Here is the third in the series of photographic journals. My desire to get a better camera, I work with my iPhone 13 which is a tad inferior to any iPhone with the suffix Pro, is becoming more acute and it looks like that soon a good chunk of my savings will be bitten off by Nikon. My darling wife is protecting me from falling prey to the temptation.

Be that as it may. March was not a particularly a good month for my adventures in photography, at least that is what I thought till I travelled to Shirwal.

When my car approached the Katraj Tunnel, I saw that a State Transport bus was stranded, and the conductor was guiding vehicles to move to different lanes. The bus had stalled at the mouth of the tunnel so passengers must have escaped a potentially dangerous situation of having to walk to the end of the tunnel.

In 1999, Former Prime Minister of India Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee announced the Golden Quadrilateral Highway Project connecting four of India’s major cities, Delhi-Mumbai-Chennai-Kolkata and face of the village Shirwal changed forever. The Golden Quadrilateral Highway passes through Shirwal, and this has made it an important location for industrialization. (See Wikipedia)

Pune Satara is a good highway, and the traffic is high even in the early morning. Cars and huge trucks carrying tonnes of load buzz past you.

Shirwal is town where one must make a great effort to click good photographs. The well-known Marathi author PL Deshpande had once made a similar observation about the Bhandup railway station – ‘you will never find a beautiful girl there’. Well things change!

And I too discovered that I was wrong about Shirwal when I went out for my morning walk.

I usually do not click sunrise and sunset photos, but this scene was captivating. As I walked back to the hotel, I remembered that there is a beautiful place nearby called the Necklace Point.

Here the river Neera makes a U turn. And a small hillock provides the vantage point to watch the stunningly beautiful landscape.

I have visited Shirwal many times, never the Necklace Point. Someone had wrongly informed me that it would take about two hours to reach there from my hotel. It took just 20 minutes! But on this occasion, I visited the Necklace point. Overcoming my fear of long travel. It was a complete U turn for me, just like the Neera River.

I should have gone there during the golden hours of sunrise or sunset; the Necklace would have glowed beautifully in the golden light. I will go there again. Maybe with a new camera, if not with new eyes.

And the rivers make old bridges look magnificent. You cross this bridge on the way to the Necklace point. 

Rivers fascinate me. As a child I used to watch Patalganga river at Khopoli in which Tata Power’s hydro-electric station discharges all their water making it flow perennially, and it was a clean river then without pollution. Similarly, Narmada at Bharuch mesmerises me, it did at Bheda Ghat. Flowing water has magical properties.

Whenever I see a river, I remember the famous Heraclitus quote: ‘No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.’

Like Neera river, I must have changed between my two trips to Shirwal. What has changed, why and how? That is a good homework to do till my next visit. 

Vivek S Patwardhan

“What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.” All work copyrighted.