WALKINg around in Ram Nagar, Ram Nagar Hill Top area on a Sunday afternoon brought up forgotten memory files in the mental space. That is the area where I spent my wonderful, fun-filled, happy childhood through school and then youth through college. That was a different scene -- sixty years ago -- so firmly wedged in the mind that I refuse to accept the change that has come over the area in the past few decades. Mind gets weighed down with certain sadness at the loss of the serenity that enveloped the area all the time.

 

Today, most unfortunately, the area offers a chaotic experience that mind fails to understand and accept. The Ram Nagar Hill lorded over the area, marked by sheer cliffs on all its fringes. On the northern fringe, the brown-rock cliff eased into a little plain that formed the southern bank of the wonderfully placid Bhide Tank. What a serene pleasure it used to be loitering in the area especially in afternoons -- with no elder to accost you. All of us friends swam to our hearts’ content in the Bhide Tank whose spread was at least thrice bigger than its present pond-like condition. We also climbed those tall trees that formed a beautiful, shady ring around the lake, except in the south-western corner from where the metal quarry starting spreading towards the Ambazari in the distance.

 

Despite the continuous noise the metal crusher made, the area donned certain peacefulness whose quality is just unfathomable to comprehension based on today’s experience. That was also the time when institutions such as (Shri Janardan Swami) Yogabhyasi Mandal, Mahila Samaj Ramnagar, Shri Ram Mandir (Adhyatma Mandir), Bhagwat Pada Sabha, South India Association, Karnataka Sangh CKP Sabha were coming up. Subsequently, Sarveswara Devalayam and Siddharudha Swami Temple also came up. On the hill-top, there was nothing when we first moved our residence in Sitabuldi to a new house on the Hill Road. Then a friend’s civil contractor father built the massive concrete reservoir which sprang into view as one climbed the dusty eastern slope up to the hill. There were no houses, no construction. The whole area was open for us to play, to indulge in adventure, to climb up and down those truly risky, dangerous cliffs. A few of our friends even fell down and broke their limbs in those adventurous overtures.

 

All that is gone now. Some anti-social goons breached the northern embankment of the Bhide Tank and emptied it (so that the land would be used for their realty business. The Nagpur Improvement Trust (NIT), too, auctioned out the hill-top plots, giving rise to the massive, current spread of housing colonies that ultimately ate up the hill-top’s serenity and solitude. Now the area is terribly chaotically populated. The growing urban sprawl only destroyed all the serene comfort of the area -- which, according to most, is inevitable as a city develops and evolves. There is no use contesting that argument. Yet, nobody also cannot stop me from indulging in nostalgia of those serene young days that I spent there nursing my adoration and adulation for undulated landscapes. In the depth of my mind, I feel terribly sunken in despair. But then, that is my private and personal privilege -- of having seen and sensed and lived in that kind of Nagpur. That is history. That will always be history. For, Nagpur has made every effort to destroy the legacy of its own persona over time.