A Few Vrindavan Scenes

I thought I would just post these pictures that I took today. As you already know, the road through Raman Reti is to be widened. The walls were knocked down, leaving the entire length of the street looking pretty much like a war zone.

Construction of new buildings goes on, of course. I heard from Jagannath Poddar that the current plan for development of Vrindavan allows for buildings of up to 12 storeys.

Here, as elsewhere in many places, there is a great deal of water that seems to flow unimpeded from leaks in the water supply system. It quickly turns into a stagnant, stinking mess.

One sector that is getting a little benefit from the destruction is labor. It seems that up and down the road, there are people rebuilding walls. Here you see day laborers waiting on the street for someone to come and offer them work for the day.

I wanted to take pictures of the current work that is being done further down, by the Vidyapith intersection, where huge holes in the ground completely impede traffic movement. Or further along in the Bhangi Para, where the accumulation of garbage covers a tennis pitch size of terrain in the middle of a residential neighborhood. Today's paper cited one neighborhood in another nearby village becoming sick from the detritus. Has nobody noticed that it is everywhere!!?

It rained last night and I still haven't gone out onto the streets because I know that the drains cannot handle even a minor rainfall, what to speak of an out and out thunderstorm.

I think that Vrindavan must be the most poorly managed town I have ever seen. This roadwork on the Raman Reti Road has been going on for two years and there seems to be no progress, only increased deterioration of the infrastructure. The sewage pipes will lead more effluent directly into the Yamuna. While protests against the cutting of trees seems to have stopped the renovation of the road here, they merrily chopped down 800 full growth trees along the Mathura Road to widen it. With global warming and water table depletion set to affect places like Vrindavan disproportionately, they blindly keep running down this deathwalk they call progress.

I suspect that they are trying to continue the destruction until the people are so frantic that they will do anything just to get some relief. A kind of "disaster capitalism" in the microcosm.

The thing is that this road is going to really do nothing except cause more misery. The traffic will hurtle closer to the center of town where it will again become jammed up in the narrow streets, making regular pedestrian and rickshaw traffic near impossible. More and more properties will be converted into parking lots. The general quality of life will be further reduced for the benefit of a few fly-by-night tourists and those who profit from them.

And the thing is that they are doing nothing to improve or enhance the very core of Vrindavan's real treasures. Indeed, this is all destructive.

I have to commend the Kishore Van project, and indeed it is important to restore the wooded areas of old Vrindavan. We have to do something, and this is something. But there is so much to do that it seems like a drop in the bucket. This small sacred area--which thank God no one has thought should be better made into a parking lot--needs to recapture the beauty of Radha and Krishna's lila sthalis. We need to support this project, but we need to expand.

The most important thing, as far as I can see, is to work on public opinion. We need publications in Hindi, we need karmis who will go out, distributing this material and convincing others, one by one, from the acharyas and politicians to the businessmen and people on the street, of the necessity of environmental action, cleanup, heritage preservation, and an action plan for Vrindavan that takes into account its sacred character. And this is especially important as so many people who have come here for work in construction or business and so on have no real consciousness or affection for Vrindavan as a sacred city.

Charity begins at home. The preaching of Vrindavan must begin in Vrindavan.

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Here is a common enough sight in the hot season. Dogs wallowing in the water to cool off. Finding clean water isn't easy though, and all the dogs have black legs and bellies from the muck.