in manicured lawns. The new owners come not more than once a quarter to visit, and the lawns are backdrops for parties.

As elsewhere, the builders lobby has struck Santiniketan. Somnath Chatterjee, whose constituency this is, must be particularly proud of having drawn so many investments into this erstwhile sleepy town. One of his model projects, a housing complex built by Peerless""a ghetto of over 200 cottages, all painted an ugly white with not a speck of green (except a few mandatory ornamental palm trees) to break the monotony""has succeeded in changing the Santiniketan skyline. I often wonder how owners manage to recognise their respective dwellings! But what makes this housing complex get into my list of the most bizarre is the installation of a life size bullock cart made of cement within the complex compound!

Most people who build a holiday home in Santiniketan feel the need to paint/sculpt a figure of a baul either on the outside wall or inside sitting rooms, probably to reassure themselves that they are indeed in rural Bengal! But the bullock cart is an absolutely brand new thought in installation sculpture. It looks lost, completely forlorn in the midst of heavily "Snowcemed" apartments. But hey, who I am to complain? The owners of the apartments are probably drooling over how the cement looks as "realistic" as bamboo.

The builders are now vying with each other in creating ugliness. In a town where between the university, the Bolpur municipality and the Santiniketan Sriniketan Development Authority, no waste disposal system has been designed, buildings are being planned in close proximity probably to be fenced and beautified by plastic bags which fly around in gay abandon.

The insides of the compartments of trains to Santiniketan are increasingly covered with posters of building projects coming up in and around Santiniketan. Competition being what it is, the advertisements are increasingly ambitious in what they promise. But the one that really caught my attention was put up by the Bengal Greenfield Housing Development Company Ltd. It said, "Buy a cottage and get a village free." To my mind this surpassed the crassness of the cement bullock cart. I had visions of surrounding tribal villages being turned into homeowners' parks (anything is possible). But I was getting carried away. As I read the fine print on the poster I realised what they meant. In addition to the other amenities, Bengal Greenfield Housing would also create a craft village within the complex!