Blogs

It's almost like a switch is turned on and two things happen. People get up from their seats and head towards the doors in two different directions. Most of them make a beeline towards the restroom while some presumably head towards the canteen in the opposite direction. I am attending a classical concert at the Gayana Samaja while I watch this scene unfold in front of me. Ranjani and Gayatri are the main artistes of the evening. The auditorium is overflowing with music-lovers. Before the concert begins, all the seats are taken. The stragglers end up standing near the doors while…

The story I’m about to tell here is about the discoveries at the Everyday City workshop at the School of Architecture & Planning, CEPT University. This workshop was held as part of CEPT’s Summer Winter School from 1st to 17th Dec 2015. The question we asked was: How can we bring about small changes in our perception and that of others through documenting how people negotiate streets on an everyday basis? The two key modes of inquiry were Photography and Map-making. The course participants worked in groups of three, approaching topics that they found riveting, ranging from cows in urban…

If you are like most people, you are only vaguely aware of Kundalahalli Lake. Maybe, it is to you that largish pond between AECS layout and EPIP. A water body whose shimmer perhaps caught your eye while you once glimpsed out of your tenth-storey office window. If you are a motorbike-rider, it is a well-known — and sadly, illegal — shortcut to your workplace. No wonder that this lake, an urban environmental gem, is largely unvisited except for transit purposes. For it is hidden, surrounded by that most Bangalore of combinations, that is, gleaming tech-parks and wretched slums. Almost everybody is guilty of dumping…

"Better than nothing" is not progress. It's just better than nothing. If we set our metrics so low, we can never develop. Take the example of buses. The city needs about 13,000 to 15,000 buses to reach the kind of service levels that are seen in places with excellent bus service globally (1,250 buses per million of population). Also, each year, as the population grows, the fleet strength has to grow by about 200-300. That's the need. The actual fleet strength now is 6,500. And each year, 600 buses are scrapped, so these need to be replaced to keep the…

All of us bemoan the fact that so many PET bottles get used and thrown into the landscape, where they will not bio-degrade. Well, I've been noticing that the Government (or, rather, the power companies) have come up with a great "jugaad" (creative solution) that uses these bottles. The ends of the transmission wires are fed into the bottle and sealed, thus ensuring that short circuits do not happen, the ends are protected from the elements, easily visible, and in a lightweight container. Congratulations to the very creative person who thought "out of the box" and "in the bottle" on…

Who has the right to park on the street? For how long? And at what price? These are questions that every city faces, and universally they have come up with some practical ways of answering them. The core of these is that parking cannot be free everywhere. There may be areas where it does not need to be priced, but surely where there is high demand for parking space, it is important to price the use of public space by vehicles. Such pricing, it is assumed, will discipline people into using their vehicles less and wherever they continue to use…

Half the city of Bengaluru travels using 6,500 buses. The other half uses 55 lakh vehicles. This data points so obviously to what we should be doing, but unfortunately, we insist on spending enormous amounts of money supporting private transport, and less than one-tenth of it supporting public transport and sustainable options. The illogic of financing urban mobility is that it is easy to get 30,000 crores for a full Metro system, or 1,000 crores each year endlessly for road-building, but we struggle to get 50 crores a year for footpaths and refuse to spend 200 crores for a Bus…

Recently, the Bangalore Traffic Police made it mandatory for pillion riders to wear helmets. It's been a law, for some years now, for two-wheeler drivers to wear them. Here's a family I snapped...   This was not on any side road, it was on the main highway leading to the airport from the city.  I've had a neurosurgeon neighbour, and two of my surgeon brothers in law, tell me what horrific head injuries can happen when a two-wheeler is involved in an accident. The pillion rider can, in fact, be thrown even further than the driver, and head injuries are…

Having read this article in the Hindu, dated September 28th 2008 and also enjoyed this article by my friend Adarsh Raju about the trees and the temple, written on July 15th 2015, I'd wanted to visit this heritage site for some time. On January 30th, when my friend Mallika Rajasekaran asked our mutual friend Arun Visweswaran about the location, I was very happy to finally be able to go Nallur, a village in Devanahalli taluk in Bangalore Rural district, which once hosted vast tamarind groves, now has a patriarch of a tree, estimated to be 900 years old, still bearing…

Vittal Mallya Road was built about five years ago. When it was built, it was proposed as a higher order of design than the roads that BBMP usually builds. The difference consists of three key elements: a level and continuous footpath ducting of all utilities a concrete surface of uniform width Plus some nice things like better lighting, and a little vegetation. In Tender SURE, most of these became standard, and in BBMP we improved the design by re-doing the way the storm water drains are built. The road cost a lot of money to build. But it was a…