GENRE: Features

The Singh family in Ghaziabad didn’t pay much attention when their 62-year-old father suddenly began to struggle to find the right words or remember the names of friends. He had loved travelling, but he stopped travelling and even avoided meeting friends and relatives. The family put it all down to age-related idiosyncrasy. Dementia or Alzheimer’s Disease wasn’t something that crossed their minds at that point. Mr Singh passed away within a span of one year. He had frontotemporal dementia.  “We thought that retirement and COVID lockdown had made him irritated and stress was the culprit,” says Mrs Nath, wife of…

River Cauvery is the lifeline of Bengaluru’s economy. But before Cauvery, it was the Arkavathi. Polluted and now running almost dry for around half a century, Arkavathi is biologically dead. It stands as living proof of what is to come for Cauvery. A victim of urban-industrial society, Arkavathi today is a shadowy semblance of a former glorious river. It is a ghost river. This is the story of how the Thippagondanahalli Dam and Thippagondanahalli Reservoir, also known as Chamaraja Sagara, on the Arkavathi river rose to prominence as Bengaluru’s drinking water source and 80 years later, became defunct because of…

An often overlooked link in the entire waste segregation and management chain is the dry waste segregation centre (DWSC). Mumbai has 46 of them — of varying sizes and capacities — spread across the 24 wards of the city. They serve as the heart of decentralised waste management; collecting waste from houses across the city, clubbing and sorting them and finally, sending it for recycling.  In Mumbai, the centres work in partnership with the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) and organisations involved in waste management. The BMC provides the space and vehicles for the centre. An NGO then takes over, overseeing the dry…

If “vomiting” is the first remedial action that strikes you in an imagined event of poisoning, it may not be the correct approach in most cases. So, what is to be done if somebody ingests poison unknowingly or intentionally? Unfortunately, there is not much awareness of what constitutes poisoning and the correct response to it among the general public and even among doctors. The World Health Organisation estimates that, in 2016, unintentional poisoning caused 106683 deaths and the loss of 6.3 million years of healthy life (disability-adjusted life years). According to a paper published in the Lancet Global Health in…

""Kitne aadmi the?" The scene featuring Gabbar Singh's famous question in Sholay has a rarely noticed sideshow. A small lizard scampering across the rocky terrain of Ramanagara, located just outside Bengaluru, where the iconic movie was filmed. That lizard is the Peninsular Rock Agama, or Psammophilus dorsalis, which can be found today mainly in Bengaluru's rocky outskirts. The city's ever expanding urbanisation has not only altered natural landscapes in its wake, but also destroyed habitats of species like the Rock Agama lizard. And although not endangered, the Peninsular Rock Agama is no longer a common sight across the city as…

The movement to save Aarey forest - known as Mumbai's green lungs - from construction activities has awakened again. Every Sunday the area is packed with protestors sloganeering, holding placards, and shouting anthems of resistance. What best encapsulates the sentiment on the ground are the first two lines of the song 'Aarey chi Kalji', which went viral recently: "Sarkar yeil sarkar jaail jhaad tu todu nako, ugaach kamal gheoon haataat Aarey la chedu nako" (Governments will come and go, do not cut our trees. Holding a lotus in your hand, do not play with our Aarey.) Writing on the wall near the road…

Mumbai's fisherfolk share a strong camaraderie that has only strengthened over time amidst threats to their livelihood. For the last several years, they have complained about dwindling catch due to various infrastructural projects. Some left the occupation decades ago for upward mobility and more are now contemplating leaving. What remains unchanged in the face of adversity is the enthusiasm and celebrations around Narali Purnima, the annual coconut festival celebrated on August 11th this year. The festival is of great significance to the fishers from the Koli community, the city’s earliest inhabitants. From Sassoon Docks where boats unload the day's catch. The dock…

Amidst a cacophony of chants of “ond maaru nalvattu" (one measure Rs 40), every morning the city's Krishna Rajendra Market wears a vibrant cloak of reds, orange and yellow. The removal of all COVID restrictions has made the flower market even more colourful and cacophonous, as this year's festival season gets underway. Amidst negotiating a kucchu (bunch) of fully bloomed chrysanthemums from Rs 140 down to Rs 100, Naveen Kumar, a flower seller in KR Market for 17 years, is seeing an uptick in his sales during the weeks leading up to Varamahalaxmi, Dussehra, Ganesh Chaturti and Ugadi. “I earn…

Much before the Right to Information (RTI) Act was passed by parliament in 2005, Karnataka had a pioneering sunshine law. The Karnataka Right to Information Act, 2000 (KRIA) was passed in December 2000 and notified in 2002. “Before KRIA, the Official Secrets Act, 1923 (OSA) was in place and that was used to deny all information to citizens,” says Kathyayini Chamaraj of Citizens’ Voluntary Initiative for the City (CIVIC), Bengaluru. At the time, Karnataka was one of few states, like Maharashtra and Rajasthan which had enacted their own laws on citizens’ right to information. KRIA was a landmark piece of…

This article is part one of a series looking at how the history of building regulations and development has shaped the built environment of Mumbai. Part two will delve into the changes in building regulations over the twentieth century, through suburbanisation, the development plans and liberalisation. Ask Mumbaikars about the housing problem in the city, and you’re likely to get a different take on the issue from each one. Some will be up in arms about the pervasiveness of slums, which they call ‘encroachments’. Others will point to the absence of affordable housing, laying the blame on either the gaps…