RATNAGIRISouthern comfort for exilesBy Anuradha KumarRatnagiri will come as a revelation and a pleasant walk down memory lane for Mumbaikars, for this pretty little port town is probably what Mumbai was like in the 19th century, when the first views that greeted visitors landing at Apollo Bunder were vast expanses of gently rolling hills. Ratnagiri’s coast is still fringed with bright green hills and are not necklaces of traffic lights like those that bedeck Mumbai. The hills still stand proud because Ratnagiri has never been of more than middling strategic importance to India; good only for housing the odd exiled monarch.
That’s why there are also beaches here that look effortlessly clean and where coconut palms grow unauthorised by the municipality. It’s a lazy city where people yawn before giving you directions and hotel staff bang down the phone suspiciously when asked for too many room details. Ratnagiri has all the charm and quirks to draw tourists in for long weekends, except that one is left wishing that more facilities existed.
Official effort is biased in favour of ‘modernisation’. Planted evidence of progress is strewn all around in form of MTDC complexes that deface the town and jetties that nobody uses. Even the obeisance that Konkan Railway pays to Ratnagiri has more to do with industrialisation than with transporting travellers to the town’s balmy shores. This railway line that threw open the Konkan, making possible, among other things, this book, makes a tangential, sharp-angled detour to the west to take into its course this Queen of the Konkan, before veering back east to resume its original course. What it will take for the powers that be to realise that if they took enough care to protect its natural beauty, Ratnagiri would need only one industry — tourism.