Bullish on Bengaluru

I began my last post by describing myself as a member of the "NRI-return" species. It had quite a negative and pessimistic tone. I don't regret it since I believe every word was absolutely true. After living in a small town in Austria, living in a megapolis like Bengaluru is obviously jarring and can get nerve-wracking. As someone who lived in Europe for many years, I swear by public transport and walking to most places, which makes navigating Bengaluru particularly challenging. I know friends of mine who have not set foot in a city bus in decades. A sensible decision on their part. 

Today I am not here to complain and whinge. I will never be taken for a defeatist. No situation is beyond redemption. Exceptional change is always underway in this world and humanity can make magic happen. I believe in Bengaluru. I genuinely believe that thirty years hence, we will have a clean, functioning, pleasant city without the constant noise of honking, no garbage pile-ups, heavy but disciplined traffic driving and riding in accordance with neatly painted lane markings on roads in good condition with ample space for walking, well functioning pedestrian infrastructure, a large, effective network of suburban rail, metro and bus with great prosperity, economic growth and a good standard of living. Clean air, clean water, clean public spaces, more greenery. Maybe the Vrishabhavati will continue to stink, but she will definitely flow much much cleaner and people will know it is a dirty river rather than an open sewage. 

Things always get far far better before they get worse. This a path charted by the course of development for every nation. Remember the apocalyptic headlines about smog and pollution in Beijing and Shanghai about 15-20 years ago. When China was close to hosting the summer Olympics games. Today these are not the world's most polluted cities any more. Not because they sacrificed breathless economic activity or the meteorology changed. It is because of government interventions and implementation of laws necessitated by the situation getting worse and air pollution becoming a major topic of local frustration as well as international embarrassment. 

I remember speaking to someone visiting New Delhi from Australia in January and asked him how he handled the pollution. A fairly senior person, he told me he grew up in Los Angeles and so he actually expected far worse. I was surprised - I had never heard of Los Angeles or California being associated with air pollution. I looked it up and indeed, Los Angeles had smog far worse than even Delhi, with high levels of ozone - arguably worse for health than particulate matter that is the main focus today. 

London suffered from terrible smog and pollution as well in the late 1800s all the way up to the 1950s. Here is a nice article on this - https://ourworldindata.org/london-air-pollution. I have been to London quite recently and I can tell you, it's an amazing city to be in today. Traffic is heavily regulated and tariffed, public transport is wide-spread, bicycles are a chief means of transport. Public spaces are clean, apart from the occasional overflowing garbage bin in a corner that is simply a fact of every big city. The air is clean. The river Thames still stinks though. 

In 1858, London had what came to be known as "The great stink", a hot, humid summer day when the city stank so badly that Parliament was disrupted. The interesting thing here is that it was an improvement in technology that led to the great stink. Before sewage and toilets with plumbing, houses simply had holes in the ground into which human waste and other waste was emptied. These holes, called cesspits, overflowed onto the streets, seeped into walls, etc., but life went on. When the flush toilet became widespread, this "cleaner" technology ended up leading to more water collecting in these cesspits, more of them overflowing with the water ending up in the river Thames. The hot summer led to the river bed drying up and all the waste from a rapidly growing population stagnated there. 

It is a classic cycle - increased prosperity, population growth and clustering near economic centres,  increased stress on public services, increased consumption destroying public spaces until it comes too large an issue to ignore any more. 

On traffic - Bengaluru's biggest problem - I would take the example of the Cheonggyecheon Expressway in South Korea. A quick google search of before and after pictures tells a fabulous story through time. We must remember South Korea's miraculous journey from a dirt-poor country in the 1960s and 70s to the economic engine it is today. The Cheonggyecheon stream meandering its way through marshes with shanties and tin houses on the banks, then the city growing in a chaotic, unplanned way around it. The stinking stream was covered in concrete and a massive expressway was built to cut right through Seoul to handle the burgeoning traffic. It was a symbol of grand infrastructure development and a symbol of national pride and progress. Traffic was terrible in the 90s, South Korea was notorious for grid-locked traffic, until they started applying congestion charges and other measures to control traffic. Around 2003, the expressway was actually broken down and the old stream was restored with a large park and public space built on the same land that was once a covered sewage channel. Clean water flows through Seoul now and traffic is actually better despite this huge arterial road being demolished. 

