Back in Barton Hill

Cooling off in the cyber space after another week of turbulence, separation and coming out unscathed through yet another blast, I stumbled upon a site showcasing India in its myriads of avatars. The profiles of a cross section of the people of India were given along with the articles about its history and cultural heritage, religions and pilgrimages and the lifestyle and fashion. Gandhiji was there presiding over a host of luminaries from arts, culture, business, sports and everyday life. There were the melodious Mangeshkars, the shocking Shergill, the Haryana hurricane and a host of other illustrious personalities from the different walks of life. Wonderful descriptions were there about some of the unique features of the communities from its different regions.

But I was wondering why in a site dedicated to travel and tourism, representation of my home state, one among the National Geographic Traveler's "50 Places of a Lifetime" was reduced to the virtually extinct Jews of Kochi. A bit peeved, I half heartedly clicked on the least appealing of all the titles on display which read ‘The Mother and the Tramp’. And.... surprise.... surprise.... I found myself in one of the most beautiful places in the state of Kerala, “where cool ocean breezes waft gently through the trees that stand scattered over the small hill”.... Yes, I found myself back in Barton Hill! ....The very place I had left a couple of months back, bitter and broken.

Barton Hill is also the location of one of the several colonies where the downtrodden of another era were dumped by the rich and the powerful from the left and the right who had bent the famed and feted Land Reforms Act of the state to cater to their selfish interests. But if you pay a visit to the colony one of these days, you can see that the people who live in those small huts with no compound walls live in one of the cleanest regions of the capital of Kerala. The lanes and by lanes leading to those tiny hutments were one of the cleanest I had seen in my travels across India.

And yes, Barton Hill is notorious for certain reasons. But this article had no mention of the people who brought it the notoriety or of the institution which will help it earn world wide renown in the coming days. Instead it told the story of a tramp who used to send money to a Nobel Laureate, who in turn sent her people to seek out her strange benefactor. I ‘can scarcely believe that such a man in flesh and blood had ever walked' on the streets of Barton Hill. But if he did, he definitely earned his position alongside the Mahatma.