Srinagar is alive again. Walk along the Boulevard on any morning this summer and you feel it immediately. Shikara oars cutting through the Dal. Houseboats welcoming families from Chennai, Pune, Delhi and places much further away. Market lanes around Lal Chowk thick with voices speaking a dozen languages, all of them happy to be here. Kashmir is having its moment and it deserves every bit of it.
But drive through those same streets at five in the evening and something else greets you. Horns layered on horns. A bus half-parked on a narrow lane near Residency Road turning three lanes into one. A tourist cab stopped in the middle of the Boulevard while its passengers photograph the lake. A local commuter who has been sitting in the same spot for forty minutes watching his evening disappear.
A city’s roads are a mirror. They show you how a place treats its own people when things get crowded. They show you what a visitor carries home alongside photographs of the Mughal gardens and the taste of kehwa. Right now that mirror is showing something we should not be comfortable with.
Nobody is entirely to blame. But everybody is a little bit to blame. And that means everybody has something to fix.
To every driver on these roads, this city is your responsibility. The shikara walla whose season depends on tourists reaching the ghat without frustration. The family that drove fourteen hours to see Dal Lake now sitting in a jam wondering if it was worth it. Their experience is in your hands every time you sit behind a wheel. Slow down near tourist spots. Park where you are supposed to park. Stop treating your horn as a first response rather than a last resort.
To our visitors, please understand that these roads are also how a nurse reaches a patient and how a schoolchild gets home. When you stop mid-lane to take a photograph you are sitting inside someone’s ordinary day. Travel with that awareness.
To the traffic police, the appeal is direct. Peak tourist hours do not end at sunset. The Boulevard fills in the evening, dinner cruises return after dark, night markets run late. Yet this is precisely when visible presence thins and unmanaged hours begin. Extend your active hours. Put personnel at the bottlenecks everyone who drives this city can already name. Tow wrongly parked vehicles consistently, not occasionally. When a tourist sees an officer standing alert at nine in the evening, something shifts in how they behave.
A tourist who travels from Lal Chowk to Nishat without losing patience comes home and describes Kashmir differently. That word of mouth is worth more than any promotional campaign. Equally, a Srinagar resident who commutes without daily exhaustion carries a different kind of pride in their city.
Srinagar is shining this summer. Let its roads shine too.
