It has just started raining in this part of India and tourists have started trickling into Santiniketan after abstaining from mid-April to mid-June. The Volvo buses, the SUVs and, of course, the new totos (battery-operated autos, which have been Mamata Banerjee's gift to the unemployed youth of Bengal) crowd the narrow streets of this university town and its adjoining moffusil town of Bolpur.
Since the totos need no registration and no licence to drive, every unemployed guy who can beg, borrow or steal Rs 1 lakh can ply one. So even a small town like ours has over 1,500 of them! Normally they are parked on both sides of the road with the owners/drivers twiddling their thumbs. But come tourist season they add to the chaos on the streets, which already have their fill of local buses, tractors and cycle rickshaws.
So most residents don't look forward to the start of the tourist season, especially the weekends. Besides that, what definitely increases after every end of the week is the garbage on the roads. Little do the tourists know that Santiniketan has no municipality and thus no conservancy services when they chuck their Haldiram bhujia packets out of their cruising SUVs or rickshaws or totos.
Since neither the state government nor the Visva-Bharati University entrusted with holding high the Tagore torch is very interested in its task, the tourists do a perfunctory round of the museum and then proceed to either shop or eat, much of it on the roadside.
Used as I am to this scenario in much of east India, I had no idea what was happening to the west of India, not having spent too much time there after leaving Mumbai a decade ago. This year, while looking for a destination to escape the summer heat in Santiniketan, a chance conversation with a friend in Mumbai took us to Lonavala. Since most of our friends in Mumbai are far more prosperous now than when we fraternised with them a decade ago, they tend to holiday more in Europe than in the Western Ghats. All those houses bought years ago for weekend getaways now lie locked. So we inhabited one such house, quaint and comfortable, and enjoyed the pleasant climate - occasionally, travelling to Mumbai or Pune to party with old friends.
All in all a pleasant experience coupled with gorging on the Marathi food that we miss. Sabudana vada, misal, thalipeeth, pohe - we had it all and savoured our Mumbai nostalgia. We had been warned, however, of the weekend madness that happens when many from Mumbai come to Lonavala to eat, drink and party. So the weekends we just stayed home and drank our beer and read our books. But one Thursday evening close to our departure date I wanted to have my last pav bhaji and got out to go to a restaurant located in the centre of Lonavala on the Mumbai-Pune highway. It was a 250-seater but was packed when we arrived.
Big cars, expensive SUVs were parked on the road without a thought to others. Obese men in tight, striped T-shirts and shorts, fat middle-aged women in thigh-hugging leggings and tank tops reeked of an attitude: "I have money, a big car; so I can come out in my bathroom slippers". As we sat there waiting for our pav bhaji to arrive, I thought that I had not seen so much ugliness in a long time.
If this is how money talks I prefer our Kurkure-eating sari- or kurta-clad tourists of the east. Hopefully, given Mamata's head for attracting investment we will take a while to become prosperous.
Disclaimer: These are personal views of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect the opinion of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper
