On littering the environment...

'Getting away from it all' has a new meaning. That I discovered on a recent trip up to the galiat -- Murree, Nathiagali et all. Luring countless people up into these places with the promise of fresh alpine air, beautiful surroundings and pine-capped hills, I'm afraid is soon going to be a thing of the past. In Murree it is already so; no matter how much property developers (there are countless apartment complexes cropping up) may try to make you believe, how far can you lie? And Nathiagali, second major tourist spot in the area after Murree is fast going the same way. The stench of garbage in Nathiagali -- common in Murree, was unthinkable in Nathiagali, until last year. This year, it's surely been driven home that Pakistan is overpopulated -- people have to go somewhere in summer -- and there aren't enough places to go to.

Headache-inducing traffic jams on holiday, on narrow winding mountain roads will possibly make many people think twice before venturing into these hills next year. Driving around in the galiat is not a pleasure anymore; bad driving and lack of road sense contribute to creating intermittent holdups along every route. It may be likely that one of the reasons there were more people in the galiat this year was as an aftermath of the earthquake. Kaghan remained out of bounds, and newspapers reported Swat roads to be in bad state. The few adventurous enough to venture towards Azad Kashmir too stayed away this year. The torrential Karachi rain led to too many negative discoveries; the tourism situation in the galiat did not lead to sad mishaps as in Karachi, but is also an eye-opener... the shape of things to come. We've stripped the galiat of much of their natural splendour. Where are people going to go on vacation within the country? I dare say, farther up north things are no better, on my last visits to Kaghan and Swat, the same issues of overcrowding and littering with disregard to the environment were apparent.

Nathiagali's tiny bazaar is today ominously reminiscent of Murree's Mall, expanding down both sides of the main road. The same horrid sewage stench hangs in the air; look behind any shop, restaurant or bend of the road, and you'll find a trail of garbage going down the mountainside. The fact is, that this road's having traffic blockages due to bad parking and overcrowding is a serious concern -- it's the main road that runs all the way to Abbottabad, not a side road. On a walk from Dungagali to Nathiagali, I realised the garbage dumping issue does not exist in pockets of habitation only. Along the 2.5 km stretch of road, beyond the road barrier, the mountainsides present a pathetic story of too many littering tourists. Fortunately, not everyone is insensitive to these issues like the government is. The WWF has noticed the garbage trail and sprung into action, as I was pleasantly surprised to discover, perchance. The hotel where I was staying hosted a WWF workshop to discuss a proposed project by the name of 'Payments for Environmental Services' (PES). The programme will work by rewarding stakeholders involved in managing the natural resources of the area -- addressing deforestation, solid waste management, water resources etc. 'Stakeholders' at the workshop included officials from NWFP Wildlife Department, NWFP Forest Department, Nathiagali residents, representatives of different NGOs, Nathiagali Union Council Nazim, Tehsil Municipal Administration Abbottabad, Chairman Nathiagali Residents Association, and various others. With the stakeholders agreeing that such a scheme would be feasible, and help raise money for management and environmental conservation of the area, let's hope to see a cleaner and greener Nathiagali, maybe next year.

And destroying the

environment...

What better example of this, than the grandiose scheme of the Cecil Silver Apartments... we have no dearth of scheming people. Cecil, if the hotel was named after a person, should surely have turned over in his grave by now. It comes as a shock, an utterly depressing sight to see how the Silver Apartments scheme has turned out. It is sad, that the media is ineffective, that shoutouts in the press against the hideous idea itself could not stop this from happening.

Block upon endless block of multicoloured apartments is today crammed together on the entire hilltop where once only the hotel stood amidst a verdant landscape. It's a sight for sore eyes. And an alarming traffic mess is in the offing -- when the barely two-track road will cater to the traffic of dozens of apartment blocks. The saddest irony in the situation lies not in the statements of government officials propagating the project, perhaps not in the miserable state of the ex-hotel itself, but in the extravagant claims on the official website.

