vade bolai ....a sleepy little village or is it ??

 the climb up to the cave ....you can see or car in the parked way below on the edge of the road to vade bolai ....

 the cave where robbers used to hide ......this was found by the police department and a statue of ambedkarji placed inside and a grill installed .....to ensure, no one misuses the place ...


i first went to vade bolai in 2010 november, a few months after, i joined a govt aided college in pune ......this village was adopted by the college and students accompanied by profs paid a yearly visit ...... en route to the village when we reached this hilly area .....students started asking if they could climb the hills .....since they seemed so exciting .... i had dressed to visit a village in typical indian clothes and foot wear ......ergo when the bus stopped near this hill ....i was highly sceptical ..... however there was no way i was going to wait in the bus either ....so we set out to climb the hill to this cave ...... two profs and 60 students ...... after a lot of yelling and squealing ....helping people too .....we reached the top .....the climb down was dangerous as the place has lose gravel and we did slip quite often ......we held on to tree branches to keep us from falling .....or held each others hands .... some who had stayed put at some mid point too climbed down slowly .... every one was intrigued to see the cave ....which was the hiding place for robbers and dacoits ...who used to terrorise the area ..... after the climb down the next stop was an emu farm .... we were amazed to see such docile and big birds ....which pecked grain out of our palms ..... the next stop was  the village school where we faculty were felicitated ...... and we had breakfast ....the next stop was a water bottling plant ....here we saw the entire process of how small pellets were transformed into bottles that were sterilised and then water infused with extra oxygen filled in bottles and were packed mechanically into cartons ....... the next stop was a cashew shelling factory ....and a bee hive keeping unit ....
the next visit was a biogas plant in a farmers house .......after this we visited a jaggery making unit right in the middle of the sugar cane fields ..... it was wonderful to eat warm jaggery and get a few stubs of sugar cane ..... the next small scale unit we visited was a carbolic soap making factory ....it used oil used for frying in hotels that gets thrown away .....they collected this oil from big MNCs like macdonalds, 5 star hotels etc at subsidised rates and made carbolic soap, used for washing clothes ..... it was run by two very enterprising young men who gave all of us a few samples that smelled a bit .....after this we went to a dog shelter run by a south indian couple, one of whom was a vet ....there were many spacious kennels for all kinds of dogs specially stray that were sick or needed care ...

it was lunch time by then and we went to a pond near the village temple ....the speciality of this pond was the water that had some minerals that could heal skin problems .... we ate vegetarian food in the temple premises provided by the village and the college NSS team ....then we went to a picnic spot which had a connection to mythology  ..... we were taken to a rock and asked to hit it with a stone and we got this distinct sound of a bell being rung ......myth has it that the pandavas had lived here during their exile and used to live in this region and we were shown the place where they had lunch and the rock was used as a bell .....the last stop was a check dam built by the college NSS team for the village and the bund  build over the lake ......we did a bit of boating which scared one of the profs who had joined our bus at the village while we stopped for eating ... ergo we cut our trip short and boarded the buses back to return to pune city .......by this time it was past 5pm and we all were exhausted ..... the students were excited as ever and kept up the chattering and sharing of stories .....

i really enjoyed the visit to the village to see all the fields  and greenery and my most fav part was the climb to the cave ....so we made this a yearly ritual from 2011 ....in assam it is customary to go for a picnic to the river side and cook in the open on 1st jan ....so here in pune we would earlier go to a temple and feed fish ....however after seeing vade bolai ...that became a favourite haunt for my kids and me ......        

ahhh the marine drive of pune eh ;)

 caught the glare of the sun on the window of hotel westin ...

 had my camera panned a little to the right i would have caught a hoard of expensive condominiums that have sprung up .....in this ...once a hide out for the dons of mumbai ......somewhere in the early 2000 ......BPOs arrived and this once forgotten sleeply surburb got a face lift and the bridge i am standing on ... and a place where the infamous don papu kalyani got killed in an encounter ....morphed into of one the most posh addresses... chez pune ...ahhhh

Pune ...... clicked on my very long walk home ....after dropping kids at their friend's place .... this is a very posh suburb .....

people were enticed into buying property here by .....ahh homes on the river banks .....

and what have we reduced the river to .... nothing but a dirty stream of highly polluted water ..... the butchered state of the river called 'mula mutha' .....

walk or drive down the bridge connecting koregaon park (famous for the osho ashram and german bakery)  to kalyani nagar at night .....and i wonder if anyone had seen the street light rimmed road ...with the river on one hand and the high rises in the other ..... it would always make me think of ....this being the closest we could come to marine drive in pune .....i love the way this place has evolved over time ..... it was a surburb with no public bus transport ..... though we did have a few famous and the rich settling down here .... 

in the 90s this place kalyani nagar was infamous by the shootout incident of a mr papu kalyani ....people would avoid this dusty part of town ...... i think two things changed this place and position in pune's map .....one was BPOs 
.....two ....the bridge connecting koregoan park to kalyani nagar ....
most people from nagar road area got a second option of travelling .....
multiplexes and eateries mushroomed 
people started thronging this place .....
my favourite eatery is marrakesh .... a place serving delectable lebanese food ...  and i like the small but high end eating place ....polka dots ...
there is so much that adds and also substracts from kalyani nagar ....however .....i would say its importance as a hang out zone of the youth of pune changed with the coming of pheonix market city ..... a giant that pulled away a lot from most places in and around ......
ergo i see lesser crowds in kalyani nagar and the mc donald's in kalyani nager wears a deserted look ....KFC left the place and recently i saw a sign board of domino's pizza come up where KFC used to be .....
mais c'est la vie ....life does move in circles ....twists and turns .....slips and slides ......