This kind of development is happening the world over. We know the famous success story of the Netherlands with bicycles. Having been there I can assure you, the calm streets of Netherlands are a joy to walk on. Paris has been massively cutting down on road space and adding cycling paths, very significantly improving air quality and improving congestion. Smaller roads actually lead to better traffic as people use alternatives. London is doing something very similar. Chinese cities have built up public transport at an unparalleled scale and even brought up a massive network of high-speed rail to complement their highways. 

I see glimmers of hope in Bengaluru. Footpaths have become a contested space. Maybe it is just my algorithm, but there is a growing number of content creators and activists who ask, hey, where are the decent footpaths to walk on? The recent drive to clear street vendors from footpaths saw quite a bit of public support. I particularly like the current Minister for Bengaluru, Mr. Krishna Byre Gowda. 

I know skeptics and cynics who will say that all his actions are purely gimmicks for the camera. I don't fully agree, but let us accept this. I think the words of politicians hold a lot of truth.  Not because they don't lie, they almost always do, but because they want to be seen to be saying popular things. If a high-profile politician walks through a busy market area and demands officials to clear a footpath to render it walkable, the truth is that there are a lot of people who want the footpaths cleared and the Minister wants a camera to capture him getting it cleared. A clear footpath is then an actual political issue that people care about. I love gimmicks on the right topic. 

Another reason why gimmicks about the state of public spaces are great is that you cannot really claim things that are simply not true. "We created jobs" or "we improved the conditions of our sub-sub-caste" are claims that anyone can make and verification is not straight-forward. But a minister claiming to be getting Bengaluru cleaned or getting footpaths cleared cannot really bluff for a long time. So those gimmicks will have to be followed by actual action or lead to unpopularity once the PR budget runs out. 

Bengaluru has a large population of people who genuinely care about the city. We are one of the foremost technology hubs of the world. The number of cars on the street have sky-rocketed and infrastructure is struggling to keep up with the influx of people. Garbage piles dot the landscape, walking is hell, commuting is hell. Just living is hell. But there is a mad rush to get somewhere and do something. The scale at which prosperity, measured by just money available in the hands of people to spend, has shot upwards at a very rapid speed. 

The challenges are unique because of the technology of our times. No matter the amount of sewage, London never faced these levels of plastic pollution - that's because plastic was not common in the 1800s. They faced the problem of horse manure piling up on the streets. Sadly, plastic is fundamentally worse for our collective future than horse manure that will decompose and return to the soil eventually. So in a way our development journey is much dirtier and harsher on the environment. But we're also adopting solar energy in India at a break-neck speed, so our carbon emissions while we develop will be far lower. 

I know I am completely sheltered from so many daily struggles because of my privileges. The naysayers will point to the "development" and say at what cost? What about inequality? What about public services? They will come. The city is rapidly improving, but not fast enough. One day the improvements will compound. That one extra metro line will suddenly form a small network affect that drastically takes the load of one network of roads. Those metro lines will be incredibly congested, but new train by new train, that will slowly ease up. 

Once that happens, a new normal will set in. And people will now take that for granted, clamour for the next demand. And then the next. 

I see the Cockroach Party protests in this light. It is known as the Tocqueville paradox - as social conditions, freedoms, and prosperity improve, people's dissatisfaction and desire for further change actually increase. A government that actually brings a good change to the lives of people is at great risk of facing the ire of the people. For example, I would never look at a 6-lane highway and be greatly impressed. It is the same with airports. It is the same with lack of garbage and litter at Bengaluru Railway Station. I am just used to it now and I cannot continue to commend a government for bringing about this change, even if it was in the last decade. Even while the Chief Minister of Karnataka keeps talking about tunnel roads and multiple new flyovers, I already want Bengaluru's flyovers to be torn down and the sewage networked and treated. I want congestion charges on cars and at least 500 kms of metro. My mind is already in Seoul 2003. Hopefully that will be Bengaluru in 2040.

I am bullish that these changes will come about. Delhi will be smog free in 30 years. People will not be senselessly driving down the wrong side of the street in Bengaluru. 

