u/Relevant-Moose362

I preserved your tone and imagery, but tightened the flow slightly so it reads more like a powerful reflection than a rant.

I usually live inside my room. I work from home, spend most of my free time at home, and when I do go out, I mostly drive straight to wherever I need to be. Apart from the gym, I barely experience the city around me.

Maybe that’s why it shocks me every time I step outside.

I’ve always loved the idea of cities. But after consuming so much Western imagery and urban life online, reality outside feels jarring. I always liked believing Himachal was somehow different — cleaner, calmer, less depressing than the rest of the country.

But today I write this after four days without water because of a pipe leak nobody seems able to fix. I write this with no electricity because a mild storm happened somewhere nearby. Every hour I have to call again just to ask whether there’s any update.

And when I drive, I am either swerving to avoid a stray cow — too holy to be harmed, yet free to roam the roads and kill me — or some idiot driving on the wrong side.

The other day, some friends came to town, and we went for a drive along the lake — the only real tourist attraction here. What should have been beautifully developed into a space for leisure and pride is approached through roads filled with potholes of a kind you wouldn’t believe unless you saw them yourself. The lighting is barely adequate. The dust is relentless. The footpath — well, there barely is one, except for a small broken stretch awkwardly placed on the wrong side of the road.

And on both sides of the lake are slums so ugly and hopeless-looking that you just want to run back to your room, where things still feel somewhat hopeful. Slums growing and proliferating openly under the noses of the authorities.

And today I drove through villages in Bilaspur district and saw roads lined with garbage because people stop to feed monkeys using packets and bags, then simply throw them outside once the food is gone.

I genuinely do not understand how people are living like this. Is it our bankruptcy that has led to this state of our state? Is it simply Himachal being a part of India? How is everyone okay with it?

Are we truly just cockroaches?

Town: Sundernagar

Written via Chatgpt, because I am too angry to write respectfully.

I was texting with my friends who are a couple and who shifted to Canada a few years ago. We used to live together in Pune. Then I shifted back to Sundernagar. They just told me they were back from hiking.

This made me think about our cultural differences, India in general and Himachal in particular. A hiking culture, I think, needs supply & demand. Supply in the form of marked trails, clean trails, trails where you won’t find alcoholics, with toilets, etc. and demand, well, that’s self explanatory, if not, then people who have enough time to give to their health (work life balance), awareness of such needs of the body and a culture which longs for this.

I don’t see any of this. Though I have come across many pioneers in this, nothing like what I suspect it is in the West. I do see people going on morning walks, but that’s not quite like hiking culture.

Indian cities usually lack features and honestly, safety for such hikes, Himachal should have been different? Are we just too poor compared to the West that we haven’t hit that place in Maslow’s pyramid? Or am I just oblivious to what’s happening around me and indeed there is this culture around me.

Went on drive today in Sundernagar. Saw that the underside of flyover on outskirts of Sundernagar in Naulakha has been encroached by families of migrant labour, around 15, kids women men. We are starting to look like Punjab or Delhi now.

Where is the government, what are we people doing. In Sundernagar, these people encroached the khad next to Iph office and the lake. Making this town look terribly dirty, and feel unsafe.

Tbh, i don't know what can be done here. But the very least encroachment should be punished. Himachal is going back ward. Our once cleaner cities look like shit now. May be government can make cheap hostels for them? Or idk cheap housing, forms. But this is unavailable.