Part 2: Open for People

I have recently had some evolving thoughts on cities, transport, the environment, etc. This is the second part. I don't necessarily promise a third part. Click here for Part 1.

I arrived in Bengaluru around October 2021 after spending 3 years in Europe, mostly Rome, Italy. It was a chaotic time in most people's life, going back and forth between lockdowns and mask mandates and vaccine doses. It was particularly chaotic for those living in and around Malleswaram as Sampige road, a major, arterial road, was being "white-topped". I have written, whined, cursed and complained about this white-topping exercise multiple times in this blog before, but let me repeat what exactly it consists of. 

As far as I understand, "white-topping" is the media coinage for replacing tar roads with concrete roads. It also involves remaking the footpaths with concrete blocks, shifting all wiring, water and other pipes and cables underground in a metallic casing where it can easily be opened and repaired. This would avoid the need to dig the road for future maintenance work. The local Malleswaram MLA claimed that this was all work that was pending for several decades and that these few months of work would ensure that no roads would have to be dug or blocked for the next 100 years in the city. There could be some truth in this and overall, there was a certain streamlining of several parallel systems - no more electric poles for wires, no gaping holes in the footpath straight into the drainage. 

While this was work was ongoing however, there was complete and absolute chaos all along the streets of interior Malleswaram. Cars and scooters now thronged and choked these narrow streets, with long pile-ups reaching usually quiet and sedate residential streets. Every day a new road would be blocked and some other alternate route was suggested with little forethought or idea about the flow of traffic, with no prior warning. The streets were a nightmare to walk on. The holes and pits dug everywhere made them extremely dangerous and the construction dust was everywhere. Add on top of this constant rains throughout 2022 (the highest recorded by Bengaluru) and the incessant honking of vehicles. 

It was in the midst of this chaos that I found myself at the flower market right on Sampige road, buying flowers for an upcoming festival. As I was navigating through the sludge and construction debris and avoiding falling into the deep pits dug nearby, I actually noticed something - it was still somehow quite peaceful. The weather was nice. Sampige road is lined with large, shady trees that keep the surface reasonably cool even on the hottest days. Mostly importantly, there weren't any vehicles passing. No constant honking, no roar of loud engines, no smoke, no fear of being crushed to death under the wheels of a car with one small misstep. 

Under usual circumstances (for example, right now), the flower market takes up the entire footpath while there's a bus stop nearby. Heavy traffic whizzes by your shoulder as you are forced to walk right on the street. There are cars parked at random simply on the side of the street which completely puts the flow of traffic out of gear. This leads to more block-ups, more honking and more vehicles willing to speedily snake in and out of lanes between other vehicles, putting pedestrians at even more risk. 

I had a random thought - what if Sampige road just remained closed for traffic at all times. I am cognisant of the fact that Sampige road is an important link between the central areas of the city (Market, Majestic, MG Road) and the north - north-west of the city (Yashvantpura, Peenya, Jalahalli). Let's ignore that for the moment. 

Even with the traffic and terrible footpaths and vehicles parked everywhere and vendors occupying large parts of the footpath, Sampige road is thronged by pedestrians. It's a major shopping centre and becomes extremely crowded during festivals. Navigating 8th cross Malleswaram, a famous shopping street, is also fraught with danger under normal circumstances. This narrow street has a large volume of traffic and is filled with pedestrians. Why not let the pedestrians walk and breathe in peace? 

In the section of Sampige road where there was no active work going on but was still closed, the shop-keepers had brought their wares right on to the streets. The people were bustling on the street, buying, bargaining. Parents were more relaxed about which direction their kids were running. One misstep might cause a child to trip and fall on hard concrete, but at least he/she wouldn't be hit by a 1000 kilogram box of steel. 

"You don't close the street to traffic, you open the street to people". 

I have stayed in Europe for a few years now, visited quite a few cities and towns. A trip to Europe is on everyone's bucket list. We love to take pictures of beautiful city-centres with cobbled-stone alleys and street markets, maybe the dome of a church in the background. Beautiful walks along rivers, posing in front of monuments. Now imagine if there wasn't a park in front of the Eifel tower but hundreds of honking cars and vehicles on a regular, busy Parisian street. Or the Colosseum being ringed by broad streets full of heavy traffic. 

The point isn't that Rome or Paris don't have traffic issues. However, when they want to put their best foot forward, when they want tourists to have a good time and visit again and again and bring in all that revenue, they eliminate cars and vehicles from the setting. They plant trees or set-up a lawn or a garden, block traffic and allow people to move around. How often do you hear about a collision between two people being fatal? A large congregation of people leads to a lively hum of festivity and chatter, not honking and smoke. 

When vehicles pass through a crowd of pedestrians, it's always extremely unpleasant for pedestrian and driver, while also being dangerous. If you ever walk down 8th cross Malleswaram from Margosa Road to Sampige Road on any given evening, you will see it unfold right in front of your eyes. Two-wheelers irresponsibly whizzing past crowds of people. Auto-rickshaw drivers who assume that if they race down the road constantly blowing their horns, they gain some God-given right to the road-space. 

It's the same with Eat-Street in VV Pura. It's the same with Church Street - Church Street was converted into a pedestrian only street, but I don't know why that was changed. Cubbon Park is closed to vehicles on Sundays - and you immediately see the huge crowds that turn up.

In India however, there's an even bigger problem - cars which aren't being used. Walk on any street and just look at how much public space, whether road space or pedestrian space, is occupied by cars just parked there. This might be outside private homes because people don't want to use precious and over-inflated real estate on car-parking. Or it might be on busy roads, where every cosy corner is taken up by some parked vehicle. (try to count the number of parked cars on the sides of this rather broad street in the picture below!) Even if two-wheelers are the culprits often in clogging up the streets and extremely wayward, dangerous driving, ultimately the space crunch is caused by the large number of cars. Bengaluru has an insane 1.16 crore private vehicles! 1.6 lakh cars were registered in fiscal year 2023-24 alone. 

