Destinations :: Margate, Kent

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At Margate

Having come so close to England we had to have a shot at it even if only for a few days. A friend of more than fifty years, Dr. Pratap Desai, had retired from the National Health Service of the UK and was residing at Margate, in Kent, virtually across the North Sea. He had been asking me to visit him. He had even rung me up at Brussels.

Pratap was with me at the College but in the science stream and we used to meet at the nets at the College. He would generally be accompanied by Sharad Dravid, another close friend. All of us would regularly meet at the nets, particularly in winters, the season for cricket at that time. We too later had summer cricket in the mornings where all of us cricketing friends used to meet and play an innings for each team composed on an ad hoc basis. Pratap and I would regularly meet till he left the college for his medical degree. He was in retirement at Margate, a harbor town in Kent.

Margate Marina

We had to catch a ferry from Oostend in North West Flanders^th Century wars. During the Second World War it came under German occupation. It is called Oostend because it is situated at the east end (oost-einde) of an island. It has a promenade right on the sea beyond which we had once seen a catamaran anchored. The ferry to Ramsgate was, in fact, this catamaran. Margate was around 10 Kms from Ramsgate.
. It is a very old historical port town that played important roles in the 20

Before boarding the catamaran I got workd up because the Belgian immigration officials took away my passport and did not return ti soon enough. When I approached them I found them tinkering with it and trying to pull off the firmly pasted UK visa. When I questioned them a bit sternly they said they got suspicious as my wife and I had only one way tickets for the catamaran. When I asked them whether one had to return only via Oostend for want of any other route they realized their mistake. But the fault was not entirely theirs. The illegal Indian traffic has made them suspicious of every Indian and his motives.

The catamaran was a splendid craft with a capacity of around 300 passengers. It had a shop, a bar and a cafeteria. With its impressive dimensions the cruise on it was pretty smooth over the North Sea despite a strong breeze. Ramsgate was around 200 Kilometres away. It made it, if I remember, in more than five hours. It took around 45 minutes to one hour to get through the Immigration. It was almost 10 PM when we got out. It was summer and evening had just set in.

Canterbury Cathedral

We were the last people to come out of the immigration. As I came out I saw a lone person, an Indian, with a hat slightly askew on his head, with impressive handle bar mustachios sitting on a bench. Dr. Pratap Desai had grown a very heavy fungus on his upper lip since I met him last – and that was quite some time ago. After the preliminaries he drove us down to Margate about 10 miles away.

He had a three bedrooms affair in what was known as Alkham Close. I had come across this word “close” perhaps in books of Charles Dickens. But here at Desai’s place I saw a “Close” from up close for the first time. It was nothing except that as you entered a lane with residential buildings on two sides there is no outlet apart from the one you entered through only because the other end was built over shutting off the lane. That’s what a close is – a street closed at one end.

Margate, once again is a historical town like its sister city Ramsgate. It has a long history of being a harbor with maritime traditions. It was an important port for the Dunkirk operations during the 2^nd World War. It also has some Roman remains. It has been popular resort like Brighton and has been a traditional holiday destination for Londoners as it is only around 60 or 70 miles away from London. With Canterbury being close by it has substantial tourist traffic in summers.

There was much to talk about after those more than fifty years that had elapsed since we parted. Desai had been an early migrant to England soon after he did his MBBS from Gwalior and landed a job with the National Health Service, a more comprehensive healthcare scheme than our Central Government Health Scheme. He married  into a family from Pune and had a couple of sons working in London and a daughter who was in Germany having married a German. Desai told me he had met Sharad Dravid when the latter came over to England with his son Rahul who used to play cricket for India. He had the whole team in this very house for an evening of drinks and dinner.

Desai took us out one evening to Canterbury which is just ^th Century. The Cathedral is linked to the history of England as from here the Archbishop of Canterbury St. Augustine established Christianity in England. It is also famous for the murder of Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury in the 12^th Century. He was soon canonized by the Pope.

Canterbury

about 15 miles away. Canterbury was made well known by Geoffrey Chauser by his famous Canterbury Tales written in the 15

The Canterbury Cathedral is the most famous Christian structures in England and is now a World Heritage Site. History of the cathedral goes back to the 6^th Century AD. The architectural style is said to be predominantly Romanesque and partly Baroque. Romanesque style dominated the Madieval European architecture. The Cathedral, despite its age,  has all the typical features of a Christian place of worship like the knave, choir, vaults, etc. It was a sombre place to be around.

