HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY?

                                  

Every time I visit Dehra Dun , my native place;  also  known as Doon Valley , the title of this old, black and white movie echoes in my  mind.

Those were the Black and White times , ancient times; so ancient that even in my memories I don’t see any colour. Doordarshan, the only and national TV channel had started showing   English  movies at  late night on Fridays.  The TV that we had was also a black and white 21 inch  Onida TV which had shutter doors, which could be locked ,and was locked . The ad for this TV had a tagline ,Neighbour' s envy owner's pride ,which was true for all the TVs in India then : early eighties , when owning a TV was  a  real privilege.

 The  movie, How Green was my Valley,    was seen by me tucked in a quilt and set in  an  old  rickety armchair. Our favourite chair which Babu , a colloquial word for father in Kumaon, bought after his  marriage, in1968, for fifteen rupees. I must have been in seventh or eighth class and very  thin that I could sit in that armchair with a thick quilt; you  needed  thick quilts in Doon back then, around me with only my head out of it. Movie was about the changes, development and  mining brings to a nondescript town.

Dehradun in late seventies and early eighties was for kids ,like me , a Ruskin Bondian Dehradun . With a ramshackle bicycle roaming around the streets of Dehra I felt like   Rusty , main character from The Room on the Roof , Ruskin Bond's first novel which he wrote at age seventeen and won lot of accolades for that. Dehradun , main part, of that time was restricted to 3-4 km radius of Clocktower with ample open spaces to play and a large number of Lychee and Mango Orchards  , which invited young kids like us to raid these orchards in summer.

Every time I visit Doon I see a lot of new things, unfamiliar things and unfamiliar faces. I see broader roads , open spaces which never existed earlier and I see them getting crowded and I see them getting   inadequate. The valley extends to new places , places which were very far are now very near. I discover new places getting affected with the scourge of development called Traffic Jams and strewn plastic.

Traffic jams , which we had never encountered  as kids in Doon are ,I guess ,now a regular feature , a part and parcel of life with vehicles spewing smoke and killing the valley. Incidentally I encountered my first ever proper traffic jam in Dehra after it became the capital of Uttaranchal. I was returning from leave  in 2001 and there was a major traffic jam near the Tunnel at Mohand, just before the Dat Ki Devi temple .It was then for the first time that I thought about this movie synonym with what my valley was going through.

Every  time I visit Doon I see my hills in the  day and in  the night I get to see the Mussorrie lights . I see lot of familiar places , familiar things and familiar faces .Any small town guy will tell you what familiar faces mean . For us it  meant that if you do something  nefarious the news in all likeliness would reach your home before you do. For us it also meant that if you dare to give lift to a girl , half your  friends will congratulate you next day  on a new girlfriend .

Every time I visit Doon I see the same  beautiful houses and I see the same  beautiful faces ,though now ageing , both of them. The city has grown but has  also become smaller. Besides the new and old things that I see, I find peace in the idyllic settings and  laid back life of the city. It calms me down.I  find  peace  in the cool winds and the bright sunshine of the valley so much so that  I   very often break into a song  .

Every time I visit Doon I wonder , like many of us , how green was my valley and  will I ever stop loving it?

Written in 2010,after visiting Dehradun for my  School, Cambrian Hall, reunion. There will be sequel to this and not because its in vogue