A Town Called Jagadhri (Admiring Nature)

When I shifted to the town of Jagadhri, District Yamuna Nagar, little did I realise that I would be viewing my year long stay in retrospect! From the day I set foot in that town I started cataloguing my experiences rather meticulously, backing everything with photographs, videos, and other souvenirs! While going through my external hard-disk I came across numerous photographs which set me reminiscing  about the rather unique things about the town and its surroundings. When I and my colleagues were returning from a trip to Dakh-Pathar, along with our guest, Mrs. Helen Smart, the driver drove off the road to show us how the farmers extract Jaggery, a raw form of sugar from sugarcane. The golden yellow mass of cooked sugar-can juice seemed to be rather fascinating. The people started mixing the molten yellow mass of cooked sugarcane juice, and lo, it started to turn into a crystalline powdery form of sugar called shakar in Hindi! Being the shutterbug that I am, I couldn’t resist taking some snaps of the thick liquid mass that was being turned into the crude form of sugar and these amazing pictures are what I got!

                 

Throughout my stay in the Yamnua Nagar District I observed the preponderance of greenery and a wide range of flora and fauna, the likes of which I had never seen or heard of in Delhi or Gurgaon! The favourite talk of the town was about what had been planted, whether it was paddy, or wheat, or onions or whatever! One word that I kept hearing about was the word “Jhiri”, which means rice!The poplar plantations were a common site and I was told about the  vibrancy of the Ply-Wood industry which depends on an adequate supply of Poplar.

                 

It is a common site in Jagadhri to see tractors pulling trailers loaded with cut poplar logs and sugarcane, and often overloading of the trailers meant that it was a common site to see overturned trailers with their cargo spilled on the road often causing a bottleneck! The absence of large Malls is offset by the presence of provisional stores with all the latest goods in them, along with the popular offers on discount cards. But aside from the fact that there is no outlet for the shopaholic, there is much more to be offered to the Nature Lover or the bird-watcher, as a large number of exotic birds can be seen throughout the town and its surroundings!

                          

Time seems to stand still in Jagadhri and Yamnuna Nagar, and everyone seems to move in slow motion which often seems rather frustrating to a person migrating from Delhi! This is perhaps because everyone in the town is free from the mad rush of the metros, and perhaps commuting distances are relatively shorter than in the NCR region of Delhi! Mornings are lazy and the evenings are lazier still. Perhaps this is what makes the sunrise and the sunset most spectacular in Jagadhri well, that is because you have all the time in the world to observe them and appreciate them!

                    

Another rather unique thing about Jagadhri and Yamnua Nagar is  presence of a large number of colleges,and institutions which offer training in professional fields, whether it is Education, or Engineering, or M.B.A. or perhaps even Dentistry! Here I would like to thank the D.A.V. Dental college, and that wonderful dentist who did a wonderful job of extracting one of my wisdom teeth which had been giving me sleepless nights! The Yamuna Group of Institutions on the Jagadhri-Ambala road offers a large variety of courses under the same campus. I was invited by Dr. Dutta to take a look at one of the Operating Theatres of the soon to be opened College of Dental Surgery:

                                             

Well, I guess, there is more to Jagadhri and Yamnuna Nagar for the Nature lover, but then, I guess development is not far behind, and with development come Housing Projects, construction of Malls, expansion of existing roads, and of course all this will result in the cutting down of trees. The pristine greenery of Jagadhri is not there forever, but then, one should enjoy and appreciate this natural beauty till it lasts!

Technorati Tags: Appreciating the Natural Beauty of Jagadhri and Yamuna Nagar