GENRE: Solutions

Art projects, Kannada and English letters, bookshelves and colour-coded graphs cover the walls of a ground floor classroom. A rainbow of paper lanterns hangs from the ceiling. And there are so many children who sit in groups on the floor reading, writing, drawing or just quietly conversing, even as two women hover around supervising, periodically hunching down to work with them. This is a scene from a classroom of Makkala Jagriti, a non-government organisation, from a primary government model school in Mathikere, North Bengaluru. Makkala Jagriti is committed to making learning attractive and education possible for children from Bengaluru’s most…

It has been two decades, and yet the struggle does not seem to end. Parvathy, a resident of Saidapet, is 70 years old and is seen actively moving around her small shop. “Our joint family became a nuclear family after my two sons got married. It was tough, and then my husband passed away too. Life was even more difficult now and then with my savings, I started this small shop adjacent to my house to keep myself engaged. I long to see my sons but they are busy with their family,” says Parvathy while handing over toffees to two…

Here is a drainage map of the city of Bengaluru sourced from the Central Ground Water Board website. No city sitting on a ridge line should actually get flooded but we have achieved the impossible — of course in parts. A dotted ridge line divides the city between the Vrishabhavathy-Arkavathy-Cauvery basin and the Dakshina Pinakini, from the North to the South. There is a huge difference between these two in the slope, the hydro-geology, the soil, the rainfall, the built up area etc. The drainage patterns - the rajkaluves - are interesting too. They are more dendritic in the Vrishabhavathy-Arkavathy-Cauvery basin…

At a four-road intersection near Besant Women's College in Mangalore, a 49-year-old man sporting an orange reflector jacket over a neatly pressed Khaki shirt, trouser and black shoes, flags down an errant SUV from Kalakunj road. This gives the on-duty traffic constable enough time for not only clearing the traffic from MG Road (PVS circle to Ladyhill circle), but also to allow some school children to cross the road to safety - another job well done. But the duo cannot yet heave a sigh of relief, for over the next three hours between 5 and 8 pm, Ramesh Gowda and…

At the stroke of midnight, when the whole world is asleep, one garbage “terrorist” in HSR Layout of South Bengaluru is rudely shaken to wake up to his responsibilities by a green volunteer. Striding up to a man who is emptying garbage into a parking lot in HSR Layout, Dr. Shanthi Tummala thunders that overturning his dustbins on a vacant site even at midnight is against the norms. “Don’t you know that you are violating the rules?” she asks. He knows, so it isn’t news to him. Yet he is doing it. Dr Shanthi forces him to pick up his…

BMTC is the lifeline of Bengaluru. Its buses deliver 5 million (50 lakh) passenger trips everyday. This figure of passengers carried is close to half the population of the city. Without BMTC, we would all be dead, in a manner of speaking, as the city's already beyond-clogged roads would need to carry this huge number of people in vastly more motor vehicles. In comparison Namma Metro does not yet carry even one-tenth that number of people a day along its currently functional 2 lines. And reports are that their service is already 'at capacity' until much-needed coaches are added and…

Why do sharp, witty lines from Dale Carnegie’s books cut the misty, morning breezes in Mitra Jyothi, a school for the visually challenged in Bengaluru? How did the author become a dramatis personae here, you wonder. Ratna, a volunteer, walks out from one of the audio rooms. She proudly says that textbooks, magazines, competitive exams, novels, fiction and biographies in Kannada, Hindi and English are converted into CDs, so that they can be documented and made accessible to visually challenged students. The technological details are rather complex but interesting. “With Daisy Resources, we are transcribing a number of books into…

The World Health Organisation (WHO) defines Health as "a state of complete physical, mental and emotional well being and not merely an absence of disease or infirmity." And yet we often find ourselves paying heed only to one of these domains in isolation. Oft-neglected are the domains of mental and emotional well being or rather, the lack of it. As someone who is a fledgling in the study of Mental Health, I'd like to share my two cents on  Mental Health. The mental health pandemic Mental illnesses have been known to humanity since time immemorial. Even the ancient Indian scholars…

It is not possible to make the city pothole-free in 10 days. So it is unclear what the government hopes for, by ordering BBMP to do this. It may as well order the rains to stop! Keeping a city pothole-free is not difficult. But that requires doing a few things right to BEGIN with. The responses after things go wrong won't help. The only thing we can hope for in 10 days is to see whether the government and the BBMP begin to do things differently in the way construction and maintenance contracts are set up for roads and footpaths.…

About a year ago, the government of Karnataka approved a steel flyover road that would run from Basaveshwara Circle till the Kempapura junction after the Hebbal interchange, to ease the traffic congestion leading to the Kempegowda International Airport (KIA) which was estimated to cost a whopping Rs 2,100 crore. Little did they know this project would become a lynchpin that would energise citizen activism like never before. Thousands of people came out on an early Sunday morning to form a human chain and tell their government that it was a terrible idea. The offset of a collective awareness that Bengalureans…