Desai's handlebar Mustachio

On another day, this time it was a day out, Desai drove us down to Wembley in North West London. We must have travelled over the same road as the Pilgrims and went across Greenwich, East London where Bangladeshis have a big concentration, past the Oval Cricket Ground on to the banks of the Thames and then over the London Bridge to the Westminster area moving on to the Hyde Park and the Wellington Monument. Lust a few miles away was Wembley, known for its football stadium. Wembley has a substantial Indian population and has great shopping for them in, I think, Ealing Road for ethnic affairs. There are numerous Indian food joints in one of which we had refreshments.

The other thing that is touristy here is the Swaminarain Temple. Desai took us there. It is a mammoth place with almost all the Hindu deities in the sanctum. The walls a re intricately carved. It is said that marble for this temple was

At the Swaminarain Temple

sent from Italy to India to be carved and then brought back to England. We were told that even Prince of Wales had attended the opening ceremony of the temple. This was perhaps the first temple built by the Swaminarain sect, later they built massive temples in Ahmedabad and New Delhi.

On another evening we went to the Marina of Margate which is probably smaller than that of Ramsgate. It is a great place for boating enthusiasts as also thos who try their lake on gambling machines. We too worked the handles but had no luck; we, instead, lost some money.

Bhopal Notes ::71 :: Minister shown Idgah Hills roads

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Reports the other day in the newspapers said that the local  MLA Arif Aqeel and the Minister for Urban Development were taken on a round of the Idgah Hills area to show them the awful condition of its roads. They had come to the old Bhopal Nawab-era gate, re-designated as Shahid Gate, to express their sympathies for the CRPF jawans who lost their lives in Pulwama, Kashmir.

 Since the Shahid Gate is located at the foot of the Idgah Hills enthusiastic local people literally highjacked the minister and the MLA, taking them round to show them the terrible condition of the road. As a consequence, the matter made for the first time into the pages of the local edition of the Times of India on two successive days. Hopefully, the incompetence of the Mayor and the local councilor was also brought home to the minister. This has perhaps been the first time when people of an area have been somewhat aggressive in trying to capture the attention of politicians in an attempt to have their problems resolved.

I have been writing consistently about our Idgah roads, that is, the deplorable condition they were in. It has been claimed that residents of Idgah Hills are some of the highest tax payers of the city. Besides, Idgah Hills was at one time the abode of movers and shakers of the city as well as of the biggies of the state government. One can see the evidences of that in the government structures housing public offices that are still present in the area. There are even some  government bungalows that are still in use. However, with the new city coming up across the Upper Lake the importance of this area was lost and it was left to decay and virtually rot.

 Idgah Hills which hosts the state’s only TB Hospital, a massive cancer hospital and a smattering of missionary schools like St. Joseph and All Saint’s schools or even the
Cambridge School have not been able to weigh in with the government for the proper upkeep of its public assets. The progressive lack of attention by the authorities has brought the situation close to disaster. Resources get all the time diverted towards the newer part of the town which is now taking the shape of an urban sprawl.

I would like to recapitulate that soon after his election the current mayor had come and seen the Ridge Road for himself and promised a modern cement-concrete road. Obviously, even at that time condition of the road was appalling and it was not lost on the mayor. But almost five years have gone by the condition of the Ridge Road remains as it was. At least twice we heard that the road was going to be built and the earth breaking ceremony was also held but nothing happened. One can see some of the material lying on a vacant plot by the side of the road.

Call it municipal incompetence or whatever you will, the fact remains that citizens are tortured every day when they have to step out on to the. Road. I for one, an octogenarian had to give up my constitutionals for fear of broken limbs. But the municipal councilor was least bothered. For one whole year he never showed his face. What kind of a democracy it is when we do not see the face of the municipal councilor for extended lengths of time, forget about the local legislator and the MP. They seem to be there only for their own sake , not for those of the people.

Now that the minister and the local legislator themselves have got a taste of the roads in these parts it is hoped something good will come off pretty soon.

Our Life, Our Times :: 31 :: the nightlong dogfights

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A dogfight every fifteen minutes. That seems to be the standard in our parts. The fights generally commence at night-fall and continue through the night. Maybe, the periodicity changes and the frequency comes down, but the fights continue till the dogs get tired and fall off to sleep.

