So here you are in Khajjiar, or Dalhousie or some other Indian hill station, far away from the maddening crowds just like you wanted to be. You breathe in the crisp mountain air, feast your eyes on the greenery, and wonder how you could have ever lived in a city. You clamber up and down hills all day and give Kodak (these were days before smartphones or digital cameras came along, when you actually had to buy film for cameras and get them developed after the roll was finished. Not sure what my kids would think of this arrangement when there were only 32 pictures per roll of film and one had to be judicious about which photos to take, because film and development, were expensive) plenty of business. The sun sets. Your aching feet and growling stomach propel you towards the hotel. You relax, freshen up, shovel food down that bottomless pit you call stomach. Time to call it today, you think. You look at your watch and you think again.
It’s only 8pm. Now your system is all screwed up from the wear and tear of sinful city living. You wouldn’t want to be subjected to a rude shock by going to bed at eight, would you? What if you died of toxic shock syndrome?
So what do you do now? You check your options – hit the streets? The same friendly hills you clambered up and down so cheerfully in the day look ominous and threatening at night. You neglected to pack a torch in your luggage. And the thieving municipality has not heard of streetlights. Your holidays are already costing you the earth. You do not want to add an orthopaedic surgeon’s bills to the expenditure and to what purpose anyway? The restaurants are shut. The discotheques are a light years away from this medieval place. And the local cinema showing ‘Mughal-e-Azam’ to a very rustic local crowd is definitely out. So it’s back to the hotel.
The hotel must have provided for some entertainment, you think. The hotel thinks that Doordarshan on the telly with the poor transmission is very entertaining. Satellite dish is a wish. The table tennis court is occupied by obnoxious, snot-nosed brats. Their aim is very good. Their bullseye is your eye. In other words, the ball is in their court. Like a good sport, you know how to retreat. You go to the cardroom. It’s minus the cards the hotel solicitously forgot to provide. You could join a family of over-friendly tourists from Northern India for some friendly conversation. But they’ve had some ‘pegs’ from a famous North Indian town and are about to burst into a famous North India dance any minute. So no.
This is where the 10 commandments come in. The Bible type ones won’t be of much help but 10 ways to survive boredom on your favorite Hill Station might. They have been formulated by experts and may save your life one day. They just come with one statutory warning – ‘only for desperate souls’.
Number one: Find the stables. Sing lullabies to the horses till they fall asleep.
Two: Move to the local park. Stick straws or toothpicks in piles of horse dung and count them. Believe me, the unsuspecting tourists and their shoes will be everlastingly grateful.
Three: Climb the nearest hill and look for UFOs.
Four: Find the nearest five-star hotel. Badger the incoming/outcoming guests insisting that you’re a monkey who has lost his ‘madari’.
Five: Buy a bear mask. Wrap a black blanket around yourself and go around scaring the tourists witless.
Six: Walk up and down the stairs of your hotel, calling the elevator on every floor.
Seven: Threaten the local chaiwala with a lawsuit for serving you with tea that tastes so awful you’re convinced it’s made of donkey’s milk.
Eight: Find a local restaurant that claims to serve Chinese and continental food and admire the creativity and ingenuity apparent in the spellings of the dishes on the menu.
Nine: Find a map. Calculate the distance between where you are in every city on the map and contemplate your proximity or the lack of it to civilization.
Number Ten: Think of ten more ways to survive the boredom on your dream holiday destination
Sharmistha's musings 