Once upon a time this campus was "A Thing of Beauty"

A little more than three hundred meters walk from the CMS college campus, one reaches the Baker junction.  The scene shifts from the serene to the atrocious.  The junction is the bottle neck of the Kottayam town. At any time there are at least a hundred vehicles waiting  for the traffic police man’s permission to crawl forward.  Yet I will not say that “if there is ever a madding crowd on earth, it is here, it is here, it is here”.  It is almost the same everywhere in India. In any unplanned  city in India one can see such long vehicle queues burning hundreds of thousands of gallons of scarce imported fuel each moment. And adding to the misery forever  to the bottle neck of Kottayam, right in the midst of it came up a shopping Mall called the “Mall of Joy”. I think any chance for a little joy for the junction in the future too has been sealed. This junction would still have been beautiful but for the indiscriminate construction of the shopping complex bordering the Baker Memorial High School for Girls during the 80's. My writing abilities are far too limited to describe the beauty of the then school campus. You have to go back some thirty thirty-five years in time.
 

In 1981 I came to Kottayam to attend  the interview for the post of Junior Lecturer in Physics in the CMS college  I alighted the bus near the Thirunakkara Maidanam  and started walking towards CMS not knowing the exact distance. There was only twenty minutes left for the interview.  I walked in the direction given by a stranger and was walking past  the Baker school campus. The present shopping complex was yet to come up and hide what was a “Thing of beauty” which would have remained a “Joy for ever”. I was awe-stricken by the beauty of the campus. I stood there for a while oblivious of the fact that time was ticking away.  Then also, I didn’t have the habit of reaching a place in time.  I, then in my twenties, could not be blamed as the beauty was simply mesmerising.  A sprawling campus with a low fence with vintage buildings in the shadow of trees transcended me to romantic levels, but I had to leave. Walking three hundred meters to the west I reached the CMS campus. My Goodness! I couldn’t believe. Despite coming from St: John’s college, Agra, the picturesque campus took me to sublime heights of aesthetics. But the impending interview forced me to crash land to reality.

I joined the CMS college and felt lucky to be in a place like that. The Baker School campus as much beautiful as the CMS campus, suddenly developed a look of gloom as if by some premonition. Danger happened soon. Globalisation and market economy were still Greek and Latin to most Indians. But the mandarins of the CSI establishment thought too much ahead of their times and decided to build a shopping complex almost around  the Baker school campus. The campus that breathed the air of freedom for centuries and blew the air of life into the near dead slavish existence of the oppressed class and imparted liberal education to girls when none in this part of our country ever thought of such a revolutionary idea, was soon to be caged. Even the caged can see the world and air can, though not freely, flow into it. But the money spinning citadel built around the Baker school isolated and insulated it from the rest of the world for all times to come. It did not stop there. I had mentioned about the vintage buildings. I should tell about the tragic fate of the most beautiful edifice there. Even the CMS campus cannot boast of having one like that.  This majestic structure now houses a tea shop called “Jewel Box”. Yes, this jewel of the campus has been reduced to a “Chayakkada”, of all the things in the world. I have heard many an alumnus lamenting over the cruelty meted out to the campus.  This certainly is a “Paradise lost”. With a “Pay and Park” place at the POOMUGHAM of the campus (of course whatever remains there as a campus) you never feel like entering a place sacrosanct.

 A thing of beauty is a Joy for only as long as it is preserved with love and veneration. The very few vintage architecture  that still remain are just the specks of tears on a glorious past. Sense of beauty or sense of history might not bring in dividends that can make the money chest ringing. But these alone will help the present to pass on to the future what was inherited from the past.