Sometime back, in 2003, when the Punjab Chief Minister Chaudery Pervaiz Elahi spoke at the ground-breaking ceremony of the project, he said 'such projects should be launched throughout the country'; while Punjab law minister Raja Basharat said such projects would 'also help promote tourism' (Dawn, April 5, 2003). By 'such projects', the chief minister might well have meant destroying as many relics as we can and sticking steel and concrete in their place. And, the law minister's idea of 'tourism' is loaded with inherent danger to the environment.

The external shell of the hotel building itself remains unscathed as yet, while the patina of graceful aging on the inside has been wiped clean. The dining room's (now a booking office) old wooden floor has been scrapped in favour of yellow and blue tiled floor, and the walls are now (horror of horrors) blue. The hitherto gracious small lounge has a ceramic tiled floor, yellow walls, a white painted fireplace with colourful tiles, gold and white painted moldings on the ceiling. You can just imagine the zeal of 'renovation' in action here. But the sadness one feels on seeing all this cannot be imagined.

The website of the Cecil Silver Apartments states proudly, 'Cecil is not just a hotel. It has a very rich history, almost as old as the discovery of the region itself, by the Raj. The building was the official house of Lord Mountbatten the last viceroy of India.' It goes on to say, 'spread over 104 canals of prime land in the Murree hills, Cecil Hotel is a place of history, adventure and romance.' Which we have put to rest, is what it should say.

It is interesting to see the creators of this concrete jungle state, 'Cecil Resorts is an ideal abode for those who love to enjoy maiden nature in its absolute purity and colours.' A mortar maze in place of pine trees... I would really like to know whose idea of nature this is.

Papaya salad to Thai food is what a jewel is to a crown, or icing to a cake. Locally known as som tam or som tum, it's as essential to the final impact of the main course as is selecting the right ingredients or cooking them to an appropriate degree of heat. Yet, very much like the jewel in the crown or the icing on the cake, it can remarkably successfully hold its own in any category of Thai culinary delights. Though no authentic Thai food worth the name should be deemed complete without a papaya salad, this appetizer, or the side dish if you may like, can very successfully excite the taste buds all on its own. For someone motivated to eat not so much by gluttony or starvation as by exotic smell and taste of a food, the praise for papaya salad can be endless.

But what's it that makes papaya salad so special? Is it in its ingredients? Does it lie in the way it is prepared or has it something to do with the way it is served? The answer is probably all or none of the above. Because there are no fixed ingredients; preparation may vary from simply chopping and tossing a green papaya in anything from honey to lemon juice to garnishing the chopped and tossed stuff with a variety of fresh vegetables like tomatoes, cucumber and cabbage; and presentation may have as many variations as the number of restaurants in Thai capital Bangkok. (Though the salad is best served with sticky rice, called khao neow in Thai language, and grilled chicken, it is also served in the accompaniment of roasted ducks, barbequed ham and curried pork.) So what's it that puts papaya salad on the highest pedestal of Thai gourmet, giving it the veritable status of a staple diet across the country.

The answer is as simple as the name suggests: it's the papaya, stupid!

The luscious, juicy fruit is known to have digestive qualities since the first human being ever tasted it, may be by accident or sheer necessity. It has a tart taste, is kind to the palate and benign to the digestive system. Weight watchers can count on it. In fact, they can consume mounds of it without having to worry about added flab around their waist. Since times immemorial, papaya has come to be associated with a tastefulness that does not produce a heavy stomach.

Certainly the Thais have exploited this wonderful quality of papaya and realised its potential by complementing its natural gift with a long tradition of producing exquisite cuisine served with spectacular Thai warmth.

Eating out in Bangkok can never be a complete experience unless it does not involve a helping or two of papaya salad. Some connoisseurs put it so high on their culinary list that they can never even think of having a Thai meal without it. The large clientele that street vendors selling papaya salad attract in Bangkok is ample proof that there is always room for it even if you just had your lunch or dinner in a trendy Thai restaurant, available by the dozens along every street worth its name.