Our Ridge Road on the Idgah Hills overlooks the government offices of the district. These have been there since the Nawabi era. Each of these offices has a chowkidar and scores of lower level staff residing on the premises. These people have a battery of dogs, presumably to help them carry out their duties of watch and ward. Dogs, after all, are known as the best friends (of humans) and affection is lavished on them to keep them emotionally attached to those who care for them.

But when a fight commences all hell breaks loose and it is a kind of a no-holds-barred fight. Fierce barking by multiple dogs rents the air for seemingly interminable minutes but then the whole thing kind of collapses. Everything becomes normal and quietude prevails as if nothing had ever happened. This lasts for around a quarter hour at the mosr and at the end of which the barking and snarling re-commences against an intruder – canine or even a human – only to subside again till the cycle of barking and vicious snarling commences again. This goes on till well past midnight when, tired of the noise, we aged mortals fall asleep. But many a time snatches of canine fury can be heard even late in the night or at early hours of the mornings.

Call them stray dogs if you will, but to my mind they are not stray. They are always in a group – occupying our universe, the urban human universe. Photographs have appeared of these groups having a field day in the so-called New Market which now, in fact, is not so new being half a century old. I have myself seen a huge  assemblage of them near our Taj Mahal in Shahjehanabad while going late in the evening to the station to catch a train. Even the taxiwala, a local Muslim who used to ply a lone taxi then, confessed that he had never seen such a “nazaara” before. That was around ten years ago; since then their numbers have grown manifold.

Their numbers had to move northwards as the effort to control dog population failed. The phenomenon has a close resemblance with the country’s efforts to control the human population. After the infamous Emergency of the 1970s, during which Late Sanjay Gandhi ham-handedly tried to impose birth control, family planning became a dirty word. After around two dark years the new minister in-charge wanted to have nothing to do with family planning and even changed the name of the ministry, replacing the word “planning” with “welfare”. The matter of controlling population was put on the back burner and in the next 40 years the country’s population doubled without anybody getting wise about it; hitting a billion much before it was anticipated.

So like humans dogs continue to breed, to use a Churchillian phrase, “like rabbits” or in our context, shall we say, like dogs – littering like mad every year. Indian streets are full of them and at night they congregate on the spacious squares now free of rotaries to raise merry hell. Time was when the municipal corporations used to make sincere efforts to control their population. Their would be dog catchers roaming the streets to catch the stray ones, yes, really the stray ones and probably put them in a dog house or liquidate them.

Those days are gone. Now it is more humane way of controlling their growth – by neutering them. An admirable way to achieve the objective only if it were effective! When the wherewithal to carry out the process is not in accordance with the needs, the effort is bound to fail. Obviously, the municipal staff all the time find themselves as losers as against the burgeoning dog population. The inadequacy of financial, technical, and human resources forces them to chase the unachievable target - that of besting the growth in dog numbers.

 That is how we get to a situation of proliferating dogs that now have become kind of maneaters. A few months back a report from far away Thiruvanantpuram in Kerala said stray dogs made a meal of an elderly woman. In Bhopal one has seen reports of infants being attacked by stray and violent dogs. Obviously, when there are too many of them there isn’t enough food to go round for all of them. So, they attack the old and infirm or hapless infants. Clever, aren’t they?

The crux of the problem is that even if our humane methods fail leaving the urbanites exposed to the increasing dangers originating from the canines nothing drastic can be done to liquidate them. That is the government’s policy. Blue bulls and wild boars can be culled but no, not urban stray dogs. The blue bulls and wild boars destroy crops and cause losses to the farmers who have that precious thing called votes. Hence blue bulls and wild boars have become dispensible much against the laws relating to protection of wild life. Mercifully, the license to kill has not been extended to pachyderms who too are destroyers of crops.

 Urbanites, unlike the farmers, are a diffused community and hence can be allowed to remain exposed to the canine threat or made to bear the night long barks. Theirs generally are middleclass votes which can be foregone as they do not matter much in electoral equations.

So, while the dogs bark and snarl you have to grin and bear it as no prospects are in sight of mitigation of the problem. A day might soon come when the cities are taken over by dogs and, fearful of them. humans are forced to move into the wild

*Photor from internet.

Bhopal Notes :: 70 :: Plight of Bhopal Lake

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Lamenting the plight of the Upper Lake of Bhopal on the World Wetland Day on 1^st February last, a millennium-old inheritance of the town, Prof. Madhu Verma made a mention of her study on its economic value carried out more than 18 years ago. Her study revealed that the lake makes a contribution of around Rs. 61 crores annually to the state government’s coffers and yet it is not taken care of as it should be despite it’s being a valuable natural resource. Having specialized in Environmental Economics, Prof. Madhu Verma is a distinguished professor in the Indian Institute of Forest Management (IIFM), an only institute of its kind in the country. If I recall, her study was conducted under the aegis of the World Bank.  