And we should not be under this impression that it is some kind of inevitable, manifest destiny. It really needs exceptional governance and leadership in Delhi and more importantly, in the states. It needs a Chinese or Singaporean level of national resolve from the leadership to push it. And I deeply believe it will happen. 

The thing that we citizens can help decide is how bad the absolute worst will be. If we are more proactive, if we call up the municipal officials when we see a garbage mound, if we whine on twitter about every broken footpath and poorly designed bus stop, in little ways, we can make sure that at least one little street corner is saved from this seeming dysfunctionality. And then the next street corner, then the next street corner. Until it all comes together. 

In my humble opinion, turning our backs is not an option. We have a stake in this. Do we want to retire comfortably in a city with a good standard of living? Do we want to pass on the legacy of a well thought-out city? 

To echo the Prime Minister's words at a recent speech - "We can do it. We will do it."   

If we all just slowed down

As a member of the "NRI-return" species, I have the usual habit of pointing at every thing that is not right around me and asking stupid questions like "why is the footpath broken?", "isn't this a one-way street?", "does the Pani-puri cart guy have FSSAI certification?".  

I think mostly I'm frustrated, irritated. Many times I'm bemused. Occasionally I embrace it. Sometimes I get all righteous and I want to go on a crusade. I regularly call up local government officials. Mostly I get ignored or told it will be done and nothing happens. But overall I think I have been quick to assimilate and just enjoy life without asking too many questions. It's a certain willful blindness and acceptance. 

This is mostly while I walk or take public transport - which I do a lot. When I take a vehicle - a cab or an autorickshaw - is when my frustration peaks. My frustration at being stuck in traffic that is constantly stop and start is not because I'm in a hurry or anxious to get somewhere. It is because the typical traffic jam in Bengaluru is not caused by sheer magnitude of vehicles or a lack of good roads. 

I know this is going to infuriate people as they point out the crater-field that passes for a street close to their residences. From my observation, traffic jams are created by the driving style and haphazard parking. The traffic piles up in gargantuan proportions because of the number of vehicles, but the cause is one of the above. 

Either on an already narrow, crowded, cramped street, someone thinks "I'll just leave my vehicle here for a few minutes and it won't cause any bother" (or more likely, "I'm just going to park here for a few hours because I don't even marginally consider the impact of my actions on others and I just want convenience and who is going to catch me anyway??")

Or at a turning, a number of people want to outflank the traffic and end up creating a bottle-neck out of nothing. Since I am observant of these things, I can off the top of my head name at least 20 junctions close to my residence where simple lane barricades (I'm not delusional enough to hope for lane discipline coming from habit and behaviour, there has to be something physical to enforce it) would eliminate the constant pile-ups. 

The worst configuration is of the tiny street that joins the main road from the left just a few metres from the traffic light. And a constant flow of vehicles who emerge from that street and want to turn right immediately. They choke off the lanes and block the flow of traffic in those few seconds when the light turns green. Those kind of traffic-lights are just forever blocked. A simple barricade that says "hey, if you want to turn right, go back and join the right lane. Or just spend a minute and half more to make a U-turn slightly ahead" would solve the problem. It's the same with wrong side driving - it's the desire to save a few 10s of seconds. 

Even without this small road leading in from the left, any right turn from a T-junction is a nightmare. Because when the lights are red for the right turn, all the vehicles that want to turn right pile on to the left lane and try to cut ahead of the traffic. 

My little service that I render to Bengaluru is that I always give a lecture to every cab and auto driver about two things - the ineffectiveness of honking towards decreasing your drive time and the immorality of sneaking up the lane to cut the traffic. I know my words are a complete waste of breath, but I hope if it comes from enough quarters, the feedback might just be taken up. 

I believe there is a deeper point to be made here. As a driver of a vehicle, on one occasion I may sneak up on the traffic and buy myself a minute. I could annoy one person and cut them off to gain 30 seconds. But overall, when everyone thinks this way, when every single person is in a tearing hurry, everyone is a loser. For every time that I get to gain a second, there are 20 instances where I'm the one at the back, unable to move ahead because vehicles that want to turn right are blocking the left lane meant for traffic going straight. 

For every time that I narrowly squeeze into the gap and force another vehicle making a turn to suddenly stop, there are 10 occasions where I am actually behind the vehicle forced to brake. Even as I believe I'm gaming the system and making small gains over everyone else, I'm actually fostering a system where I lose along with everyone else. 

