Skip to main content

Rock Garden

The Rock Garden in Chandigarh is the work of a rare genius.  Only a Nek Chand could have created such beauty from sheer waste.  All kinds of waste from pieces of broken bangles and porcelain articles to boulders and electric sockets are made efficient use of producing an aesthetic wonder.  

Nek Chand was not a trained artist.  Art was his hobby.  He spent his spare time creating works of art in a wasteland he cleared in Chandigarh.  As his work progressed and drew the attention of people, the government was in a conundrum.  How to destroy such exceptional artwork merely because it was built up on land belonging to the government?  Good sense prevailed (strangely!) and Nek Chand was given not only the permission but also regular employment with helpers to assist so that he could create the paradise in the semi-desert that Chandigarh is.

Below are some pictures from my recent visit to the Rock Garden.

Rocks welcome you


Nek Chand was not only an artist, but he had certain engineering skills too.  He observed the way the architects of Chandigarh built the well planned city and adapted many engineering feats in order to give shape to some of the intricate structures in the Rock Garden. 






Even the amphitheatre is created out of waste materials

As I sat in the amphitheatre, with Maggie beside me sipping fresh fruit juice to quench the dehydration produced by Chandigarh's merciless sun, I thought why there were so few Nek Chands in the world.  Nek Chand was a man with an obsession, or a passion.  I think all of us have our own obsessions or passions.  But why has money become the single or dominant obsession today?  Does capitalism inevitably make people greedy?  Does capitalism strip people of their nobler passions?  


Will a time come when the human species will evolve qualitatively?  As Bernard Shaw imagined in his superman?  Towards Teilhard de Chardin's Divine Milieu?  

Nek Chand's Rock Garden gave me some weird dreams.

Comments

  1. Weird Dreams :)
    Not that I speak from experience, but they say that it is those who believe weird/impossible dreams are possible, who make impossible possible - or something like that.
    I visited Rock Garden once. And it is on my list of places my children have to visit. It truly is a special place.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Everyone should visit the Rock Garden at least once, I think. We may be inspired in many ways.

      Dreams, yes; they do matter much.

      Delete
  2. Replies
    1. Go ahead and visit the place, Paresh. Avoid summer; 49 degrees won't be the ideal temperature! Rock Garden is near to the Sukhna Lake, another beautiful place - I couldn't savour the beauty of the Lake since I left the Garden only at 8 pm when it was going to be closed.

      Delete
  3. Wowwww....God bless Nek Chand's soul...wonderful work of art....:-)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. People like Nek Chand are the really blessed souls, Isaac.

      Delete
  4. Brilliant! There is so much of character to this place.. :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Character, you said it. That's why I said "rare genius". This is something exceptional people think of.

      Delete
  5. I went to the Rock Garden in 1995. This post took me back to the time when as a kid on summer vacation, our parents took us to Chandigarh and Shimla! Rock garden is truly amazing - it depicts the power of passion! Parul :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. There's much info about Nek Chand in the Chandigarh Museum too. An aerial view of the Garden is given in the museum and it looks amazing. The photo I clicked in the museum didn't come out well :(

      Delete
  6. Nice place..hope to visit sometime..:)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Plan for the next winter or any season except summer.

      Delete
  7. Shila yugathile shilakalkkuellam, chiraku mulachirinnu...chilangakettiya swapnangalkkum chiraku mulachirinnu...by Vayalar is actualized by Nek Chand. go to you tube ..search for songs from film omana malayalam. you can experience the video

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. You're quite a romantic, Babychetta. I used to call Vayalar the revolutionary of romance.

      Thanks for the you-tube reference.

      Delete
  8. Thanks for this insightful post. Beautiful place and your awesome adds to that beauty.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Really one of the places i have to visit... Have heard a lot about it..
    Good work by Nek Chand.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It's worth a visit, I assure you. I spent a hot summer evening there and found it enticing. The other seasons would be bewitching.

      Delete
  10. Well that is amazing...another absolutely my kind of a place

    ReplyDelete
  11. Memories bring smiles on our face.This is one of those memories.Had been to Rock garden few years back.Great art work from waste by Nek Chand.
    http://www.srikri.com/

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...

Coffee can be bitter

The dawns of my childhood were redolent of filtered black coffee. We were woken up before the birds started singing in the lush green village landscape outside home. The sun would split the darkness of the eastern sky with its splinter of white radiance much after we children had our filtered coffee with a small lump of jaggery. Take a bite of the jaggery and then a sip of the coffee. Coffee was a ritual in our home back then. Perhaps our parents believed it would jolt our neurons awake and help us absorb our lessons before we set out on the 4-kilometre walk to school after all the morning rituals at home. After high school, when I left home for further studies at a distant place, the ritual of the morning coffee stopped. It resumed a whole decade later when I completed my graduation and took up a teaching job in Shillong. But I had lost my taste for filtered coffee by then; tea took its place. Plain tea without milk – what is known as red tea in most parts of India. Coffee ret...

Truths of various colours

You have your truth and I have mine. There shouldn’t be a problem – until someone lies. Unfortunately, lying has been elevated as a virtue in present India. There are all sorts of truths, some of which are irrefutable. As a friend said the other day with a little frustration, the eternal truth is this: No matter how many times you check, the Wi-Fi will always run fastest when you don’t actually need it – and collapse the moment you’re about to hit Submit . Philosophers call it irony. Engineers call it Murphy’s Law. The rest of us just call it life. Life is impossible without countless such truths. Consider the following; ·       Change is inevitable. ·       Mortality is universal. ·       Actions have consequences. [Even if you may seem invincible, your karma will catch up, just wait.] ·       Water boils at 100 o C under normal atmospheric pressure. ·    ...