I am saddened on hearing about the Supreme Court approval for the demolition of Appu Ghar. There is a twinge somewhere inside my heart… Not that I had a close association with the place. I think I might have been there twice. The first time in my teens, when I was visiting cousins…

In my shady past I have had the temerity of representing the Kerala  State Junior Women’s Cricket team  in the under sixteen interstate matches in Chandigarh… (The skeleton of that match rattles in my closet as I was bowled out for a duck as an opener…and there was shame and scandal in the family where brothers were university cricket team captains and the family were diehard fans of the game… I’d rather not talk about it at the moment.) The best part of that Punjab trip was that on our way back, my Dad’s cousin managed to coax the team manager to let me and my Mom, who was accompanying us 12 girls, as ‘coach’ ( as there was a last minute deficit of personnel),  to stay back and spend a week in Delhi. My mom and I can never forget those wonderful days we got to spend with Dad’s 5 cousins and their families. My first Diwali Mela… my first fruit chaat eaten in a public place… my first adult movie ( with scenes of explicit lovemaking…) my first visit to Appu Ghar… my first glimpse of my ultimate hero Amithabh Bachchan’s house in Gulmohar Park where two of my uncles resided… Visit to the Taj, Lodhi Gardens, the Parliament…Aahhh! That holiday was the stuff dreams are made of! Ahhh… digression! I was reminiscing about Appu Ghar…

I remember the huge gates of Appu Ghar and how my mouth fell open at the sight of a huge hot air balloon… and  of course, Appu… I can not recollect the rides… I have selective amnesia when it comes to things that make me sick…and theme park rides top the list… I remember … people…. lots of them… milling around…  Mother Dairy ice cream stall (?) Balloons that drifted up when they  lost hold of precious little hands… The entry fee was something like fifty rupees… and I was mighty impressed that my uncle was loaded enough to treat almost a dozen of us…

I don’t really remember my trip to Appu Ghar when we went after a decade with my twins who were one or two years old… By that time I had good memories of Baghdad’s Luna Park etched in my memory, though my dread for rides continued… Now, after a couple of dozen years, when there are theme parks galore…where I still feel my presence is a waste of good money as I still refuse to go on the rides or get into water… my heart still aches a little when I hear about Appu Ghar being demolished to make space for the Metro and for constructing the Supreme Court Lawyers’ Chambers…

This is the price we of the yester generations pay for progress… It is nature… Old things get demolished…and get replaced by new steel, chrome and glass monstrosities…But Appu Ghar was an iconic site… Even for a non- Delhiite like me… I wonder what those who grew up spending their weekends, school trips and picnics there would be feeling now…

During my trip to Europe, I saw just how much the Swiss, the Italians and the French cared for their heritage… Buildings and structures that date back centuries are preserved as national heritage… One hardly saw any chrome/ steel and glass structure … and Paris looked so ancient and appealing to one’s aesthetic sense… and modern structures did not outshine the old…They merge… they coexist without dreams of eradicating each other…

But here,… aesthetic sense… nostalgia… heritage… all alien terms in the marathon for modernity… One can not do anything but wring one’s hand helplessly… and perhaps murmur like the great king Arthur…: The old order changeth,  yielding place to new, And God fulfills Himself in many ways…