It's not a comparison that Barodians -- who think of themselves as unlike all other Gujaratis -- will be proud of, but their city was going the Surat way. Journalists who had covered the plague there recognised the signs and reckoned that it was only a matter of time before a similar tragedy occurred here.

Within the past two months, however, Vadodara has swept away -- or literally demolished -- some of the murky past, helped by the fact that it had new incumbents in the top three administrative posts: municipal commissioner, district collector and police chief. Inthe station area, gone are the innumerable stalls that narrowed the road and added to the littering. The scars are fresh; some traders, having demolished their illegal structures, operate with just a table and a chair until they can find someplace else to go.

The most satisfactory fallout of the drive is the fear of God it has inspired. Many illegal structures have been demolished suo motu by their owners. Walking past a grocery store late one night, I saw the owner in an agitated state, his concrete facade in the process of being demolished. I asked him what the Vadodara Municipal Corpor-ation was doing that late at night. He replied that this wasn't the VMC at work, he was doing it before they could lay their hands on his shop.

There are those who grumble that it's all too little, too late, but as any Surti will tell you, nothing is ever too late. Surat survived the plague and only then did S.R. Rao begin his much-acclaimed refurbishing exercise. But, as already mentioned, Barodians dislike comparisonswith other Gujaratis...Undeserved honorific: Vadodara takes pride in being called the cultural capital of Gujarat, the state's sanskarnagri. It's a title from the glory days of Maharaja Sayajirao's rule in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when Baroda State led the way in reforms.

Sayajirao was one of the few enlightened rulers in British India. He encouraged women's education, often going to the villages himself and choosing girls to be sent abroad. He was a patron of the arts, drawing to his court the painter Nandalal Bose and the singer Ustad Faiyyaz Ahmed Khan, among others. He employed the best administrative brains as his dewans, including R.C. Dutt and Sir V.T. Krishnamachari. He was nationalistic, too, the only Indian ruler to turn his back on the King-Emperor at the Delhi Durbar in 1911. And of course, he gave shelter and support to B.R. Ambedkar when the rest of the country spurned him. Not bad for a village lad adopted by the then ruler and groomed as hissuccessor.

So if Vadodara has a surfeit of royal memorabilia, it's probably not unwarranted. What is unwarranted, though, is the sanskarnagri honorific. Time was when city life revolved round the Maharaja Sayajirao University, among the best in the land, its magnificent buildings reflecting the quality of the faculty and students. The Fine Arts department was modelled on, and rivalled, Tagore's Santiniketan.

Today the MSU has fallen victim to student politics and administrative apathy. It is without a registrar, its vice-chancellor is due to retire and a departmental dean has chosen to go on a sabbatical abroad. In the past few weeks, the university beat has seen regular stories of student unrest. There is still good work being done, notably in tribal studies, but the university no longer does justice to the man whose name it bears.