This while road networks have remained the same apart from a few flyovers or widened roads here and there. Bus fleet number has remained stagnant for more than a decade. And progress on the metro has been quite slow. The situation is particularly dire given that compared to other metropolitan cities in the world, the city fares very poorly in road density (km of road per square km). It's around 1/3rd of Delhi, for example. There simply is no space, and no space to add more space.

That doesn't mean cars don't have their utility - cars and roadways are often the only way to reach certain areas. Personal cars are a lifeline in times of emergencies. They're sometimes essential for older people or those with disabilities. And let's face it, they're great marvels of engineering and amazing machines! But when they're everywhere in cities and people are forced to slink away, then they become an intrusion.

In fact, I would argue that genuine car-lovers, those who love driving for entertainment must be the strongest advocates of eliminating cars and private vehicles from public places in cities as much as possible. Pedestrians, unlike cars, are easy to manage and manoeuvre and occupy very little space. Let the streets be freer for people and for car users, by taking cars off the streets.

Part 1 - The scale of Bengaluru

I have recently had some evolving thoughts on cities, transport, the environment, etc. This is the first part. I don't necessarily promise a second part. 

I remember the first time I walked past the Jalahalli metro station in northern Bengaluru. There was something fearsome and intimidating about it. Fast moving trucks and buses zipping past you, their loud honks echoing off those tall, imposing, grey concrete pillars. The air was dusty and filled with the sounds of the city. You couldn't see the sky or much green - mostly the light brown of dust and the gray of concrete. 

It was one of the first times Bengaluru had tripped me up. I grew up in the quieter, older part of Bengaluru, close to Malleswaram (technically within Malleswaram by pincode, but there exist Malleswaram purists who will contest this claim). For me Bengaluru consisted of the central part of the city (MG Road, Cubbon Park and surrounding areas), Malleswaram (home), Rajajinagar (school), Jayanagar (cousin's home) and Lalbagh (on the route from home to cousin's home). Cantonment, RT Nagar, Ulsoor, Indiranagar, these were areas I knew reasonably well because my father's office was in the Eastern part of the city while the Western parts of the city were familiar because my school was a bit to the west and most of my schoolmates had their homes in that part of the city. 

Growing up, I had the theoretical knowledge that Bengaluru was expanding absolutely rapidly but I had never truly experienced it first hand. I didn't really go around much during my school days apart from Sunday mornings to play cricket or football. Those in my family would also mention how IISc was considered to be in an isolated area to the north of the city, to be avoided after dark. Or how South End Circle was so named because it really was the southern end of the city. I hadn't really spent much time in the core areas of KR Market or Chikpete.

I left Bengaluru to go to college at 18 and it was only there that I really started to be "out-going" in the literal sense of the word - moving around for the sake of moving around and entertainment. I returned in 2017 at age 22 for an internship at ICTS, "Bengaluru". ICTS is really located in a remote area, surrounded by green fields and connected to the main city by a solitary bus route. I once missed the shuttle bus that plied between IISc and ICTS. Rather than wait for the next one, I decided I would plot a way to reach ICTS on my own. I got on a bus that I knew went roughly north with some idea about which way it would go. (In hindsight, I really don't know why I didn't just check google maps!) 

I don't completely recall the exact details of the day - The bus made a turn where I didn't expect it to make a turn and I realised I was wrong about its destination. So I got off at the next place and decided to walk towards Jalahalli metro station. 

My logic was airtight - ICTS was to the north of the city and Jalahalli metro station was on the green line which ran North-South. So if I went north, I would get closer to ICTS and somehow reach there eventually.

When I started walking towards Jalahalli, I whipped out my phone to see how long it would take. About an hour, said Gooogle. I was absolutely stumped!! 

I'd checked on the map before, they were right next to each other. I'd have guessed the distance to be 3 km at the most. 

I was completely wrong. The reason I was wrong was because if the map was zoomed out enough that my home (Malleswaram) and Jalahalli were both visible, the map scale was large. Two points that look adjacent could actually be quite well separated. I felt Jalahalli is "right there", just a bit north of Yeshvantpur, which was a bit north of Malleswaram. These bits of north, however, add up really quickly. And once distances get so large, you can go north in a slightly different angle and end up 6 km away from Jalahalli instead of the presumed 2. 

I quickly jumped on a passing autorickshaw and asked him to take me to Jalahalli and this was how I found myself at Jalahalli station. 

Jalahalli station was actually quite familiar to me in a different way.  When I visited home from college, I would usually take the overnight bus and arrive in Bengaluru in the morning. The bus-route coming in from the north ran parallel to the metro line. The usual routine was that the bus would stop for breakfast at a restaurant near Chitradurga at around 6 am. I would eat a piping hot Vada dipped in saambar and feel glad to be back well south of the Vindhyas. 

With my stomach and soul thus satisfied, I would happily watch the scenery go by as we approached Bengaluru, the city of my childhood. Reaching the northernmost station of the metro line was a sign that home was quite close now, and I would eagerly watch the trains plying up and down, trying to recall the exact order of the stations that passed by. I thus knew the general lay of the land, though from the comfort of an AC bus. 

In hindsight I think I can pinpoint exactly what about Jalahalli station that day made me feel intimidated - it was the first time I felt like I'm in a big city. A bustling metropolis, where my existence was miniscule and insignificant. It was that day that I realised the scale of the city. Prior to that, walking the streets of the older parts of the city that I knew very well, I felt like a minor Lord of the land. It all felt very familiar, like home. (idh ella namdhe adda type feels)

Now I've grown accustomed to discovering entire swathes of Bengaluru housing lakhs of people that I've never heard of. The regions that newcomers to the city know as the heart of the city - HSR layout, Electronic City, Whitefield, Sarjapur, Sahakarnagar - these are completely foreign lands to me. 

