Would you believe this???
Sandip C. Jain
Just the other day, two very interesting stories took me to the still virgin hill slopes on which Lingsay village is cradled. The stories of course were only a pretext- the main reason I travelled to Lingsay was simply because I wanted to go and see the area. The stories which had felicitated my travel to Lingsay will be printed in the forth coming issues of this magazine but what I am sharing with you here, although also about Lingsay, may be too astonishing for many to actually believe it.
Lingsay, which is in the Kalimpong Sub Division, lies about 45 km to the northeast of the town. The only motorable road approaching this isolated village is via Pedong and Rehnok in Sikkim. Yes, one literally has to enter Sikkim and then come back into DGHC to reach Lingsay. The approximately 15 km that one has to travel between Rehnok and Lingsay is through amazing scenery through paddy fields and lust green forests. Half of this 15km lies in Sikkim and other half of it in DGHC. One half of the road is so bad that it can hardly be classified as a motorable road - it is more akin to a stairways on which a four-wheel driven vehicle can barely manage to huff & puff and stay alive- while the other half of road is as smooth as any hills road can possible be. The almost amazing and unbelievable thing about the above is that the bone jarring portion of the road is in Sikkim while the smooth roads are in the DGHC. One would bet it would have been the other way round but the fact is that the road on the DGHC side is 200 times better than on the Sikkim side.
What this piece actually wants to say is that even though the grass always seems greener on the other side of a fence, the fact is that the grass on our side, at times, too could be better groomed, more lush and is any day more useful!!!
Propagators and supports of the weird “Darjeeling – Sikkim Merger” theory should take note!!!.