Dorangla, Live

NOTHING ever happens in our village! There is no electricity; no good grocery store; no pizza delivery, leave alone the 30-minute deadline; not a single ‘single’ screen theatre...nothing!” Till a week back, I was busy whining about the sorry state of my village (also my birthplace), Dorangla, Gurdaspur, to my cousin over the phone. 

Not that one wishes a surprise attack in your home or find out that one Sukhwinder Kaur from this pind is actually the controversial Radhe Maa, but the recent events have shaken up this sleepy little hamlet from a deep slumber, so much so that it has overnight turned into ‘Dorangla, Live’, making headlines on national media, and finally finding its corner in the spotlight, maybe even on the map of Punjab and the country.

This tiny insignificant blip on the border of Punjab was suspected to be used as an entry point by the terrorists who attacked Gurdaspur on July 27. Soon, the media from all over the country swarmed in — their local stringers acting as their GPS to this village no one had heard of, ever.

Although its existence became known under unfortunate circumstances, Dorangla, by then, had transformed into a ‘major site-seeing spot’.  One that left the journos, escorted by the BSF, baffled over the missing barbed wire or any sign to distinguish the border between two countries. How I wish, I could tell them that the only yardstick was ‘word of mouth’ in these parts — “Bas aithon dus kadam chalkey tu Pakistan pahunch jaavenge (Take 10 steps from here and you will reach Pakistan),” as kids, my cousins and I used to flaunt the way to enter Pakistan. We may have made light of it as kids, but here is a village, bang on the border, unmanned, untracked, unnoticed. It’s a sitting duck, its either sides relishing a feast of animals that stray over. In fact, the missing border wires were never an issue, till now.

So, the day I saw security forces and top-level police officials gather near the site of the attack in Gurdaspur, discussing the GPS theory, I couldn’t but smile to myself — “some action in my sleepy village, some action in Dorangla, and it really didn’t take a rocket scientist to crash land here.” A one-time recce to Gurdaspur and its border villages will expose the reality of borders. 

A dull, lifeless kasba of 1,000 kutcha-pucca houses, a market of barely 20 shops, with the chemist doubling as the Internet-STD-photostat guy, and a compounder-turned-physician ‘Dr Kala’s’ being the busiest of them all, Dorangla has gone live, with now Radhe Maa stealing Gurmeet Ram Rahim’s thunder.

Yes, we are back in news, and like my simple cousin rings up and declares: “Hun next pata nahi keyda sap nikalda aithon; sadde happening pind ton!”