Something fundamental about my map of the city changed that day - Bengaluru ceased to be a "human-scale" city in my mind. It never was a human-scale city even when I was growing up. But it was close enough that I could build that illusion in my head. And either way, apart from some trips to Jayanagar, a large part of my life played out within a circle with a radius about 4-5 km, with a majority of that being in a circle with radius 1 km. My grandfather's house, shops, stores, doctors, etc. were all within a short walk away.

A human-scale city is a city where a reasonably fit human being can be expected to reach anywhere expending his/her own energy - either by walking or by bike. And there was something more comforting about believing I'm in a human-scale city.

PS - To complete the story, I realised that going north of Jalahalli on the metro would leave me in complete no-man's land with respect to reaching ICTS. I actually took an auto back from Jalahalli station to where I came from and took another bus going towards ICTS, got down mid-way where I knew the shuttle bus stopped.

Trapped in Algorithm

I have the habit of scrolling through comments on youtube videos while listening to videos - this is especially the case for songs, since it's the audio rather than the video that is of interest. Most of the comments are cliched and inane, some deeply personal and poignant and there is always a sprinkling of genuinely unhinged comments where you hope the commenter is seeing a therapist or has friends in the real world. 

On the video to a rather popular, mainstream song (it has over 900 million views), I read a comment that said "I really miss this song". I paused for a moment to understand the comment - how can you miss a song that you can choose to listen to anytime you want? Pretty much every song ever made is a few clicks of a button away for most people.

I pondered a bit and understood what the commenter meant - it wasn't that he/she missed the song, but rather the time period in which the song came out. I'm sure we all have this - you listen to a song and this takes you back to a very very particular time when the song was popular or when you first came across the song and heard it several times within a short period. 

The songs of the movie gaaLipatta take me back to the summer holidays of 2008, when I would spend the entire holidays either with my cousin visiting my home or vice versa, and most of the days were spent playing cricket on the street. The songs of Yeh Jawaani hai deewani remind me of the monsoon in Pune, since the movie was released in the rainy season of 2013, around the time I shifted from Bengaluru to Pune for college. That year saw a particularly rainy August in Pune and I enjoyed my initial days on campus, away from the city and traffic, surrounded by hills and greenery. (A funny aside - in that period I had just switched from a rudimentary Nokia phone-brick to my first smartphone. The Nokia phone could store at most 2-3 song files before running out of memory, one of them being the song Kabira from this movie. I somehow transferred this song file to my shiny new smart-phone and so it was the one song that I could listen to in the days of 100 MB/month of 2G internet. My flatmate said that whenever he wanted to find me, he would just wait for 5 minutes and move in the direction from which he could hear Kabira playing. :D )

Somehow these songs get interspersed with your life and memories. And nostalgia is always sweet - hindsight makes everything feel sweeter. You might have been miserable in the winter of 2015, but listening to a song associated with this period will make you feel like you are being reminded of some "good old days". I guess the point isn't that the days were good - more that the company of the song was good, even if the times were generally miserable. 

I have a set of songs which take me back to a very particular time in my school  days - those were the days when the bus driver would switch on the radio on the school bus. And the radio would also keep me company while I studied late in the night. When the wind was blowing in the right direction and it was late enough that the general noise of traffic in the city had died down, it was possible to hear the sound of a train horn from the window in my room. Whenever I visit home, even the distant sound of the train horn late at night is enough to bring back a flood of memories, a feeling of being transported back in time.

Recently I was doing some routine chores on my own with some music playing on youtube and something about the list of songs chosen by the youtube algorithm annoyed me - it was repetitive. I had heard the same songs in almost the same order a few days prior. I scrolled through the list of songs in the automatically curated playlists and saw the same theme - they were all songs I had relentlessly listened to in the previous few months. They weren't recently released songs - some were old songs. But they were all songs I had recently searched for. 

Maybe this is particular to the Youtube algorithm rather than algorithms in general, but the repetitiveness of the songs youtube suggests has started to get on my nerves. Songs that made me feel pleasant a few weeks ago now feel jarring. 

It's at times like these that I miss the days of the radio - it may seem quaint and naive, but I liked it when someone else made the choice of what I will listen to. What we have today is an excess of having exactly what we want all the time. We want the music that falls on our ears to exactly match our mood and mindset at that instant. And a small deviation can get us annoyed. And sometimes you want to listen to something, but you are not sure exactly what you want to listen to - all you know is that it's not any of the songs Youtube is recommending. 

In the days of the radio, or music channels on TV, you just made it through all those advertisements and annoying promotions by the host and listened to whatever was on. When it was exactly what matched your mood or it was the song that happened to be stuck in your head, you were overjoyed. If it wasn't, well, hey at least something was on. 

But for me this is beyond nostalgia - with radio, you got these songs that were insanely popular for a few weeks - they would play it literally every hour. And then they would fade away. You would forget them after a couple of months. But maybe 3 months later, you would hear it again. Then maybe 5 months later. It very naturally fades away and you move on slowly to the next nice thing. 

If you truly liked a particular song or a set of songs, you made the effort to go somewhere, actually pay money to buy a CD (or a casette if you're older than me), maybe painstakingly make your own compilation by burning some CDs. 

Today, we theoretically have all the options, but we are simply redirected constantly to the same stuff. When we had just one newspaper delivered home, we just read what was on it. Today we have information about almost any topic right at our fingertips and yet we easily get stuck in little echo-chambers of people who all think, speak and act in exactly the same way as us. There's no slow, constant change. 

You jump rapidly from one thing to the other, and somehow stay on the same things all the time.

Balance

"The basis of morality is the application to human life of the principles governing the universe, and the great principle of the universe is beauty."

Shri Aurobindo

My blog generally avoid topics related to my (modest) practice of and thoughts on religion. This is probably because I come from a family where my elders, particularly my (late) grandfather, are extremely well-versed in many aspects of religion and are far more disciplined and faithful practitioners than me, so I feel rather unqualified to hold forth on it.