If everyone just waited patiently. If everyone stuck to their lanes, went straight without driving waywardly, the overall traffic would actually flow so much better, that everyone would be able to reach their destinations faster, even if momentarily it feels like you're needlessly waiting all the way at the back of a lane. 

Everyone being in a hurry actually causes everyone to be late. 

If we all just slowed down, we could all go faster. 

And I would end this piece by saying - I ride a scooter regularly in Bengaluru and occasionally drive cars as well. I honk maybe once a week. And I just go slowly in a straight line. To quote a friend of mine, "you drive like an Unc." I get honked at like crazy, but I'm happy to be the crazy NRI return who hasn't re-learnt the ways of my country. We need to adopt this at a large scale to make our cities more livable. Enough has been said about rapid urbanisation and pathetic streets. Even on those streets, some basic empathy for a fellow driver and human being would be half of the solution. 

The Empty Key-chain

I have a habit of constantly patting my pant pockets when I'm outside home. I run a quick check of whether my mobile phone (right pocket), wallet (left pocket) and apartment keys (also left pocket) are still present or they have been pick-pocketed. And on occasions that I am without one of these, usually because I would have kept my wallet in my backpack, I have a 0.2 second long burst of panic before I recall where it is. 

This happened to me recently, but not with the wallet. I felt around my pocket as usual and I could feel the absence of my keys. I stopped dead and panicked for my usual 0.2 seconds! Being without the key was a scary thought. I usually have a spare key in my office but I would have to endure the commute to the office and right under the fury of the sun at the hottest point of the day. And this spare key is only for the door to my apartment, not the apartment building itself. 

To enter the building I needed a different key for which I was never given a spare. I don't know why the landlord did it this way, but I had just received one key for the building door and I had never asked for another. The door is usually open, but if someone has per chance locked it, I would have to call my neighbour, hope that she is at home and request her to unlock this door for me.  Even if I could enter the building and my apartment eventually, I would have to then pay money to get a spare made, maybe file some report to the police for the official records, etc. 

I had thought about this scenario several times before to psych myself into never forgetting my keys, especially since my apartment has an "auto-locking" system where the moment you close the door from the outside, you need a key to get back in. Maybe this is a better protection against people forgetting to lock the door, but I think forgetting the keys inside is a much bigger danger. 

0.2 seconds later, the panic faded. The keys were indeed missing and I had only an empty key-chain in my pocket. Neither did I have the keys on my person anywhere else - not in my backpack, not my shirt pocket. I simply had no keys because it was no longer my apartment. I was just returning from the key handover and making my way over to my friend's house. He had kindly agreed to let me stay at his place to bridge the days between the day of my apartment handover and the day of my departing flight. 

It was a departure from the country, from a number of people with whom I have developed deep friendships and personal relationships. A flight from one country to another, from one life to another. And in that moment, it somehow sunk in. I would never hold those keys again. I would never walk in that apartment again. It was somehow all so sudden. A month ago it was a fully stocked apartment, a home, an abode in which I had spent upwards of three and a half years. In a town whose many alleys I had walked in quiet exploration to clear my mind. Whose many woods and paths I had run across to get in my weekly kilometres for half marathon training.  

Suddenly, now it was an empty building that I was barred from entering. Clean walls replaced the cobwebs that had made their homes on my walls. The layers of dust on various untouched surfaces were gone when I had done my final cleaning. There was no bed. I ordered a pizza home earlier that day but I had nowhere to sit down and eat it. My chairs and tables which had hosted a dozen people and more were simply absent. 

This was home. Soon it would be an alien small town, far away from me, largely irrelevant to my life. It would never appear in the news. The view from my window where I watched the icy winter turn to the fresh green leaves of spring, then to the fierce, almost overgrown green of summer, to the orangish hues of autumn, back to the bare, dull brown of winter would be gone. That favourite corner where I spent reading so many books and mindlessly scrolling so much internet nonsense will be someone else's corner. 

I come back with an empty key-ring on an empty key-chain. I fly back to a place I once called home, more than a decade ago. A place which never ceased being home, but somehow also stopped being a home. 

Nearly four years of my life are packed neatly and tightly in a few suitcases and bags. To start over again. It is daunting and exciting.  

