Rickshaw heritage rides give an opportunity to appreciate our rich past

Heritage walks on the ancient lanes of the city’s Old Town area are like time machines that take you on a journey through the pages of history and give a glimpse of some chapters that make your soul recoil with pain and poetry.

The small group of people, which participated in the rickshaw heritage ride recently, took back with it slices of the rich historical past of the city.

For Anita Rao, an artist, the experience was a trip down the ages — to how the area was a few centuries ago. “The over 250-year-old Queen Mary’s School encouraged and made special arrangement to educate widows and even paid them Rs.15 per month to study in the early 1900s. There were several such stories we learnt about the places that give me a reverence for these structures, which we often take for granted,” she said.

Intrigued by the fascinating tales of many such structures, some of which no longer exist, Rao made a watercolour sketch of the Kurupam Market entrance, which was demolished a few years ago.

The participants were taken around 10 important heritage places of the locality — Town Hall, Town Hall Lane, Kurupam Market, Old European Cemetery, Queen Victoria’s Pavilion, St. John Church and School, Queen Mary’s School, Ishak Madina Dargah, St. Aloysius School, and Light House. Sandhya Parimala Vijapurapu, a youngster, said that the heritage trail gave an in-depth understanding of the city’s history.

The experience made her realise that heritage was more than old buildings.

“When I hold my camera and shoot the walls of the Town Hall, it gives me a different perspective now after sifting through the multiple layers of historical facts. We saw old chairs piled up in corners of the thick walls of the building, which are now silent spectators of the city’s rapid transition,” she said, and added that the exciting part of the tour was the rickshaw ride that promoted the modest ecological mode of transport. Leading from the front was city-based social and heritage activist Jayshree Hatangadi, who had been conducting these Sunday rickshaw heritage rides for the past few months.

The heritage trail takes participants around in four rickshaws.

“The idea behind doing these rides is also to highlight the issues of preserving heritage sites. For instance, the Town Hall needs to be repaired and its surrounding area cleaned so that it can be a place of display of our heritage and have interesting speakers every month to give a talk or a presentation. Once the locations are cleaned, we can have visitor brochures and guides trained to talk about the history of the place. Even the European Cemetery has a big story to tell. Several tombstones have their life in short beautifully calligraphed,” added Hatangadi.

source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> Cities> Visakhapatnam / by Nivedita Ganguly / Visakhapatnam – March 02nd, 2016