In June 2022, I had been to Kedarnath and Badrinath in Uttarakhand for a darshan of Lord Shiva at Kedarnath and Shri Narayana at Badrinath. This wasn't my first time visiting this part of the Himalayas. I had visited Badrinath in 2007 with my family and there was a part of me deep inside that always wanted to return - something about the air and the majestic natural beauty there. At Dev Prayag, the rivers Bhagirathi and Alakananda flow into each other to be known as river Ganga. It is believed that the lands and mountains further upstream from Dev Prayag are no longer part of the earthly domain. Instead, they are inhabited by the Devas themselves.

I remember travelling along the winding mountain roads, the river Alakananda flowing far-away in the valley with an other-worldly blue hue. I remember marvelling at the mountains all around, their peaks seeming to penetrate the blue sky. There is something magnetic about these mountains that makes you want to keep returning there, to breathe the same air once again.

Before departing from Bengaluru to Badrinath back then, we had read about the boulders which frequently get dislodged from the mountain-side on to the road, often triggering landslides that sometimes hit vehicles. One report said that an entire bus was knocked off the road into the river below, claiming tens of lives. This was just a few days before we made our journey. 

Perhaps it was this memory that was fresh in my mind at that time, but at some point a thought entered my head - if I die here, it's alright. What a beautiful place to die. I still wonder from where this thought came to me. I was only 12 years old. I was not a fatalistic person as a child, nor am I one now. I had never grappled with such ideas. I had not yet really seen seen the death of anyone close or well-known to me.

My experience was not the same during last year's visit. There was construction debris and dust everywhere along the road from the plains to the Dhams. Relentless construction work and massive crowds made it look like the land of the BBMP rather than the Devas. It must be said that once you actually reach your destination, you leave behind what you felt during the journey and only feel happy that you have reached. 

A while after returning home, I quickly penned down some of my thoughts and feelings regarding what I saw. I had forgotten about this write-up in my mobile notes. The recent news on the danger of the town of Joshimath sinking entirely reminded me about the note and I felt it's worth reproducing.

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Dharma is an ultimate order of the universe - the laws that have to be followed and maintained, not because some person prefers them that way or deemed it to be the best way, but because the universe is that way. Any questions on why it is so can be taken up with the creator of the universe.

Every object, animate or inanimate, has a Dharma, a certain nature and a certain way that it has to be. Again, the reason is that it was so ordained. Not to minimise evil or "for the good", but because the creator manifests in the universe in this form. He is in every pebble and grain of sand, in His entirety.

When we interact with nature, we are interacting with the divine. When we interact with other people and animals, we are still interacting with the divine. And deep inside us, lives the divine, hoping to be realised. And when you realise It, you will become It, unshackled from this petty world of attachments and desires, anger and jealousy, hubris and illusions.

The order of the universe is balance. The order of nature is balance. We may take away from Her and plunder today, but we will fail in our Dharma.

When I visited Badrinath in 2007, I was still a very young boy, but it left a fairly deep impression on me. It was a sleepy, inaccessible town, deep in the mountains, bitterly cold with very few people visiting there and even fewer living. It was nature unspoiled.

I wouldn't call it divinity unspoiled, because divinity is always pristine, and can never be spoiled or soiled. The rose and the thorn are still expressions of the divine. The difference is in our accessibility to the divine. 

 

Why do we worship a particular stone and not another one when both have within them the divine? - Because in one stone, the divine presents Himself more easily to us. The truly learned man, who has attained ultimate wisdom, cannot see this difference. Mere mortals still chained to the endless cycle of birth and death are forced to reckon with this difference. 

But why do I speak here about nature, Dharma, balance, divinity and Badrinath?

I visited Kedarnath and Badrinath earlier this year, in the height of summer. While the plains were still sweltering in the searing sun, Kedarnath was still cold and almost hostile. Thunder and freezing rain welcomed us as we were weary from walking for over 12 hrs, around 20 km and a vertical ascent of one mile. And let us say one thing for sure - when you catch a sight of the temple, when you are standing there while the aarti is played on the loudspeaker, while every breath fogs in the air and you can longer feel your naked feet in the puddles of freezing rainwater as you wait to enter the temple, you understand that you are in the vicinity of divinity, accessible to everyone. A force that drives the universe through cycles of creation, preservation and destruction. Srushti, sthithi, gathi.

But the climb was very different. We witnessed a path completely covered with the excrement of horses, extreme crowds. It felt more like a marketplace on the eve of Ganesh Chaturthi or Sankranti than a walk up to a small town deep in the mountains. And the horses, oh the horses. The poor animals could hardly carry themselves up and down the arduous path, let alone the human atop them. They were battered and beaten by their caretakers, a cruelly ironic way to describe those young men who brutalised and terrorised scores of animals to take them to Kedarnath.

A few incidents remain etched in my memory. A man taking charge of more than one horse had one horse that was "misbehaving" by refusing to walk uphill and constantly slipping and falling in the slurry of dung, mud and rainwater. He had to go back and get this horse to behave. He handed his stick to his client atop the horse and said "Beat the bastard if he won't move."

The client recoiled. How can I, he asked earnestly, beat an animal, that too at a sacred site? He was a decent man who probably had no prior idea about how the horses were treated. He had already paid for the transport up the hill. He was clearly filled with guilt, but he also wished to glimpse the Lord at the end of the climb. He didn't wish to turn back after coming so far and he was physically incapable of climbing.

The trouble is that Kedarnath is MEANT to be a sleepy little, inaccessible town deep in the mountains. A few sturdy, locally bred horses that are sure-footed in the mountains could perhaps take a few devotees up to Kedarnath. They would be fed well, not suffer in the cold, be well-treated and allowed plenty of rest.

