Another Dying City

THERE is nothing pleasant about the weather this time of the year in what used to be a pleasant city of nawabs. It is hot and humid; the filthy streets are crammed with honking cars, trucks, scooters and monstrous auto-rickshaws; and, every available square inch of free space is occupied by garish billboards advertising a host of goods and services. "Be man not woman to your wife." This billboard, put up by the owner of a sex clinic bang across the railway station, is ostensibly aimed at English-speaking residents of the city. Apart from casting aspersions on the manliness of Lakhnawis, it raises serious doubts about the quality of English taught at the English-medium schools which have begun to proliferate like mushrooms in muck and which, I am told, cost an arm and a leg in tuition fees alone.

Every time I visit Lucknow—or, for that matter, Calcutta—I am increasingly convinced that there is a destructive streak in us which forces us to destroy our cultural heritage. The 'new' Lucknow that is fast replacing the 'old' Lucknow is a ghastly mismatch of everything that is unaesthetic. Old colonial bungalows in what used to be tree-shaded Dali Bag now lie derelict behind Uttar Pradesh government-constructed shoddy apartments with leaky plumbing. Ghastly 'commercial centres' have sprung up all over the place. Promoters tantalise you with apartment buildings with corny names like 'Sahib' where you can live like a 'nawab'. The regal grandeur of Lucknow is now a forgotten dream, a part of our cultural heritage which has been wilfully destroyed.

With nobody bothering about minor details like traffic rules, the streets are a nightmare. Stuck in a sea of smoke-belching vehicles and clanging rickshaw bells, I swore not to travel by car the next time I visited the city. Walking is any day faster, though there is always the danger of being knocked down by a careening cyclist. Everybody is in a hurry in this city of little or no action. Whatever happened to the laid-back lifestyle of Lucknow?