After her more than two years long study she had submitted her report to the Government of Madhya Pradesh where, as happens to many such reports, no action was taken on it and the report continued to gather dust and, as is apparent now, has been killed and buried. This has happened when the government had invested in the study by way of deputing Ms. Verma for it and the World Bank had made available its financial resources for condct of the study. The government has full-fledged departments of environment and water resources (the lake is a vital source of drinking water for the local population) which could have initiated action on it to keep the lake waters healthy as a very large section of the city’s population use them for the purpose of quenching their thirst. Whether Ms. Verma’s report was studied at all is not known. Perhaps it was never examined by anybody in the government as otherwise some response would have been sent to its author.

During he study Prof. Verma had found numerous drains carrying sewage and waste water terminating in the lake contaminating its waters.  She had recommended early action to stop their flow into the Lake. A period of more than 18 years has elapsed and yet the situation by and large remains the same, Even the Bhoj Wetland Project financed by the Japanese Bank of International Cooperation had recommended the same. The Project ran for around 10 years (up to 2005) instead of the mandated 5 years yet the project authority could not spend the entire sum of Rs. 267 crores. Most of the amount was spent in infructuous expenditure like on auditorium, an interpretation centre and so on.  Very little of the amount at the disposal of the government was spent on keeping the Lake free of pollutants. By its own admission, the Municipal Corporation, the custodian of the Lake, eight or nine drains carrying sewage and waste water still flow into the Lake. During the intervening 18 years therefore there has hardly been any improvement in the quality of waters of the Lake. In fact very little was done to achieve it.

The government only seems to be keen on collecting reports on the Lake and does nothing to either reject or implement the recommendations. A similar, perhaps more elaborate study was carried out on various aspects of the Lake with a view to improve the condition of its waters, improve the inflow from its catchments, improve its maintenance so as to prolong its life for effective utilization. The study was conducted by none other than the Centre for Environmental Planning anf Technology, a reputed institution of Ahmedabad. Its report was submitted in 2013 but it has not seen the light of day so far. Whatever was done was done against its recommendations. The report was kept under wraps as the government did not find irs recommendations in accordance to its wishes, in fact the wishes of the construction lobby that wanted to make use of the lands in the catchment area of the Lake.

The Lake has thus been a subject of neglect and apathy by the government and its agencies like the Municipal Corporation. They have not been able to erect functional sewage treatment plants in the course of  a couple of decades indicating the utter neglect of the water body and unconcern for people who are made to drink its waters.

It is not that  that the Corporation has no money. When it comes to exploiting the Lake it can spend crores like it did for the amphithatre and musical fountains. It is reported to have spent Rs. 11 crores  for the musical fountains and the amphitheatre which has remained a non-starter. It could not become functional as before the Corporation was reafy to do so the waters reportedly receded making the fountains unworkable. The investment of Rs. 11 crores was nothing except a dead one and nobody is likely to be held accountable for this ill-advised investment. Surely some sewage treatment plants could have been constructed with this kind of money. Cheap eco-STPs which have the “cradle-to-cradle” technology are now available that can be used in promoting zero waste constructions. Cleaning up the waste water at the source is perhaps makes more sense than trying to purify the waters of the water body which the public agencies can hardly ever effectively ensure.

The municipality’s penchant for construction on the lake shores for the professed benefit of the people is remarkable. Its “Selfie Site” on the VIP Road is another such effort which is sparsely used by the people. While promotion of sites for collection of large number of people on the banks of the Lake are against all envitonmental norms the Corporation seems to care a fig for such norms. It thus keeps on wasting precious financial resources on such projects instead of trying to keep the waters of the Lake clean and pollution-free – for the benefit of the people. Worse, it is progressively giving more and more approvals for food joints near the Boat Club/

It seems unless the culture of taking for granted the available natural assets changes both, in the Municipal Corporation and government departments concerned nothing fruitful can be expected. That the available natural assets that serve the needs of the people require care and maintenance as a concept dawns on the authorities looking after them in the town these will, at best, limp on for some time before heading towards extinction in not too distant future. Already several researchers have predicted that the millennium-old Lake will remain functional for around 80 more years unless proper care is taken in its maintenance and upkeep.