But if Kedarnath becomes a cool place to click a selfie for Instagram, if shopkeepers are eager for people to throng the site for the good business and the authorities too have a vested interest in keeping this economy alive, if we want development and 4-Lane highways, we must understand that we are destroying a carefully crafted, harmonious balance of nature. And it is we who pay the price, we who carry the sin of beating and overworking innocent animals to death. We who will look down to enjoy the flow of the surging Mandakini deep in the gorge only to be met by the site of plastic bottles swirling in her waters. Yes, we may have acted responsibly and thrown our used bottles in the garbage bin, but little did we know that the shopkeepers might not share our divine concern for the Earth and will simply overturn the filled bin straight into the river.

Yet, she roars on. She will roar forever, plastic or no plastic. We are around for a few days, is this what we want to leave behind? When we take more than what is meant for us, we also leave behind more. Upsetting the balance leads to the performance of Adharma. Adharma takes us further from salvation, tying us closer to rebirth, again and again. The Adharma of beating horses, destroying forests and desecrating divine lands.

Plastic high in the mountains, dust from construction, dammed rivers in seismically active areas, mistreated animals, but we get our 4-lane highways.

Jai Badri Vishal

To Run Free

In the summer of 2019 I bought myself a fitness tracking watch. It wasn't fancy at all. In fact it was a hopelessly rudimentary "tracker" that didn't even have in-built GPS to track a run. I still just wore it and amused myself by looking at my heart-rate during my runs. At least I had a stop-watch on hand. 

I used to "track" my runs by visiting google maps after my runs and painstakingly redrawing the route I took. It was annoying because google constantly tries to optimise the distance, so if you ran from point A to point B, you need to add several stops enroute to retrace your path exactly. Further, I would run on pure instinct and go down random streets just to look around - a nice way to explore my locality, but it made my runs harder to track. 

If someone back then asked me my best 5k pace, I would have no idea. I never really thought about tracking my runs, firstly because I didn't know others were doing it and secondly, because I felt this is contrary to the spirit of running. Running for me was always about pure joy and instinct. Run as far and fast as you possibly can just to feel the high. I had no fitness goals, no target body-weight, nothing. Measuring your runs and trying to improve your numbers felt like something that would kill the joy of running. 

At some point, a couple of my friends took to posting screenshots of their runs from Nike's run-tracking app. And another friend bought me a fanny pack for my birthday, since he knew I go on runs occasionally and he thought it would be useful for me to carry stuff on the run. Before that I never carried my phone on runs - just my home-keys and a 5 Euro note. The 5 Euro note was in case I was feeling faint and needed to rush into a store to buy a chocolate or an energy drink. I've never had to use it, but I still always carry a few Euros with me. 

I disliked carrying my phone because of how they bounce around in the pockets and also because I felt that my running time doubled-up as my break from screens and devices and gadgets. It was the time to let my mind wander and just enjoy the outside world to live in the moment.

Once I had my new fanny pack, I could carry my phone. The truth is that no matter how much you hate the fact that you're addicted to your phone, you remain addicted to it. And you will carry it with you every chance you get. I started taking my phone with me and started tracking my runs on the Nike app. The joy for running being killed by numbers and statistics? Screw that, let's play with this new toy! 

The trouble with numbers is this weird human desire for nice, round numbers, whole numbers or numbers that are direct multiples of the number of fingers we have. I would run maybe 5.8 km and feel like stopping, and then say wait, why not round off the last 200 metres to make it a nice 6 km run? 

This was also an unseasonably cold spring in Rome, with temperatures staying close to 0 degrees for long periods even in March. Something about the pandemic made me want to be outdoors and be physically active - I had hated staying cooped up indoors for months and months with seemingly no end in sight.

I ran in forced, small bursts throughout the late winter and spring until it paid off in the summer. Once the weather got warmer, I truly hit my stride, going on some really long runs, covering distances I never thought I could. 

Running brings me a very deep joy. So doing it in an unstructured way, doing it instinctively and just for the heck of it gives great joy as well! Structuring it and chasing statistics can make it more of a chore than it should be. What I eventually realised though, is that being structured and strategic about it makes you a better runner, so it can bring you even more joy in the long run (pun intended). 

I found this out in April and May of 2021 when I ran over 250 km in just these two months, distances I tracked with my running app on my phone that I carried in my fanny pack. It still wasn't extremely structured, for I didn't have any long-term running or fitness goals. But I would leave the house thinking on the lines of - "today I should run 8 km" and this meant sometimes I had to hold back even when I wanted to run as fast as my legs would carry me just for sheer joy. 

My rhythm broke later in the summer (Italian summers go all the way to September) because I got rather busy with wrapping up my PhD. At that point I had come up with a quote that I'm really proud of - "PhD is what happens between running to forget your codes and forgetting to run your codes" :D :D 

I ended up running over 350 km in 2021 since I started tracking it properly. But as I said above, most of it this was just in the space of two months when this little son of the tropics felt really good to feel the warmth of the sun again. 

Come 2022, I decided to set a running target for the entire year - 1000 km. Maybe another day I will write about how this is going, but to make a long story short, I am on course to end up with somewhere between 750 to 800 km by the end of December. And while I'm disappointed, I'd like to give myself reasonable credit. I had lost all my stamina in January after a few months of no running. For the first attempt at a long-term running goal, with my schedule being constantly disrupted by travel, my thesis defence, job interviews and finally moving countries, it's a solid effort. 

Anyone who knows anything about the world of running knows Eliud Kipchoge, the absolute master of long-distance running. The greatest ever, other than some of our cavemen ancestors who probably casually achieved such feats while stalking prey and running from volcanos. In fact, I only know the name of one active long distance runner - Kipchoge's! 

Kipchoge has a beautiful quote. "Only the disciplined ones in life are free. If you are undisciplined, you are a slave to your moods and your passions."

It's something extremely deep and something that has really speaks to me. When we speak of freedom, we always think of it in terms of the freedom to "do as we please", which is to say, the freedom to pursue our desires and passions, the freedom to simply follow your mood. Discipline is the exact opposite, it is to force yourself to not follow your mood. 

