The snows of Shimla
The snows of Shimla, which sent a chill through the gumboots of us schoolchildren walking through 5 kilometres of it in November and December in the 1980s, have vanished. Sultry May seems to be paying January an ill-timed visit — heralding disaster, surely. Let alone snow, there’s hardly any rain, marking this January as possibly the driest since the British started keeping records 123 years ago. Skating sessions at the Lakkar Bazar ice-skating rink are dwindling, the ski slopes of Kufri are brown, not white, more fit for grazing than skiing.
In Kashmir, the Khelo India Winter Games, to begin on February 2 in Gulmarg, are imperilled by the lack of snow — Gulmarg went through most of January in a dry state, and the slopes that would be under 3 metres of snow this time in the past years were bone-dry. There were fears that the Winter Games would have to be cancelled, like they were cancelled last year in Auli, Uttarakhand.
In Kashmir, as in Himachal Pradesh, water bodies are drying, the flow in the rivers is paltry and the level at reservoirs of hydel power dams low. Electricity generation has been affected, as has been the supply of water to homes. It’s for this reason, and not for the Winter Games, that special prayer meetings were held in Gulmarg and other parts of the Valley over the past few weeks — and then there was snow two days ago! But it’s scanty, more the sort that the departing winter splattered Shimla with, with the leftover moisture, in March. More snow has been forecast in Gulmarg in the coming days, but the sword over the Winter Games hangs by a thin strand.
Last November, Gulmarg’s Arif Khan became the first Indian to win an international ski competition — in Dubai, of all places! For this feat, he was hailed as one of the 75 success stories of 75 years of India-Swiss relations, for he’s undergone training in Switzerland. The emergence of Arif Khan had caused a flutter, raising the hope that more of his ilk would become good enough to participate in the Winter Olympics, like him. But now, with the warm winds of the plains — and deforestation, construction, ‘development’ — thawing snow and drying water, we stare at a future in which skiing in Gulmarg or Kufri would be possible only in an indoor ski facility, as in Dubai. Sport is not serious enough a human activity to be put in the same bracket as crop failure and water scarcity and hydel power deficiency; however, sport is an anti-depressant like no other, and often the only escape from poverty, and from dismal situations, as in Kashmir in the north and Manipur in the east.
Along with the melting snow of Shimla, certitudes of childhood have melted along the way over the decades; India’s solidarity with the Palestinians, for instance, and the coolness with the Israelis before embassies were established in 1992; the policy of non-alignment yet embrace of the communist world, most famously signified by the hug then PM Indira Gandhi shared with Fidel Castro in New Delhi; the aversion for the American colas, and then the craze for them when they were reintroduced; we had only Doordarshan, and it seemed to be part of the incumbent PM’s publicity wing, but it also taught lessons in solidarity with animation films such as ‘Ek Chidiya’ or the iconic ‘Desh Raag’. Were people nicer, or were their actual, often disgusting opinions confined to a limited audience, and not broadcast to the world through social media? One aspect that must not be ignored in analysing the degeneration in public discourse is the size of India’s population — it was 68.4 crore in 1981, 140.7 crore in 2021. Same resources, double the number of people competing for them, and beings brushing against each other in increasing smaller spaces — this can only cause greater tensions.
Some certainties from sport have gone, too — in the 1980s, we were no-hopers in the Olympics, the interest being limited to hockey. At the Paris Olympics this year, we’d expect medals from several sports, as diverse as women’s boxing to men’s track and field — that’s one change for the better. Hockey, at which we got progressively worse until we failed to even qualify for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, is doing good again. Shooting got us our first individual gold medallist in the Olympics, raising hopes before dashing them over the next three Olympics.
As for the snows of Shimla, they’re not likely to ever return — the ones of 1982 or 1991, which were scary yet thrilling, when walking in 4-foot-deep snow was tough but also a great deal of fun, as only those who walked those walks know.
