Blogs

A night view of M G Road. Pic: Shree D N After finding out I would be coming to Bengaluru, an Indian city I knew just as the "Silicon Valley of India," having grown up in Seattle, I became fascinated with the idea of comparing my hometown to B'luru. The differences between these two cities, 8,000 miles/13,000 kilometers apart, are stark (food, geography, language, ethnicity, weather, traditions, you name it). Finding the similarities, I thought, would be more of a challenge. The questions I had in mind: do Bengalureans romanticise their pre-tech past as much as Seattleites do? Do they…

We often stop at one of the beautifully designed cane "stalls", which can be packed up and carried around, and equally quickly set up somewhere on the roadside.  Little puffed, fried balls of semolina, in a large bag; a large pot containing "paani" which is tamarind juice, flavoured with spices, and several potatoes, lentils and sometimes boiled peas,which are mashed together, with or without onions as the customer prefers.   I've been talking to a few of the young men who sell the "pani puri" from their stalls, and I realize that most of them seem to come from Bihar,…

How many legal and illegal hoardings are there in Bengaluru and how to identify them? Looking for a complete location-specific data? Chances are that you will never ever get it. In the month of April, when I started working on a series of stories on decoding illegal advertising hoardings in Bengaluru, I tried to gather information about legal and illegal hoardings in the city. Since the officials at Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) have claimed to have conducted surveys on hoardings, I thought they would be able to provide me the required information. Kumar Naik, who was the BBMP Commissioner…

It's always intriguing to watch poetry being dramatized, and I was keen on going to watch "Kitchen Poems" by Dhiruben Patel, a 90+ year-old Gujarati writer. Padmavathi Rao, who was the solo actor in this performance produced by Aantarya Film and Theatre House, is well-known to the theatregoers of Bangalore, and it was with pleasant anticipation that I went to the performance. I was not disappointed. Dhiruben's poems (written in English) were translated on to the stage seamlessly. Padmavathi's command over the words showed in the effortless way in which she seemed, not to be playing an archetypal woman and…

Over the last few days, it was reported that Metro stations at Silk Board and K R Puram will be developed as transit points, so that in the future we could have a line running on Outer Ring Road, connecting to these two ends, and linking to other Metro lines in the city.. This was greeted in the media as 'Metro to run on IT corridor' along with the claim this will significantly decongest traffic in the high-employment zone. Friends of the government, in particular, touted this as an important step for Bangalore. In reality, it is nothing of that…

"Did you see how she did that?" I was lucky enough to attend numerous concerts, most often at the Bangalore Gayana Samaja, with my late guru Seethalakshmi Venkatesan. In every concert, we had attended together, she unfailingly pointed out nuances brought out by the performer of the day.  i Recently when a friend shared a video of Carnatic vocalist Semmangudi Srinivasa Iyer performing at a sabha in Chennai, I was reminded of this when I saw the audience at this concert. A virtual who's who of today's Carnatic music stars were seated in the audience listening to the stalwart sing.…

Today, on the bus, my purse, along with all my documents...credit card, debit card, driving licence, senior citizen card, and so on...were stolen. One thing that helped me immensely is that I had made a photocopy of every document and had it at home. Also, I had made a note of the numbers to be called in case of such loss. So, in spite of its being time-consuming, I have managed to block all the cards (an attempt was made to use my credit card even before I could do this...luckily, it was unsuccessful.) All of us need to carry…

Kingsley Jegan Joseph has created this marvellous version of "Hotel California".  Compliments can be sent  to Kingsley. Hotel Karnataka On a dark desi highway, cool wind in my hair Warm smell of parottas, rising up through the air Up ahead in the distance, saw a lorry headlight My eyes grew squinty and my sight grew dim I had to stop for the night There she stood in the doorway; Wearing nariyal tail And I was thinking to myself, "I'd like Pav Bhaji or maybe some Bhel" Then she brought me the menu, but current went away There were voices from…

Are you a young professional passionate about water security and poverty reduction? Would you like to be part of an ambitious programme to make five million poor people water secure by 2022? We are looking for 12 young professionals with no more than five years of professional experience to form a Junior Global Advisory Panel. Members can be from any region in the world and from varying professional backgrounds (academia, industry, government and practitioners). Suitable areas of expertise would be water resources, WASH, wastewater, health, agriculture, poverty, garment industries, refugees, or gender. The Junior Global Advisory Panel will complement the Global Advisory Panel which consists of globally-recognised…

Over the last two years I have written extensively about the emerging new idea of governance around the world. Historically in democracies, we paid a lot of attention to government FOR the people, and government OF the people, but it is only recently that there is more and more attention on self-governance and participatory democracies, ... what we might consider government BY the people themselves. But how exactly could this alternative work? What are its contours? Broadly, there are three pillars on which we can imagine this. a) We need to work WITH the government ... a lot of what…