GENRE: Voices

If the dogs of Whitefield could talk, they would have quite a story to tell. Every night, over a hundred dogs in the area lie in wait to be served dinner. Rice, chicken bones, mutton fat and turmeric, sometimes vegetables - all cooked together to make a delectable meal. Perhaps with the addition of a few spices, dinner could actually pass off as biryani, ready to be served to humans too. And it doesn't stop at food alone. An injured dog can expect to be nursed back to health. Unspayed ones are neutered and set back on the streets. What’s…

On a highway leading to a cold, cold city, a two-wheeler rider was mowed down by a speeding lorry on a hot morning. He pleaded for help, without even realising that his body was torn into two pieces. That he donated his organs even in such a painful situation while he counted minutes for his own death, is history now. How do we know all these? Because we had most conclusive proof—a video, circulated over internet and on TV channels. The incident happened in Nelamangala highway. Reports say the ambulance reached him in eight minutes, and he was alive for…

There isn't any water left in river Cauvery to draw, for the use of ever-expanding city of Bengaluru. How do we, then, get water to drink? Here is a plan - creating another Cauvery for the city. Matthondu Cauvery Related ArticlesNo Cauvery water, no water problems. But that was thenWhy Cauvery Stage IV water has reached Bangalore, but not your home

"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…

Dear Government of Karnataka, Of late, there has been a lot of hand wringing over the traffic congestion. Various solutions are being proposed by citizens claiming to be experts, advisors and well wishers. Most of these solutions revolve around adding extra asphalt, at grade, overhead and underground. India's Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari summarised this predicament clearly when he said, in a recent event “I added 55 flyovers in Mumbai thinking it will solve traffic congestion, but it hasn’t solved anything”. Recently, however, there has been a growing realisation that Public Transport is the most efficient way forward. So the focus…

So, it’s curtains down on the 8th edition of the Bengaluru International Film Festival. The week-long film festival that saw a grand opening at Vidhana Soudha premises, much to the criticism of those from film fraternity as well as cine-enthusiasts, however, has managed to wrap up smoothly. There were many "firsts" for this year’s film festival’s credit. For the first time, the state government and Kannada Chalanachitra Academy took over the responsibility of organising completely, which had so far rested with Suchitra Film Society. Then again, for the first time, the Chief Minister himself led the Festival’s Organising Committee. In…

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…

The Delhi’s Odd-Even experiment has ended. The Jury is still out on the outcome of this ‘Odd-Even’ experiment, i.e. reduction in pollution. There is no concrete evidence to prove one way or the other. Pollution reduction numbers may not be visible instantaneously with the absence of vehicles partially on roads in just 15 days. However, people of Delhi ensured high compliance to the odd-even rule, leading to success of this experiment in terms of less traffic. The Chief Justice of India’s voluntary compliance in spite of having the waiver just reiterates the citizen’s desire for healthier environments and surroundings, in…

It is worrisome that Bangalore is as famous for its potholed roads as it is for its IT industry. According to a conservative government estimate, at this time, Bengaluru is home to about 4000 potholes with varying degrees of hazard associated with them. Indeed, last September, one such pothole claimed the life of a young woman when she suffered head injuries due to a fall. While calculating the cost of a life is nearly impossible, there are other costs associated with potholes that can be estimated. First, there is the cost of slow-moving traffic that leads to loss of productive…