Maslow's (disputed) theory of the hierarchy of needs places at the very top "self-actualisation". "What a man can be, he must be." I would even say that this is the zeitgest of our times. Popular culture is replete with cliches like "You be you". "Follow your heart." People are often said to travel or do some things to "find themselves", that is, to find some kind of true self hidden within themselves so they can understand it and fulfil the passion and destiny of this alleged true self. 

I don't know if self-actualisation itself is actually contrary to Kipchoge's thoughts on freedom. But to "just be yourself" is to be a slave to your immediate mood and passion. To be truly free is to actually shackle yourself in a purposeful, disciplined way. The freedom to pursue your every desire and mood, to "let yourself be", is a way to shackle yourself to your mood. And mood is fickle.

In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig asks "How to be a perfect painter?". The answer, in his book (pun intended), is to become a perfect person and then paint naturally. I have explored this idea further in a previous blog post - https://mavinahanu.blogspot.com/2019/06/the-perfect-painting.html

I'm nowhere near a perfect person nor a perfect runner, but today I cannot simply run "naturally". Or I would prefer to say, what is natural to me has completely changed. I have become a more disciplined person, more in control of what I want to do. So when I run for joy, or run "naturally", it is still very precise. I don't overdo it. I am clear about how far I can run at what speed, how much energy I need to save for the rest of the workday, etc. But I know that someday, when I'm truly exhausted and tired, when I'm having a terrible off-day, if I want to run it off and experience some catharsis, I can run it off far longer and far faster than I would have dreamed to be capable of even 18 months ago when this all kicked off. In that sense, I am truly more free to run. If I had simply continued to run naturally, to do it as and when I have the mood to do it, for only as long as the mood lasted, I could have never have been this free. 

There are two footnotes to add here. The first is that this journey towards discipline has been slow and gradual. I should make it clear that I'm still quite an indisciplined person who very very often misses personal targets and just gives up and follows my immediate mood. It's just that these developing thoughts have made me constantly conscious that I want to move in the direction of more discipline, even if I'm miles and miles away.

The second is that growing up, my father always stressed greatly on discipline and good habits,. And we would get lectured by elders on how we would eventually "realise" that they were right all along while I would roll my eyes. Well, I guess all the world's a stage, and this is an eternal drama that keeps repeating. And we will one day just repeat the words of our parents to our kids, while they repeat our words back to us. To say it simply, my parents were right about this :(

Discipline is freedom.

DEVELOP

If there's an ideology that abounds in the civic works of Bengaluru city, it is something I would call developmentalism. Concretisation might be a better word, but developmentalism has a better ring to it. 

Many thoughts have been triggered in my head ever since I learnt to drive in Bengaluru. I recall moving slowly and very cautiously behind a child on a tricycle with an autorickshaw blaring its horn from behind me on a narrow residential street. I remember thinking how one small misstep or lapse in concentration from me could be fatal to an innocent, blameless child just wanting to ride his tricycle. I don't know if he was supervised by an adult.

It took me back to something written on twitter by an urban planner. He asked how come we are okay with a 1000kg mass of metal moving on roads and forcing parents to stop children from going out on the streets out of a legitimate fear of a road accident. Is the transport of an individual more important? Or is giving children a safe space to run around and play near their homes more important? Cast in this way, as heavy masses of metal that move at speed right through living areas, we can see that cars and automobiles in general are fuel guzzling, carbon emitting monsters endangering the lives of pedestrians, especially children. 

I don't want to be a Luddite. I am fond of technology and I genuinely believe that overall, the world has become a better place to live because of it. That's not to say it is all good - our water bodies are choked with contaminants, the high mountains are awash with micro-plastics while the oceans are filled with not-so-micro plastics. The soil and the air have turned toxic and we're steadily moving towards a world where climate extremes are much more frequent and a mass extinction is ongoing. In the middle of all this though, somehow the lives of billions of humans have been improved [citation needed]. 

Let's refocus on Bengaluru rather than looking at the entire world. When I visited in November 2020, soon after the first wave of the pandemic, the city was quieter than it's usual self. One morning I went for a run near Sankey Tank but I was frustrated by the fact that they were doing some construction work in and around the walking trail there. I skipped and jumped over construction debris and slush and ran, but didn't return after that. 

When I came again in November 2021, the place was still under construction! The worst part - they were concreting the entire walking trail. Hard trails are known to be particularly terrible on the knees for runners. Tripping and falling on rough concrete surfaces cause much deeper cuts and scratches than a simple mud trail. Concrete doesn't allow plants to grow, it stores heat and radiates it out at night, making the immediate surroundings a little hotter. Children can't play on it because children fall often. Basically, a concrete trail is not good for any demographic of people who want to come to Sankey Tank. 

What's wrong with a simple mud trail? (see here for a nice example) If there's enough grass and greenery around and the right type of mud is used, it will not get very slushy in the rain. Doing this is obviously much cheaper than preparing tons of concrete. It's better for runners, it doesn't absorb heat, it allows rainwater to seep through and recharges ground water. 

The problem is that the folks at BBMP, and in general the policy-makers, are smitten by this ideology of developmentalism. It calls for maximum human intervention everywhere and to make everything look like it has been worked on a lot. Things have to look "modern". And it should not be cheap. 

We often see the news about some controversial remarks made my politicians at an election rally or public speech. We might watch these snippets of such a speech. The next time though, take about an hour or two out of your day and watch an entire election speech given in a rural part of the country. In the run-up to the 2018 elections in Karnataka, I watched a couple of speeches and there were two aspects that caught my attention. First, is just how bloody boring they get. (Now I don't blame Mr. Siddaramiah for infamously falling asleep at public meetings). And secondly, how much of the speech is about how much money was "released" for various schemes and programmes. So many crores allocated for this, so many crores for that. 

Imagine if Sankey Tank could be made into a nice, shady, walkable park with just ₹ 5-10 lakhs. That would be an outrage to the developmentalists! It needs to look upgraded, not just improved. It needs to be visible that something big was done. That somebody intervened here.