Reflections

As I was ascending the mountain towards the peak, trudging along, step after step, I felt a cool breeze on my neck that momentarily gave me relief from the weight of my backpack pushing down against my shoulder and neck. I adjusted the bag-strap around my waist. ChatGPT told me that the waist strap should be tight and flush around the waist. And ideally it should be holding 60-70% of the weight of the bag. I loosened the strap a bit to check if it was carrying any weight at all. Nothing changed really. I tightened it hard. Nothing changed. I shrugged my shoulders and moved on. If my neck and shoulders were going to be sore, so be it. The truth was that my hiking backpack was designed for someone with a longer torso than mine, no amount of adjustment would correct that. Hey, at least I never suffer for leg space on long-haul flights. 

The breeze made me look around momentarily. I'd moved quite far up above the valley where I began my climb. It felt good to look down into the valley knowing that the entire vertical distance was covered by the strength of my leg muscles. It was silent. I was just a bit higher than the canopy of the woods below. While the altitude was too high for trees to grow here, the undergrowth and shrubbery was still lush. There were many bees, butterflies, birds, flies - an assortment of winged creatures, all fluttering around close by. Maybe there were puzzled and wondering what this legged creature was doing so high up, all alone. 

It was a good question to ponder. My first thoughts were about how great it was to be there. In the silence, in the low hum of various forest sounds, breathing in the mountain air. It's the best phase. Taking steps forward felt natural, almost like breathing. Moving forward felt great, purposeful. Then the muscles started to tire, the spring in my step vanished. 

That's when the other thoughts start to kick in. Yes, the valley floor is far away, but the top of the mountain is even further. I didn't have to rely on my eyes for this - my phone was connected to the internet and GPS. I had the route saved along with the terrain, the elevation profile, the distance. I knew my exact altitude, how much further I still had to go. It is hard to savour the epic valley views when you have all this information immediately at your disposal. So much for being alone with nature. 

These thoughts often plague me while going on long runs. The brain gets chatty. Ummm, why exactly are we doing this? What was wrong with sleeping for two more hours? Are you trying to prove something to someone? Do you expect some great stillness in your mind before all the "answers" come gushing in? What is the question exactly? What do you want? Clarity? Perspective? What do those words even mean? Solitude is just some fake stuff that novelist types like to glorify. Just stop, turn back and go chill in your apartment. Hang out with some friends. Get a life. 

I don't have great arguments for this. Sure, health, fitness, lifespan, all that jazz. But there are way easier ways to achieve it. Deadlifts. Yoga. Better diets. I hear these things all the time. I don't know if that's a big motivation. I think about these things occasionally. 

The human body is a great machine though. And I really appreciated this three-fourths of the way up, carrying my rather heavy backpack. It's a classic conundrum - the further you want to go, the more time you need. The longer you go, the more food/supplies you need. The more you carry, the heavier your load. The heavier your load, the slower you go. And it's harder to go further if you're going to go slow. Humanity first solved this problem by outsourcing the load-bearing to horses. Then came heavy machinery. Trains, automobiles, aircrafts. (This was a problem on land - on water buoyancy would bear your load and you could go with the wind and currents) 

There's something that still makes the human machine amazing in my opinion. Let's come back to the problem of load versus speed. One of the heaviest things a fighter jet carries is its own engine and its fuel. The more powerful the engine, usually the heavier it is and the more fuel it burns. You can of course make a highly efficient engine - one that extracts the maximum amount of energy out of the fuel it burns. But there are hard limits on this. The weight of the engine itself then becomes a bigger challenge. You can use a lighter material, but this material then needs to have the strength and resistance to heat and deformation to carry out its task. Very few nations have this capability - to develop a modern fighter jet engine. India tried with the Kaveri programme and ultimately didn't get very far. 

Even then, let's say you have this cutting-edge fighter jet engine ready. Here's the key point - it's going to look and work very very differently from a commercial jet engine. Or a car engine. You could stick this engine on a Boeing 747 and it would not get you very far. And a B747's engine (or all 4 of them) would work terribly on a fighter jet. 

