Srinagar, Feb 13: Something unexpected of for kids to see is doing the rounds of the City’s sole Children’s Park at Hazuri Bagh. The recreation spot, meant exclusively for minors, with all swings, toons and a skating pool around, for now is a dating point for couples. Irked, many say if not anything else the authorities should change the park entry norms by restricting it to the typical one-liner: only for adults.
 This is what parents, including senior separatist leader Shahid-Ul-Islam had to say after visiting the park with kids.
 For Shahid, the recent visit, his maiden, came as a bolt from the blue when the loving father couldn’t turn down the long pending desire of his two daughters who had been longing for the park recreation.
 While driving down with the family head from their Sanat Nagar residence –Shahid’s kids –studying at a leading Missionary school –happened to see the park gate open. And this was when the duo, literally started shouting: Children’s Park! Children’s Park!
 The father obviously surrendered before the family sloganeering as he parked his sedan and purchased the entry tickets: Rs 10 for self and Rs 2 each for the kids, eldest of whom studies in 2nd standard.
 The family rushed into the park and the kids jumped onto the swings while Shahid, a moderate clean shaved face of the Mirwaiz Hurriyat faction, looked for a bench to sit. And, this was when he got the shock.
 “I saw a young couple hugging each other compromisingly in a manner beyond narration,” he recaps adding the very next moment he looked for some other place to sit.
 “But what I saw was that there were couples including young teenagers all around… On the benches, behind the bushes,” the Hurriyat leader says adding it was too awkward to be present at such a place.
 The father cursed his decision of bringing the kids there even as he asked them for an immediate pack-up.
 “I didn’t want them to get even a glimpse of what was happening there so in no time I made them rush out the way we had trooped in, running,” Shahid told Greater Kashmir.
 Other parents too have similar tales to narrate while the complaints of residents of adjacent Maharaja Bazar are no different.
 “Since my childhood this park had been a place for family recreation and we would enjoy spending evenings here. But now this place is just not worth that,” complained Showkat Hussain, a local adding that the scene at adjoining Dr Sir Muhammad Iqbal park was no better. “Infact its worst there,” he adds.
 The complaints of Public Display of Affection (PDA) at the twin parks, in Kashmir’s conservative society, are pouring in despite the fact that the police some years back reportedly installed CCTV cameras there.
 “For now the CCTV could be capturing the PDA for reasons better known to those at the helm of affairs,” the Hurriyat leader argues.
 Interestingly, the Children’s Park, which remained abandoned for some years after the start of militancy in this trouble-torn region in the Himalayas, finally got a new lease of life in 2006 when Chief Minister Omar Abdullah, a then Member Parliament developed it on modern lines out of his constituency development fund.
 While inaugurating the park, then named Gulshah-e-Atfaal Children’s Park, Omar enjoyed roller skating with kids there.
 On December 15, Omar had “dedicated the park to the children of Kashmir from whom the last 17 years has extracted the highest price of lost innocence and a lost childhood.”
 Five years on, the park seems to have outgrown the age of children!

Lastupdate on : Sun, 13 Feb 2011 21:30:00 Makkah time
Lastupdate on : Sun, 13 Feb 2011 18:30:00 GMT
Lastupdate on : Mon, 14 Feb 2011 00:00:00 IST