It's not only innocent walking trails around nice lakes that bear the brunt of this. Every road in Malleswaram is currently witness to the ravages of this ideology. Every road being "white-topped" is testament to this ideology. (white-topping is the word used to mean replacing tar roads with concrete roads) The idea is that we need BIG roads for BIG cars and these roads should be widened and made of concrete so people can reach very fast and very smooth until the next jog-jammed signal. Look, I'm a huge fan of roads which aren't filled with potholes. I understand that roads need to be widened. But at some point shouldn't we stop to understand that if we add one extra lane while 1,000 new vehicles are registered in the city on a daily basis, the extra lane doesn't matter anymore. A rant on the slow pace of the metro, the travesty of the lack of public transport options to places like the airport, the criminally underutilised railway lines in the city and the shrinking fleet of BMTC buses is for a separate blog post perhaps. 

Delays in infrastructure construction are a fact of life in every single part of the world. I'm not upset that the construction of the metro is taking decades when it should have taken years. I'm upset that the thinking (assuming there is some thinking) is to simply keep building bigger and bigger and bigger roads when the immediate need is to DE-congest the roads. No amount of fly-overs and underpasses and signal-free corridors will save you from congestion if you have so many cars on the street. And people will keep buying and using cars as long as there is no alternative.

Cast your eyes behind Mantri mall and you will see a bluish-gray monstrosity coming up, a rectangular glass building. Unimaginatively coloured, ugly glass in a tropical city that sees single digit temperatures maybe 2-3 times a decade. Look at the footpath in front of your house - before they were made from sturdy slabs of stone called "chapdi kallu" in Kannada. Now it's the same stone but with a nice polished finish. Why? They're slippery in the rain, especially when they're slightly sloped. But it needs to LOOK modern and man-made. 

Now the footpaths along large roads are being stripped of these big stones and being replaced with tile-like arrangement of concrete blocks. Because you can't have ancient stones next to a nice, swanky concrete road, can you? Doesn't matter that they're just there, supporting the weight of people and trucks which park on the pavement, with a nice rough surface that you don't slip on. Sure, some of them are shaky and could use a bit of cement at the joints, but that's very easily fixable. Incremental and simplistic changes are out of the question. There has to be a bombastic announcement that so many zillion crores are going to be spent to build this huge thing. Making it "smart".

Developmentalism cannot believe that something that has just worked for a long time can continue to serve its purpose without a fuss. Maybe bureaucractism is the better word - where activity is treated as achievement. "Dynamism" as a virtue. We have to go to a place, rip everything out and put something new while spending a lot of money. Understanding the purpose of what is being done, actually improving the place, is secondary.

This can be seen in overly gaudy airport (glass) buildings and even in the Statue of Unity, the statue of Sardar Patel. The statue looks quite imposing in pictures and it's height is certainly impressive (the tallest statue in the world). I will definitely visit it when I get the chance, but for me the most criminal aspect of the statue is how much it lacks in aesthetics. There's no intricacy, no art. Just a mass of concrete chasing some illusory world-record. Developmentalism can build a statue of unity, but never a monument like the Channakeshava temple at Belur.

I want to emphasise here that I'm neither against human intervention nor building things anew. I am strongly for modern air-conditioned metro rail systems, wide highways and expressways connecting major cities, faster trains, higher buildings and all that is generally termed development. Urbanisation is a net good for people and for the environment. Technology has so many solutions which will be adopted at breakneck speed - like electric cars and solar power and so many more. But I break at the point where we "develop" for development's sake, because we want to feel like we're developing.

PS - It's August 2022 and the concreting of the Sankey Tank walking trail is still underway.

The Outcome or the Principle?

There's something I've always wondered about morality. And recent events have simply made me wonder more. The question is simple - is morality about doing the right thing that flows from ethical principles? Or is it ensuring that given one's overall knowledge of a situation, to ensure that the least worst outcome is brought about. Let me explain using two of the biggest geo-political events from the last one year, both of which made me wonder about the same thing. 

First, the chaotic circumstances in which troops of USA withdrew from Afghanistan got me thinking about what they were doing there in the first place. Most of the media reporting it was talking about how Taliban rule would be disastrous for women and girls in particular. I think we can all agree that the education of girls and making sure that they are not simply confined indoors to be at the beck and call of others is a moral endeavour. Today with the Taliban, there exists (reportedly) a blanket ban on girls attending school. 

So let us consider a hypothetical administration in the same country which decides to reverse this ban and take more steps in a similar direction towards what is broadly termed women's empowerment. Now, let us say that the current elites, the Taliban or in general whoever runs the show in Afghanistani society find these ideas so despicable that they are ready to launch an entire nation into an infinite crusade where they are ready to spill the blood of lakhs of their fellow countrymen but will simply not tolerate these steps. Of course, this isn't the exact scenario that played out, but in the American framing of the conflict, it was said that an American-backed administration would bring democracy, freedom and women's rights to the people of Afghanistan - so my hypothetical scenario isn't completely different from reality. It is merely extremely simplistic, ignoring the multiple layers involved, starting from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. 

So is the endeavour to bring an administration that promotes women's education a moral one? Maybe an easier way to frame it - let's say there's a person in a house doing something terrible - maybe beating up a defenceless child. And the person says that he has access to kerosene and a matchstick, so if anyone comes to the aid of the child, he will burn down the entire building. And you know for a fact that this person has shown this kind of behaviour before and that he has a large quantity of kerosene. Is it moral to try and save the child? Even more, is it moral to have the hubris to think that you will be able to save the child and stop the fire, when you actually don't? Can you defend that act by saying yours was an act of saving the child alone? 

Let's look at Ukraine - if we know for a fact that the Russian military is far superior to the Ukrainian military, is it moral to send arms to Ukraine? Of course Ukraine has a right to defend itself. Of course, it is Russia that is the aggressor, the immoral actor here. It is useless to say that Russia shouldn't have attacked Ukraine. Now that Russia has already attacked Ukraine, the moral action would be to force Russia into halting it's assault and withdrawing her army. Clearly no one is willing to put everything into stopping Russia. So is asking Ukraine to fight on moral? Is asking Ukraine to simply surrender the real moral option?

