GENRE: Voices

Bengaluru, my new home, continues to surprise me every day with its idiosyncrasies. I am slowly falling in love with this place, and that is in spite of the traffic. Alright, you ask, why this sudden exhortation and public display of affection? Well, because I have just found one more reason to fall in love with the city and its people. When you see a kid begging at a traffic signal or a homeless old lady sitting on the sidewalk asking for money, what do you do? Aren’t you torn between whipping out your wallet and also doubting whether this…

In November 2015, Indirangar residents had taken to streets against the plans to convert a playground into a cricket pitch. Now there's a plan for the same ground to be converted into an indoor stadium. Indiranagar residents have come together to oppose this move, citing lack of open spaces. An open letter from I Change Indiranagar team says: The decline of per capita availability of open space in Bengaluru has reduced from around 8 sq m in 1972 to 2.82 sq m in 2003. The latest data now shows that this has further declined to around 1.9 sqm in 2015.…

Xerxes Desai. Pic: Christopher Lopaze On 27th June 2016, Bengaluru lost one of its most eminent citizens when Indiranagar resident Xerxes Sapur Desai breathed his last in the city. He was at the helm of Titan Companies Ltd from the 1980s till his retirement in 2002 and is the man widely acknowledged to be the driving force behind catapulting the brand to international renown. A man of great passion and energy, Desai is known for having transformed Titan into a nimble, agile organization and a very ‘happy’ place to work. He imbibed a culture which encouraged innovation, one of not…

Every city, even a giant metropolis like Bengaluru, still has a few patches of green, blue or brown that have managed to survive or at least allay the formidable onslaught of concrete and glass. Look carefully in these oases and you’ll be sure to find a sign of life (or five)! Snakes Among the most revered and reviled animals in India, snakes are also very common in our cityscapes. Bengaluru has about 40 species of snakes of which six are venomous. Most snakes, even venomous ones, will flee upon detection. They only stand their ground when provoked or unable to…

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…

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…

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…

This video captures a common everyday scene which every Bengalurean is now accustomed to seeing - the sight of broken pushcarts overflowing with household waste being pushed with difficulty, the sight of huge mounds of rotting garbage lying on the ground. The heartrending sight of workers bending over ankle-deep in rotten stinky waste and laboriously filling up a large compactor vehicle with small shovels and baskets manually, while the compactor system is meant to be filled up by a mechanical operation, directly from tippers to compactors. This is the pitiable state of our waste workers functioning in a broken system…

I kind of got hooked on this quiz thingy.  And while it is a bit strange to be asking and answering the questions myself, I love the fact that I know all the answers. My next quiz follows the same pattern but I put in a variation so I would not get bored.  So here, instead of just a Yes or No, I had to give a proper response, even a creative response if I wanted.  Plus, I tried to catch myself out by slightly varying the wording sometimes.  Nothing like a challenge to get the old grey cells going!…

To the Chief Minister of Karnataka, Sri Siddaramaiah, To the Minister, Sri K J George Sir, Citizen Petition: #BringBackSubodhYadav This is a tipping point. We citizens of Bengaluru who have been working on bringing in Sustainable Solid Waste management since 2009, find the abrupt transfer of BBMP SWM Special Commissioner Subodh Yadav, IAS, completely untimely, unjustified and unacceptable. This move of the Government is the tipping point which is leading into the streets well-meaning citizens who have been working with passion and optimism in their neighborhoods for improving the solid waste management in and around them. What was Subodh Yadav…