Now look at me and my "engine". The muscles and the cardiovascular system that drive me. I'm not a big guy by any means (actually quite tiny), nor would anyone passing by think of me as someone very muscular. But I was able to climb over a 1000 m in altitude carrying a backpack that was ~10% of my own weight. I'm not boasting here, but many people would struggle to do a fraction of that. And many people would do much more arduous stuff very very easily as well. With the same nuts and bolts - muscles, and a beating heart. Of course, the percentage of muscle mass, the metabolic efficiency, etc would vary a lot. But they would look so similar, if you made them stand next to each other, it would even be hard to tell the difference. It's a few kilograms of muscle shifted around that makes all the difference. 

A jet engine (or 4) can never do both, carry a large commercial jet across a continent, and power a fighter jet through extreme maneuvers with ferocious acceleration. Heck, even a Boeing 747 engine would be too large to be carried by a small, short-haul aircraft or a private jet. It would be ungainly and inefficient. OP, as the kids say these days. On the other hand, the same person who can achieve extraordinary feats of endurance and strength can also join us for a jolly stroll by the beach and they would function perfectly well. The elite runner Eliud Kipchoge would actually look a bit skinny standing next to me. You could point to the muscles on his legs - but that's exactly my point - you would need to point to them. Because only small additional weight of muscles enables him to run 42.2 km in just over 2 hours. 

These marvelous thoughts about human muscles (and those of other creatures) kept me going through a part of the climb. It didn't answer my brain's polite enquiries. What exactly are we doing up these giddy heights? Wouldn't a weekend away to a chill tourist spot have been better? You can afford a small cable-car ride up a mountain to savour the same or even better views. Do novelist types have an impact on me? Am I easily impressionable and swayed by their words, even though I claim to be so mindful and independent in my thoughts? 

Good writing does have a way of influencing people. I used to be more willing to believe people who put across a point well. Things have flipped on their head now - if something is too well expressed, I assume it's AI-generated. I more readily believe something with a few lines of clunky text and occasional grammatical misses. (like this blog post lol) 

With my head ringing with these thoughts, I pressed on. I was hoping for the grunt and the silence and the natural surroundings to provide me with answers. All I got was questions about what exactly the question is. There was no epiphany. No profound life-changing moment in the silence later, under the clear night-sky. No divine visions - just a sore neck and sore limbs. 

And so I began the descent - this time along an easier route. I walked and walked until I reached a bridge over a little river. It was more of a large stream really. The railway track was just across the river, the station just a 5 minute walk downstream. This was where I started the hike the previous morning. I had half an hour until the next train passed this tiny town. I spotted a lawn next to the river. A few people were enjoying a dip in the water. A sign told me it was a public bath. 

I was extremely sore. I did the maths - I could make my train with some time to spare even if I invested in a quick dip. It was tempting. I pulled the trigger. I had come prepared with swimwear and a towel. It had weighed heavily on my back the whole time, but now the hike was done and I wasn't complaining. The water was crystal clear. Warm enough to not put my body into shock, cold enough to jolt me awake! Like a post-lunch espresso at work. 

I had to be quick. I enjoyed splashing about for a minute before getting out and hurriedly gathering my things. I put on my shoes and looked around. It was a beautiful spot. Ahead in the distance, towering over me were the peaks I had scaled. And somewhere to the side, under the shadow of the highest peak in sight, was the little hut where I spent the night under the stars. Unseen to my eyes from the valley, but I knew it was there. 

At that moment within me was a small sense of satisfaction. A sense of pride. Pride without reason? Well yes. It won't register in the annals of mountaineering achievements. It's debatable whether it was mountaineering. Or an achievement. It was just walking. One foot, following the other, then the next, then the next. Over and over and over. With every step you had to make sure your feet were on sound ground. And ignore the swirling thoughts in your head. That is all. That itself is a kind of meditation. 

There are some things in this world you are excited to do. You think it would be really cool and fun! It starts well, and then it sucks. But you've already started, so you just keep going. And then when you look back, you forget the part where it sucked. You remember only that you did it. And in the little world in your head, it means something to you. It means something that you can share it with those three friends who think its cool. And you want to do it again! 

There are no answers. There are ill-defined questions. But above all, there is our sense of self. Meaning, Reflection. And uninterrupted thoughts that can go into a blog post. 

Maybe that was the epiphany. Not on the journey, but looking back on it. 

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