I always think of a small garrison held by a chieftain with a small fort. And the empire's huge army comes rolling in, asking him to surrender. The chieftain is blameless. He lived honorably and now the emperor is refusing to grant him what is rightfully his. He's in a fortified position, ready to fight unto death. So every man in his army is probably worth about 5-10 men of the empire's army. The empire's army is in the open field and vulnerable. They also are pragmatic, so they are held back. If they see an weakness they can exploit, but with the loss of a few men, they will not charge into it. They will wait it out. Because they know eventually, they will overwhelm the chieftain. They vastly outnumber the chieftain's forces. Surely the chieftain is immoral for leading his people into certain defeat and death, even if he is the one who has been wronged. 

The question is, in the face of immorality and might, what is morality to be judged on? The principle, or the outcome? 

This blog post could have been a paragraph long and asked the same question, but I just wanted to paint my mind's picture.

On the Installation of Netaji's Statue

Hate is a strong word. Stronger than disapproval. Stronger than finding someone's actions immoral or deplorable. It suggests a level of personal emotional investment. 

Recently it was announced that Netaji Subash Chandra Bose's statue would be installed at India Gate. And a certain prominent voice on twitter called it as the "sullying" of India Gate by a man who was "pals with Hitler". Honestly, all I know about Netaji is pop-history, the regular, fan-fictionalised, hagiographical accounts that we hear from everywhere around us. But it's quite clear that he had even met Hitler. He was firmly on the side of the axis powers in World War 2. 

Even more, I am under no illusions about the imperial Japanese. I have read about how their army treated prisoners of war, who traveled with their army camps and their actions in China. Does this mean Netaji shouldn't be honoured in India? 

(A small aside - the presence of the Japanese in Indonesia actually greatly hastened their independence from the Netherlands. The Japanese saw themselves as the liberators of Asia from European colonialism. Again, everyone claims great moral end-goals for their self-interest, so there's no need to get too carried away by such pronouncements either).

Essentially, Netaji wanted to get rid of the British so badly that he was ready to join the camp of whoever was willing to promise that end-goal to him. Today, it's considered improper to even approve of, never mind glorify, the actions of someone associated with Hitler. Here was a man who actually carried out some of Hitler's plans in the name of freedom from the British.

There's a stronger point to be made here. To an Indian, especially looking at it from the lens of today rather than the 1940s, the British and the Japanese and the Germans and the Soviets were all mass killers and perpetrators of genocide. There are several complications when it comes to the relationship between the British and independent India. For example, the Indian armed forces, their traditions and legends are inherited from the British Indian army. This was an army commanded by Britishers to serve British imperial needs and interests and even became bullet fodder across the world as a "voluntary" army. 

Certain divisions and the regiments of the army may glorify the deeds of valour by these Indians. It's unimaginable today, but an army comprised of a majority of Indians sacked Beijing 120 years ago. Certainly, individuals may have shown exemplary courage, but must an Indian feel proud of this? When it was never our war and we never had any cause (until the 1950s) for enmity with the Chinese? I totally agree that India Gate and the names of the soldiers who were killed in action during the first World War is a symbol of our colonial past. It's natural that we are only slowly developing a national consciousness that points out things like these. It isn't that those who came before us were insufficiently patriotic, it's hard to point out something omnipresent and given as received wisdom. Before we were told to salute all those who died fighting "for India" in world war 1. Today we say, "Ummm, yes, they were our brave countrymen who performed great deeds, but weren't they just pawns of the British?"

Coming back to the question of who to hate - there are many deplorable characters in history. Hitler. Churchill. Aurangzeb. They say Gengis Khan killed so many people that his exploits led to an increase in the green cover across the world and had an impact on reducing greenhouse gases. 

But today the name of Gengis Khan doesn't evoke hatred, just mild historical curiosity and wonder. It's not admiration, it's just "Oh yeah, he did some terrible stuff" or a dispassionate "he was barbaric". What separates this from hatred? For example, to the extent that mere association with a person is a terrible sin? No one gets called "literally Gengis Khan" on the internet.

I think the distinction comes from cultural sensibilities and the living memory of people. What historical memories have people (and education systems) chosen to enshrine in their collective memories. The elevation of Hitler and his actions as some kind of original act of genocide is in my opinion totally unfounded. There are so many characters in history who, if they had access to the chemicals that the Nazis had, would have happily used it on large populations. To pretend this was never the way of the world until Hitler did it is disingenuous. It means internalising the (well-justified) horror of Europeans by the whole world. I'm not European. My lens is different.

If there's a historical character I hate, it's Winston Churchill. His actions killed millions of Indians. Of course, today he's a hero in the eyes of the British. I think a discerning person, not given to constant outrage, should be able to digest that quite easily - that a person can be a tyrant for one set of people and a hero for another set of people. Ahmad Shah Abdali is a known as a great conqueror and the father of the modern Afghanistani state. In India he's an invader, a looter and a destroyer. Same with Nadir Shah.

I would never demand that the British cease to glorify Churchill or that Afghanistan stops calling Abdali the father of their nation. I think the state of the world where everyone unanimously agrees on one set of good guys and one set of evil guys is not only artificial, it will end up imposing the emotions of one set of people (northern and western Europeans) on everyone else. A mature person should recognise this simple fact. So yes, while I do not demand the take-down of Churchill's current-day statues, I also do not hate Hitler. He was one man among many tyrants of the past who committed gruesome, deplorable acts.

I could never put him in the same bracket as Churchill or General Dyer or Aurangzeb. And I have absolutely no problem glorifying someone who worked with him - he worked against the British to get them out of India and established self-rule - and that is most important for me, not some alleged overarching morality of the allied powers.

Jai Hind! 

Azad Hind Fauj zindabad!