India, Nov. 26 -- The journey to the mountains has always been a rite of passage. It was never just about the destination; it was about the journey itself - the slow, winding ascent from the plains, where the air gradually thins and cools and the world outside your window transforms from a dusty beige to an overwhelming green. This was the magic of Himachal Pradesh. Today, that magic is being bulldozed, quite literally, to make way for a new, faster Himachal - one crisscrossed with four-lane highways that are, ironically, strangling the very beauty they are meant to showcase. For decades, the old roads, narrow and serpentine, were not just thoroughfares but viewing galleries. They forced you to slow down, to meander through apple orchards brushing against your car windows, to stop at a sudden bend to let a herd of goats pass, and in that pause, to behold a valley so profound it silenced all conversation. These roads were woven into the fabric of the landscape, not imposed upon it. They were part of the experience, the prelude to the peace of destinations like Manali, Shimla and Dharamshala. Today, however, that rhythm lies broken. Hillsides gape with wounds from blasting, springs run muddy, and trees - those green guardians of the slopes - lie in heaps of timber. The promise of beauty is traded for the rhetoric of speed. What remains resembles not the Himachal of memory but a wasteland of uprooted slopes. TS Eliot's lines return unbidden: "A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, /And the dead tree gives no shelter." The road trip, which once felt like a gentle introduction to the Himalayas, has started looking like a never-ending construction site. Does anyone ask the visitor whether he wants such progress? Families heading to Shimla never complain of slowness. Friends on their way to Manali don't curse the bends that compel them to pause. In fact, those pauses - the waterfalls, the curves, the unexpected orchards - are the substance of their holidays. Tourists never clamour for four lanes. They come, instead, to escape them. The irony could not be sharper. In the name of development, Himachal endangers the very source of its livelihood. When valleys are stripped and trees gone, what remains to offer the weary traveller? Another sterile highway, its speedometer mocking the silence it destroys? Development here feels less like progress and more like the arid modernity Eliot sketches - efficient, restless, and yet profoundly joyless. The choice is not between development and stagnation. Himachal needs good roads. But good roads need not mean destructive ones. Two-lane highways, designed with sufficient passing bays, proper drainage, and slope reinforcement, could have met the requirements of safety and convenience without destabilising the environment, demonstrating how infrastructure can be integrated into fragile ecosystems with far greater sensitivity. In our rush to make the state more accessible, we are in grave danger of making it less desirable. We must ask ourselves: Are we building roads to reach paradise, or are we, in the process, paving over paradise itself? Mountains are not plains. They resist being measured in kilometres saved. They demand patience, reverence, and humility. The mountains have offered us their grandeur for generations. It would be a profound tragedy if our legacy to them is one of concrete and dust. The tragedy is not simply environmental. It is cultural, even spiritual. The hills were never meant to be conquered in haste. They are meant to slow us down, to remind us that beauty and peace cannot be measured by a stopwatch. Unless we remember this, the four-lane highway will not lead us into Himachal's heart. It will only lead us further into a wasteland of our own making....