Gurdaspur diary: Former bureaucrat keeps his word with pal

KAP Sinha, a senior bureaucrat and ex-Deputy Commissioner of Gurdaspur, is a man who never lets a friend down. The other day when Romesh Mahajan, president of the Gurdaspur District Hotel Association, decided to inaugurate a new wing of his old hotel on the Gurdaspur-Pathankot road, he rang up Sinha, who it is said, never fails to oblige old friends. And Mahajan is one. The bureaucrat travelled all the way from Chandigarh for the ceremony which was attended by the glitterati of Gurdaspur. The hotel’s location is ideal as it is far away from the madding crowd (apologies to Thomas Hardy!). One of the great advantages of hotels is that they are a refuge away from home. The ‘Doubting Thomases’ will always rear their heads whenever there is any discussion on anything. They claim a hotel is always a hotel and no matter how nice and comfortable it is, it can never be a home. The jury is still out on this! The ceremony went off with clock-work precision and everything seemed to be perfect. The fact is that it was not. Scratch the surface a bit and the dust will hit the roof of the banquet halls. Mahajan says 20 per cent of the hotels in Gurdaspur and in the neighbouring town of Pathankot are on the verge of closure. First, it was Covid which stopped the cash registers from ringing and now it is the high rate of electricity charged by the state government. A few years ago the Punjab Government decided to club hotels into the ‘industrial class’ which would have meant they would have got power at cheaper rates, that is industrial rates, and not at commercial ones they pay for now. The file, somehow, got entangled in red-tapism and never cleared the desks of officials manning the Punjab State Regulatory Authority. To complicate matters, the construction of by-passes on the Amritsar-Gurdaspur-Pathankot national highway, means that tourists who used to stay in these hotels on their way to the Vaishno Devi shrine near Jammu, go directly and do not stop en-route. “With the after effects of Covid still hanging in the air, hoteliers are devising new ways and means, including giving heavy discounts, to stay above the water in what is being termed in the hotel industry as the ‘pandemic economy. From a comfortable 70-80 per cent occupancy rate in the pre-virus days, we are down to barely 20 per cent,” said Romesh Mahajan. If KAP Sinha is listening, he must reach out to the power authorities to ensure that at least cheap power is given to these entities, if nothing else. A friend in need is a friend indeed, isn’t it?

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Punjab NSUI gen secy leads protest

Last week, the spotlight in Pathankot city was on Abhyam Sharma, general secretary of the Punjab unit of the National Students Union of India (NSUI), the Congress party’s student wing. He led a march on the city roads against the Modi government’s ham-fisted attempts to bring back students stranded in war-ravaged Ukraine. In his speech to his fellow protestor, Sharma said it was shameful that the Union government did not act earlier.

“Why were things allowed to come to such a pass? Just see how other countries have rescued their citizens. In fact, they acted early and acted fast. You can expect such things only from the Indian government which is known to work at a lethargic pace. Even a country like Pakistan has almost completed the evacuation process. Nearly 1,300 of Pakistani citizens were trapped and barring a score or so, all the others have reached home,” he said. Abhyam, who holds protests against the Union government quite often, said he is planning to hold another such march if things do not improve. But there is a problem — Is anybody listening to Abhyam’s in New Delhi?

Astrologers make hay while the Sun shines

Scores of astrologers based in almost all the nine Assembly seats of the Gurdaspur parliamentary seat are making hay while the Sun shines. They are essentially feeding on the nervousness and anxiety being shown by politicians who contested the recent elections and are awaiting the counting day with baited breath. There are many such astrologers who claim they have been invited to the homes of some candidates in the wee hours of March 10, when the EVS will decide the destinies of the leaders. Needless to say, they are charging an exorbitant rate for services rendered. And the candidates are all too happy to give them what they demand. An erudite politician, and there are not many left these days, remembered the famous Shakespeare quote: “It is not in stars to hold our destiny, but in ourselves; we are underlings.”

(Contributed by Ravi Dhaliwal)