But anyone curious to have papaya salad without first ascertaining its composition is bound to miss the point. Even a multiple number of helpings won't help in that case.

Wajid Ali is not at all confident that the government could ever have rehabilitated the water supply scheme of Batal town with such speed after the earthquake. Government functionaries, he says with a laugh, would have first of all made off with some of the pipe that should have been laid.

He is not old enough to remember when the first ever water supply scheme was established. But all his life he saw the two circular storage tanks some way up the hill from his home and knew they had been built by the government. That was back in the 1970s. And the government had done pretty well for the tanks were fed by a four-inch line that brought water from springs fifteen kilometres away. From the tanks a network of half-inch pipes distributed the water to the village. As Batal grew over the years, the water distribution system did too.

When the earth heaved last year in October, one casualty in Batal, which lies on the Karakorum Highway an hour's drive northward of Mansehra, was the pipeline that fed the tanks. The two tanks fortunately remained unscathed and it was only when they emptied that the damage to the pipes was discovered. For the people of Batal an ordeal began that was to last nearly five months.

That water was piped in from fifteen kilometres away, shows that local sources were unreliable. Now with the water supply out of service, people turned to the few wells sprinkled around town and the stream running just outside. While water from the former was good for drinking, that from the latter could only be used for laundry and bathing. By about the end of November the wells began to run low. As panic began to rise, succour arrived from a manufacturer that flooded Batal with a liberal supply of its bottled water. Shortly afterwards the first rain and snowfall recharged the wells to some extent.

Things could not go on like that however: wells that were dug when Batal had no more than a few thousand souls, could not keep up with the needs of nearly twenty thousand people. It was clear to users that they would again deplete as the weather turned warmer and drier. It was also clear that the supply of bottled water could not last indefinitely.

In November 2005 Church World Service (CWS) and its partner Norwegian Church Aid (NCA) undertook to rehabilitate the water supply. The first survey showed that repair was out of the question since the pipeline was mostly buried. Again, the upheaval had not just undone the joints; it had simply severed the pipe. The only thing for it was to lay all fifteen kilometres of pipe anew. That was a drawn out project while the people of Batal, unused to the daily labour of fetching from the wells or the stream, were beginning to buckle under the pressure.

A new survey was conducted and a smaller water source was discovered. Only three kilometres away, this spring was just about enough to provide partial supply to the town. A temporary one inch and a half plastic pipeline was laid from this source to the storage tanks in order to make potable water available again at the doorstep. With that in place, rehabilitation of the main line was taken in hand. Following the earlier alignment, an entirely new four-inch diameter line was laid from the original source to the storage tanks. The project took some three months to complete, most of it in freezing cold in periods of rain.

Wajid Ali never saw the men at work, but he knew they had laboured in difficult conditions. He also did not know that the project had cost close on a million rupees. He did not even know which agencies had brought his water supply back to life; he only knew this was the work of some NGO or the other. What really mattered to him was that he no longer had to hire a donkey to cart plastic drums of water to his home. The four to five hours he spent daily for the first two months after the earthquake to get potable well water and washing water from the river are a thing of the past. His life is once again back to normal.

Postscript

A hundred yards from Wajid Ali's home is a large bungalow where an evidently affluent family resides. The man who answered my knock had a hundred complaints to air. Among other things, he related how they had lived off bottled water for nearly two months. In the course of his loud rave he also disclosed that in their household even bathing and washing up was done with bottled water! That was when many people in Batal were carting water from the wells to their homes, here was a family that couldn't be bothered and went ahead to bathe with mineral water.

But if that is bad enough, the worse was the case of the elderly man in Balakot. Having received his quota of mineral water, he calmly proceeded to empty the bottles right there. When questioned he said he only needed the bottles to fetch drinking water from the springs somewhere about his home!