The tragic legacy of a tunnel

THE scorching heat in the plains prompted us to escape to the hills. Hill stations, with their lush-green slopes, slow pace and echoes of the past create a perfect setting where characters return to confront their failures, find peace or reconnect with their lost selves. Chandigarh offers a convenient weekend getaway to the mesmerising Shivalik hills and further to the majestic Himalayas. The mountains hold many stories of solitude, survival, spirituality and the awe-inspiring beauty or danger of nature.

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Instead of taking the recently built highway, we travelled on the Kalka-Shimla railway route. The longest tunnel at Barog is a monument constructed more than a century ago. The story of Col Barog is both fascinating and tragic, and is deeply entwined with the most picturesque and iconic mountain railway in India — a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The mountains seem to watch quietly, indifferent yet nurturing. Their grandeur often makes human troubles seem small, offering spiritual or emotional redemption.

The old tunnel, which is a trek from the main station, is a testimony to hard work, failure, human resilience and the never-say-die spirit. I believe it is a small shrine to the frailty of ambition. Col Barog was not the first man to make a mistake. But he may have been one of the few to let the weight of it consume his soul. Charged with carving a tunnel through a mountain, he miscalculated. The two ends dug toward each other but did not meet.

The mountain did not yield, and perhaps neither did he — to the mercy of failure, to the grace of time. And so he took his life. Was it cowardice? Or was it the last breath of a man who believed so profoundly in the sanctity of his responsibility that he could not live in its absence?

As I sit today in front of the tunnel, I find myself believing that that tunnel is a question etched into stone, running along old iron rails. What does it mean to fail? What does it mean to be honourable? For some, the colonel’s act may seem unforgivable — a harsh punishment for human error. But for others, it may serve as a haunting reminder that there once lived men who held themselves accountable not to applause, but to conscience.

The tunnel he could not finish now bears his name. In a way, he is redeemed by memory and legacy — a symbol of a time when professional honour was a personal vow, not just a line in a contract. In a world that forgives itself too easily, Barog is sacred, perhaps because it represents ‘the cost of precision’ and ‘the silence of shame’. And the terrible nobility of those who set standards higher than the world ever asked them to.

Rest in peace, Col Barog…