AFVOA Newletters of Year 2006

Page 71 of 77 new houses coming up in the colony now, with not even an inch of open space around the houses, in contravention of regulations. Even the common areas of the colony are encroached upon!! 37. One built that place one called home with loving care with the meagre resources that one could muster (one must remember that there were no home loans for the asking then). That home had a functional kitchen for the lady of the house (it is only recently that we have designer kitchens and glamour rooms for bathrooms!) , additional bedrooms for the kids (thinking that the kids will be with you always, as in the past during the service years!) and a garden which one could tend to. So we had bungalows with gardens and trees of the type we were used to in our spacious cantonments. 38. To add to the scenic beauty and greenery, the roads, wherever feasible, were lined with avenue flowering trees by our early settlers. The birds such as Mynahs (remember them? they are almost extinct today), kingfishers, woodpeckers, nightingales, parrots and the like used to abound. Thanks to the trees planted then, even today we hear the cooing of the cuckoo birds in the morning, till they are shooed off by the carrion crows. There were hares scurrying forth . (What we see today are stray dogs. The other species we see are spoilt brats speeding forth in their fast two-wheelers and cars gifted by their over-indulgent parents. In any other country, the licenses of these youngsters, if at all they were old enough to get them, would have been revoked long ago, for driving over the limit of 40kph in residential zones!!) 39. The colony was spotlessly clean with enough water pressure to fill the overhead tanks above the first floor without a pump! Defence Colony was similar to what the bard lyricised about Kashmir “Gar ba-ru-e-zamin ast; hamin ast, hamin ast, hamin asto----- If there be a Paradise on earth, it is here, it is here, it is here ”. Even today if one were to look at the satellite pics of Chennai on Google Earth , there are only four distinct green areas which one can notice. One is the Island grounds; next is the OTA and its environs; then Raj Bhavan, IIT, Anna university and their surroundings; and lastly, you guessed it, Defence Colony. The rest of Chennai is a dirty brown and grey of cement, mud and concrete, with small pockets of green .The satellite picture was taken sometime back. By now there would probably be more streaks of brown and grey!! ) 40. In a lighter vein, one could compare the early proud members of our colony to the characters of the little enclave of Gaul, so beautifully depicted in the Asterix and Obelix comics. There were many characters here similar to those noble souls, who displayed unity and solidarity in preserving their heritage, so carefully nurtured by all of them, against the onslaught of Caesar and the Romans!! But the similarity ends there. Here we have members verbally battling each other, in any gathering, with their strong vocal chords , instead of against any perceived onslaught!!; 41. Going down memory lane, one is reminded of a great song of 1960 ( music of today and the unholy din that accompanies it, was unheard of in those days! ) sung by a group called the Brothers Four, (not Cacophonix!), whose lines went like this: “ Once there were Green Fields kissed by the Sun, Once there were valleys where rivers used to run -----” 42. The song continued a little later rather depressingly: “Green Fields are gone now, Parched by the sun Gone from the valleys, where rivers used to run -----” “Where are the Green Fields That we used to roam? -----”