21 November 2012, 04:37 PM IST
A recent assignment to cover the Mussoorie Writers' Mountain Festival at Woodstock School, Landour, was a great excuse for me to visit Kempty Falls. I had first visited Mussoorie with my parents, my brother and sister several years ago. But the memory of that happy family holiday is so deeply etched in my mind and heart that every other subsequent trip to Mussoorie was always somehow an attempt to re-look into a place where I had spent some memorable moments with my dear ones. Sadly, not always did I get that opportunity. This trip, however, afforded me the luxury of a few spare hours before I boarded the Dehradun Shatabdi for Delhi and I instantly knew that it was Kempty Falls that I had to go to.
As we started driving down to Kempty Falls from the now absolutely disgusting Mall Road (that looks like a smaller version of Lajpat Nagar in Delhi before Diwali), my heart took a leap back in time. I started hearing the sounds of gurgling water even though the cabbie was still trying to manoeuvre us out of a jam at the Library End of the Mall Road. I could see the little girl that was my sister ages ago, holding our mother's hand and trying to balance herself on rocks over which flew the wild and clear water of the falls. I could almost feel the milky white spray over my face and hear my parents asking me to watch out.
I must have got lost in my dream of another age when I was jolted out of it by the cabbie's voice. He was pointing to the thin white strip of water on the face of the mountain somewhere yonder and was saying, "Wo raha Kempty Falls." My heart skipped a beat not due to the proximity to the falls, but because I was inches close to my childhood, even if through the eye of my mind.
Not the most gorgeous of all magnificent tourist spots nestled in the Himalayas, Kempty Falls has nonetheless always been an important spot for anyone visiting Mussoorie-Landour. Simply because of the simplicity of the falls — the scene is picturesque with white burbling water cascading down the rugged face of a mountain and collecting in a clear pool over the rocks creating a charming photo-op. If one were to browse through old family albums of travellers in north India, one would positively come across a 'smile-please' shot from Mussoorie with Kempty Falls streaking the dark mountain behind. I've it too in black & white from those decades gone by.
I came for a newer, colour version of that memory this time but suffered a rude jolt with what I saw at the erstwhile beautiful Kempty Falls. I'm pasting a few pictures along with this blog to show what I saw there — it rendered me speechless, and even as I write this I feel bereft of right words to attack the people who have made Kempty Falls such a dirty place.
Of course, this is not a story in isolation — India's filthy tourist spots are legendary in global travel trade circuit but somehow one does get shocked at seeing such rapid degradation of a once pristine locale, even if one has seen enough of it already at many other places. I'm sure readers have numerous examples to rival what I saw at Kempty — ugly potato chips' packets thrown on the rocks otherwise caressed gently by water from the falls, tickets of some sundry joyride torn and thrown on those very rocks as if they also have a secondary role of a wastepaper basket, tattered Hawaii slippers left behind as if Kempty Falls is the local trash bin where you throw whatever is of no use to you, and to say nothing of the remnants of infrastructure that used to be in place once.
So appalled was I at the general squalor at Kempty Falls that I couldn't bring myself to be photographed with the tumbling water like many others were busy doing in turns — making a V sign for God-knows-what victory or posing as if selling some pressure cooker in the midst of the Himalayas.
And I cannot finish my rant against the disgrace that Kempty Falls have been subjected to by foolish tourists till I mention the scandalous racket of shops that specialise in renting out bathing garments! Yes, used bathing garments – so, what if they have been washed thereafter – for those keen on frolicking in the filthy environs of Kempty Falls. A witty friend in the group of four that I was a part of said that anyone trying out those clothes for a fun-filled time at the falls was likely to acquire some infection and he promptly named that skin bug as Kempty-Itchitis.
I don't understand the need to get into used undergarments, or falls-wear if it can be called that, when nature created Kempty Falls for sheer visual pleasure of enjoying a waterfall dropping beautifully off a mountain face. Go take a membership in a swimming pool if you want to frolick in water, or try out some nice beach. Can tourists leave the fragile Kempty Falls alone before it turns into a smutty water body that nobody would want to even touch?
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