The uglification of Bangalore seems well and complete.
Our individual and collective silence has done us in
As with all such pieces, I open with a set of bulleted
incidents that happened in the heart of Bangalore. Bangalore, mind you, not
Bengaluru, because the focus of this article is the quadrant of the erstwhile
Cantonment area.
A couple of young women are on MG Road around noon on a
Sunday, having met for lunch. As they stroll towards their restaurant, they
come across a group of young men, about their age, definitely people like them.
One of them reaches out and grabs the breasts of one of the women. The feisty
kind, she reacts immediately and slaps him. He hits her back. Hard. She raises
her arm involuntarily and he hits her again. After which, the men walk on,
without a care in the world. There is no cop anywhere around. Passers-by watch
silently, avoiding the victim’s eye.
Areas like Indiranagar have been buying water for a decade
now. Complaints, written and oral, to the area water board office meet with the
standard response. After every fourth visit you make, they send a man who takes
a less-than-cursory look at the water meter/ lever and pronounces with sagacity
that there is an air leak / that you were stupid enough to build your house on
a higher elevation so naturally the water flow has stopped/ your water pipes
all need replacing and so on and so forth. Everything but the words that you so
desperately want to hear: that this afternoon, for an hour or so, they will
open the valves and let some water flow into your sump. Sometimes the man tells
you that, too. You wait all afternoon and evening but not a drop falls. So you
buy water and factor that into your household expenses. Come summer, the water
mafia kicks into operation, so you end up paying double the rate virtually
overnight.
Overnight, speed breakers come up on almost every street in
your locality. A close look will reveal even to the untrained eye, that these
DIY speed breakers are citizen’s initiatives, sharp-edged mounds created just
to have motorists avoid your lane and take the next one.
The SUV cab (it almost always is a cab) brushes against a
BMW and the owners get out. Except, one gets out with a car jack. It’s pretty
clear how he intends to settle the matter. Other motorists avert their eyes and
wait for the light to change so they can speed away.
As for our so-called leaders, their brazen and unscrupulous
behaviour happens for just one primary reason: we have allowed it to happen. We
have allowed them to treat the Vidhana Soudha like they would their dens at
home, to watch porn in all comfort and ease. We have allowed them to let all
development slow to a creaking pace. We have allowed them to keep offering
largesse to temples while we go without our basic necessities. We have
sanctioned all of it.
Rowdyism is percolating, infiltrating into the body civic,
the body politic, up, down, sideways, everywhere. Cardholding rowdies hack each
other in busy marketplaces. The men in black coats, our saviours in the courts,
frequently lose their cool and pick up stones. Men empty mouthfuls of paanlaced
spittle on to young women walking down quiet roads. A couple of expat women I
know gave up walking in the park after they noticed young men sitting on stone
benches and taking their photographs on their mobile phones.
Garden City to Garbage City, the transformation, the
degradation, has been relentless. Today most of our streets are dotted with
litter, sometimes a huge stinking pile just beneath a notice on the wall that
says ‘Do not dump garbage here.’ We used to have sturdy iron bins at street
corners but someone decided to do away with them. We didn’t protest…did we even
notice…and so they vanished. In their place came the intermittent garbage men
and women. They were supposed to pick up the neatly segregated garbage you left
outside your gate. Except, they don’t come more than twice a week.
The Garbage City (and it pains me, as someone who has
‘belonged to’ Bangalore for almost three decades now) has an alter ego, that of
Construction City. In most areas, there is endless construction activity going
on, iron rods and heaps of sand, bags of cement encroaching on road space.
There is a fine haze of cement and sand dust hovering in the air everywhere.
Cement mixers and heavy-duty vehicles manoeuvre their way onto small streets.
Mall upon mall comes up and no one talks of mall fatigue. Exclusive luxe
apartments offer a swimming pool with each flat, and no one talks of the
nearnil water tables in the area. This is zombified building. No prizes for
guessing who the zombies are.
Forget the aam admi, we have had our captains of industry
gently and not so gently pointing out that good roads are not a luxury but a
basic necessity for any growing city. Their words too, have fallen into the
Bermuda triangle of indifference, negligence and contempt.
This Bangalorean silence is selective silence. We yell when
someone hits our vehicle. We fight with our neighbours on points of
encroachment. The more evolved and caring of us protest when trees are
mercilessly and unnecessarily cut down. We protest at senseless murders, the
withdrawal of our essential rights. But these protests happen in spurts. So
those who are smarter than us wait for the protests to die down. After which,
it’s back to business as usual for them.
As with all cities that start to bulge at the seams
accommodating ‘outsiders’ and becoming what the labelers like to call a
‘melting pot culture,’ something vital is lost in the transformation. In
Bangalore, the list of things lost is a long one. Quiet roads, a quiet people,
bicycles, Momand- Pop stores. The shade of many-branched trees down avenue
after avenue. A certain innocence which let young men and women do their own
things without always being on the lookout for attack. A disinclination to pull
a number on your neighbour, a strong inclination to live and let live.
Have we frittered our assets away in this hitherto lovely
city of ours? Can we take back the city? I wonder.
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