Two Englishmen entered my life when I was a schoolboy in Wardha: Mr. Bachelor and Mr. Reginald Craddock.
A long road runs from the Wardha railway station to Arvi Naka—today three kilometres of life and noise—full of doctors, banks, petrol pumps, shops and mangal karyalayas. In the mid-sixties, my father bought a house on this road. That is where I grew up. The address read simply: Jaishree Bhavan, Bachelor Road, Wardha.
For years, I wondered who Bachelor was. Was this a road meant for bachelors? Surely not.
Much later, I learnt that Wardha, my small Vidarbha town, was once a model of order and symmetry. Laid out in 1866, it was among the earliest planned towns in British India—long before Chandigarh was imagined. Two Englishmen, Sir Reginald Craddock and Sir Bachelor, designed it with precision—broad boulevards, open squares, and measured grace. To honour one of them, the British named this stretch “Bachelor Road.”
That is the Wardha they built. The Wardha I know is different. The wide streets have narrowed, hemmed in by rows of shops leaning into each other, their signboards jostling for space. Buses, bikes, and autos clog every inch of the road once meant for horse carts. Parking is a daily battle. The town that once yawned at dawn and slept at dusk now hums all day, restless and hurried. Its quiet beauty lies buried beneath the din of progress.
Time, as always, changed everything. The British names faded; Indian ones took their place. Bachelor Road became Dr. J. C. Kumarappa Road—named after a man who worked shoulder to shoulder with Mahatma Gandhi.
From his modest home in Maganwadi—just off this road—Dr. Kumarappa dreamed of an India built around its villages. A pioneer of Gandhian economics, he believed in dignity of labour, local self-reliance, and industries that strengthened rather than stripped the countryside. Maganwadi itself carries history: it was here that Gandhi first stayed when he arrived in Wardha in 1934. When the road was renamed in the early seventies, few took notice. But to senior citizens, it felt as if the town had stepped out of the empire’s shadow into its own light.
And Mr. Craddock? He, too, shaped my world. Between 1964 and 1968, I studied in a Marathi-medium school that bore his name—Craddock School. Its red brick walls stood firm under the blazing Wardha sun, its classrooms echoing with recitations, punishments, and dreams. The school had a proud tradition of excellence—Abhay Bang and Ulhas Jajoo were among its shining alumni.
In 1968, when the Zilla Parishad took over, the school shed its colonial name and became Mahatma Gandhi Vidyalaya. I was in the eighth standard then, watching a signboard come down and another go up—watching history change its clothes.
Strange, isn’t it? Two Englishmen—one who planned the streets I walk on, the other who lent his name to the school that taught me to dream. Curious histories, curious names. Yet both guided my journey in ways I couldn’t see then.
A town planned by Englishmen, a road that honours a Gandhian, a school renamed by a free nation—all quietly shaped my life. Perhaps that’s how destiny works: through streets we cross every day, through names on fading signboards, through histories that live on, not in monuments, but in memory.