On a recent weekend in June, a long line of cars stood so close that not a hair could have passed between their bumpers at the entrance of Kasauli, once a quaint hill station in Himachal Pradesh’s Solan district. They had arrived from several cities and towns, but mostly from Chandigarh and Delhi and its suburbs.
Normally, a journey in the car from the nearest railhead, Kalka, takes about 40 minutes. But on this summer weekend, many tourists descended, not only upon Kasauli, but also upon other hill stations like Shimla too. After a point, it felt as if there were more cars than people.
The cars—with families and groups of youngsters looking for a good time for half-a-day or a night—were ultimately stuck for two hours, 5kms away from Kasauli, before they could make it to the main market.
Many of them were already in party mode. Loud music blared from their cars.Many of them would later drink in their cars after parking them at some desolate spot in the town and then play the same music, only several decibels higher. As the cars kept piling on, some drivers became impatient and began to honk for no purpose, as if their horns would produce a gust of air that would blow away the cars in front of them.
The old residents of Kasauli—and it is true of all hill stations in the Himalayas now—have begun to dread such summer weekends, as many city people in all their deranged belligerence and a sense of entitlement take over places that are not a weekend getaway for them but a home.
“[Henry David] Thoreau had Walden and I had Kasauli, or so I thought,” says Ashima Bath, the head teacher of the Enrichment Centre at the Lawrence School, Sanawar, on the outskirts of Kasauli town. She came here 33 years ago, she says, and was taken in by the calm, the undisturbedness of the place. “But now it has been taken over by loud honks and cuss words in more languages than I could imagine,” she says.
Disclaimer: Excerpt from “Himalayan Meltdown" by Rahul Pandita, originally published in the OPEN Magazine on July 4, 2025.Read the original article here: https://openthemagazine.com/feature/himalayan-meltdown
