Over the decades, Mussoorie, once known as the queen of resorts and the resort of Kings, a hill station where time once stood still and people experienced a rare tranquility, has turned into a place which gives one the feeling that the rush and tumble of city life has made its way into the once quiet town and robbed it of its echoing silences. Its soul is now restless.
The jolly times of Mussoorie are long over. Even till twenty years ago, Mussoorie retained its fashionable trends of live bands, beauty contests and X'mas carnivals. An extremely cheerful atmosphere prevailed in summer and tourists stayed for longer periods and struck life-long friendships with other visitors to the hill station. Over the last one decade or so, things have changed dramatically and the 'weekend tourist' has taken over.
It was almost around 190 years ago (1823) when Frederick Young, the Irish army officer, founded landour and Mussoorie. lt. Young came to these hills for the sole purpose of bagging some game, peculiar to the hills. He was so enamoured of the surroundings that he decided to build a hunting lodge (shooting box) for his convenience. The shooting box had been set up in 1823 by Young and FJ Shore, who was the Joint Magistrate of Doon, on the Camel's Back Road. This can be called the first construction in Mussoorie.
After that, Young built his residence in landour and named it "Mullingar" after the city of this name in his native Ireland. Building after building, roads joining other roads, one civic facility following the other came to be installed in what must just be a couple of villages initially, but later on came to be called by the name of Mussoorie (named after Mansur, a local shrub).
The seventies and eighties were the heydays of the hill station with movies, fashion shows, beauty contests and live bands extremely popular. Morning shows at the various cinema halls were a great hit with every one and so were the late night shows. Picture Palace, the very first cinema to have come up in Mussoorie, is now a multiplex.
‘The Electric Picture Palace' to give it its original name, opened in 1912, soon after electricity came to the hill station. One of the country's earliest cinemas, it survived for 90 years. Besides Picture Palace, there were many other cinema halls in the town namely Vasu, Rialto, Basant, Roxy, Capitol and Jubilee. All have closed down now.Says Vikas Hari, whose grandfather, PC Hari, established the well-known Rialto cinema on the Mall Road in 1929, "The days of the cinema halls got over when people found alternatives like VCRs and later, cable TV. Till the mid-eighties, when people used to come with their families for long vacations, there used to be a crowd at the cinemas.
Things changed a lot by the beginning of the nineties".Many of the old sprawling hill homes have vanished. Bungalow-styled Kenneth lodge has changed to pragmatic Mahajan Villa; Catherine Villa to monolithic Jas Apartments; turreted Fairlawn Palace to pin-cushioned Kamal Towers; tin-roofed Heaven's Club to a characterless Shipra; brick-clad Madelsa House to a concrete Tibetan Nunnery; Kalsia Estate into Pearl Hotel & Shivam Hotel; Rock Cliffe to Avalon Resorts; tree-draped Arundale Cottage to deserted Priyank Apartments; oak-covered Sapling Estate to a building-block like MS Resorts; and honey-suckle laden Rosemary Cottage to plastic-palmed Oasis Hotel.