Healing natural water and White House

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In May this year I decided to visit Kedarnath and Badrinath. On the way, I had to stay for a day in Dehradun because a friend who had promised to give me ride up to Rudraprayag – the place from where one gets vehicles for Kedarnath -- had some work there. Since I had a full day to roam around I decided to visit Sahastradhara, a popular picnic spot some six kilometers away from the city.

Dehradun is capital of the newly-created hill state Uttaranchal. The city is known for its education institutes especially Doon School and Indian Military Academy.

It used to be a cool city a few years ago. But since it became capital, its lungs seems to have got choked. The area around Ghanta Ghar (Clock Tower) is full of pollution created by vehicles specially ‘Vikrams’, as the three wheelers are known there.

I reached the local bus stop to catch bus for Sahastradhara. It was a short journey, final leg involved bus going down hill. It stopped about 500 m before the real place. One has to walk through lines of shops.

It’s named thus because many streams appear coming from different directions from surrounding mountains. At the real bathing place small dams have been put to create pools for tourists to take dips in the water which is supposed to have skin disease-curing qualities.

This was my second visit to this place and I must say it has deteriorated since my last visit a 5-6 years ago. Water seems to have shrunk. The mountains, which were so green and drops could be seen falling from them, looked so dry and bare. We Indians seem to have mastered the art of being utterly careless when it comes to dealing with nature. I saw couple of pools where nobody bathed, as they were full of filth, empty Coke and Pepsi bottles, water bottles and empty potato-chips packets. Some idiots disregarded the common sense that soap should not be used while bathing at such places. The crazy men were busy rubbing soap hard into their groins. Such lunatics should be thrown out of environmentally sensitive places if they do not mend their ways.

After spending couple of hours there I came back to the city and began my hunt to look for an old hotel called White House of which I had read about somewhere in a piece written by Mussoorrie-based writer Ruskin Bond. I finally found the hotel and decided to stay there for a night. The rooms were huge. I chose the room on the first floor with terrace, as I wanted to enjoy the life around sitting there. Bond had fondly talked about the trees inside hotel compound and I could see why. You don’t always get such places inside a city.

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Photos

A View of Sahastradhara
People taking bath

Comments

[sujeet thapa]

sahastradhara is jannat
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