City: Bengaluru

It is an often repeated story. You spot an exhibition of enticing cotton fabric and immediately start dream-designing the kurta that you can convert from desk to dinner wear. So you go ahead, buy the fabric, get it stitched as soon as you can say tailor, only to discover that it has shrunk and no longer fits you and has to be handed down to your slimmer younger sister. Then of course there is the somewhat inevitable pitfall of the colour running and turning your vibrant vermillion dupatta into a tame rust. Variety of cotton fabrics. Pic: Meera K. Despite…

A small part of our neighbourhood (Osborne road and nearby roads in Sivanchetty Garden, near Ulsoor lake) has been converted to a garbage free area. This experimental initiative comprises four roads spread over 1 square kilometre. The same strategy will be adopted to covert the entire neighbourhood into a garbage free one. Our applause to the team lead by resident Divya Nahender. The team was formed with volunteers inspired by similar initiatives in Kumara Park locality. They identified the black spots (with garbage) and prepared a sketch of the entire area; Divya and her team invited residents to a meeting…

  The Social Responsibility Committee (SRC) of Symbiosis Institute of Business Management, Bangalore, conducted a Biking Awareness Workshop at their campus on the 31st of July in association with Ride A Cycle Foundation, B-Twin, Merida & Bangalore Bikers Club. The event was a continuation of the Go Green Campaign conducted by SRC, SIBM-B. Last year, the campaign focused on sapling plantation. This time around the objective was to sell 'biking' as a cool option which is environment friendly. Bangalore Bikers Club is currently the largest biking club of its kind in the country, with a membership base of more than…

There are those who use plastic bags (saying they had little choice), those who re-use plastic bags and then those who refuse plastic bags. Or so I thought, till I met Trupti Godbole and heard of the work she was involved with in her neighbourhood.Two years ago, as part of the Republic Day celebrations organised by their Residents' Welfare Association – Uthkarsh - Trupti and her neighbour Sarita Kotagiri listened to the invitee speaker P Venkatramanan of RISE (a resident association in Indiranagar) talk about the menace and danger of using plastic bags. Shocked to hear that on an average,…

The other day, a friend from Hasiru Usiru got news that some trees were being felled at a construction site near the Indian Express building. A few people including me went to investigate and see if we could do anything about it.  It didn't take us very long to discover the site. When this group reached the spot, we discovered that trees had not been felled as yet, but branches of one tree had been pruned and pruned rather extensively. On asking the contractors if they intended to cut the trees which were in the vicinity, they said that they…

They are young, not necessarily khadi-clad, carry the latest brand of mobile phones and zip in their chauffeur-driven cars. They idolise the likes of Rahul Gandhi and Atal Behari Vajpayee. If not working, you can catch them at PVR or Inox. Meet Bengaluru's young netas, determined to bring about "some much needed change" to the city. In the aftermath of the parliamentary elections there was much newsmedia coverage on the involvement of youth in political campaigning. With dust now having settled and the council election coming up for Bengaluru, Citizen Matters talked to around two dozen youth in the age…

Young, spirited and raring to go. Bangalore's politics has probably never seen so many young faces. Some hail from political families, some young guns running their own firms, a marketing executive, a financial expert, a film producer, some self-made first timers who have worked their on way, and some are students. 2009 may be indeed the year that sets the trend from national to local. Citizen Matters spoke to a number of ‘gennext' politicians and political campaigners on their heeding the call of politics and their outlook for the upcoming council elections. Your future corporator or even MP may be…

The BDA is in the process of building two flyovers on the Outer Ring road near the Iblur and Agara junctions in south-east Bengaluru as part of their 'signal free' Outer Ring Road project.  This article presents some questions, comments and suggestions regarding both the grade separators, on the basis of the project plans obtained from the Bangalore Development Authority (BDA) in response to an RTI request by Citizen Matters. The flyovers have been described in an earlier article in Citizen Matters.  Two dedicated, access controlled, 11.5 feet wide bus lanes on either side of the central median of the…

RaasilasDespite the tag ‘fine dining’, Rasilaas is the kind of place you enter with some trepidation, given its location and general ambience. Your hopes sink further on scanning the menu which runs into many pages and covers the popular Indian trio. How can this non-descript place manage a gamut of Indian, Chinese and Tandoori dishes is the question hovering on your lips. But you’ve thrown in your lot, so to speak, so you order and resign yourself to whatever’s coming. Pic: Theresa Varghese And what comes is a delightful surprise.  Beautifully seasoned, well cooked and nicely presented; every dish here…

Sometime in MayBBMP workers had dredged out the storm water drain near my house, and left a mound of filth, muck, crushed plastic cups and assorted debris on the edge of the pavement on  8-F main road, Jayanagar. Each time it rained, some of the muck got washed right back into the drain. It was an eyesore and an olfactory assault. There are posh shops all along this road, hundreds of citizens walk or drive past, even park next to the pile of rubbish. The famous Jayanagar shopping complex is just across the road.I complained about it to the city…