GENRE: Voices

Rock climbers at Turahalli Forest. Pic: Deepa Mohan Dr Vishnuvardhan was a dignified and mature actor in the film industry, a good human being – a veritable pride of Karnataka. It is in the fitness of things that such a person is remembered for long, by way of a suitable memorial in his honour. However, a memorial is anything to commemorate a person or an event. It does not, necessarily, mean a construction with bricks and cement only! Bengaluru is overflowing with such constructions already. That has been the bane of our city, which has made the city lose its…

My primary schooling was at Sri Kamala Nehru Makkala Mandira. The school was housed in old houses, some of them bungalows, others not, dotted about the Yediyur circle area and even in Tata Silk Farm. This was a lower-middle-class kind of school. However, that characterisation belies the nutrimentum spiritus (food for the soul) that was dispensed there. By luck or by design, the school had some amazing teachers. I certainly was lucky they were in my life. Classrooms were held in the patio (suitably partitioned with a plywood “wall”), in the bedrooms, under staircases, on balconies, in “servants’ quarters”.  In…

A few days ago we decided to take a break at a home-stay in Coorg, and so had to take the Mysore Road out of Bangalore to Coorg. To avoid getting caught in a traffic jam, we always get out early in the day and that day was no different. The road was in an excellent condition which was a happy surprise for us, as most roads in Bangalore are in a mess, and we are used to pot holes remaining for even a decade. The only worry we had was the road humps, because we had hit one the…

Some start their own enterprises because they want to be independent. Some have dreams of making it big. But some end up being change-makers, because they wish to see some problem solved, the kind nobody else was trying to fix! To be honest, I hadn’t planned to become an entrepreneur. Post 2000, I started noticing the growth pangs of Bangalore. The once-nice town was indeed becoming messy, garbage-ridden and traffic-laden. And I wanted to understand why. Why did the darn flyovers take years to build? Why did the garbage collection break down? Why did we have to depend on water…

A Mathematics teacher at Corporation Malleswaram High School teaching a 9th standard class. Pic: Shamsheer Yousaf What can we do to improve public schooling, tangibly? Ever since the terrible PU results came out showing more children failing than passing, I've got a lot of letters asking what can be done about this. To my understanding, we need to do at least the following three things, to have any chance of intervening swiftly in the lives of millions of children. Increase the funding levels for education I know we are perfectly capable of wasting money, but even so, without proper investment…

Ganga Madappa, Staff Reporter and Community Manager at Citizen Matters, writes: Here's a side of the Ulsoor lake that not too many people notice. To the left of the kalyani at the lake, is a storm water drain that comes all the way from Richards Town. And along with rain water, it also carries an unimaginable amount of filth. Plastic, clothes, shoes, leaf litter etc make their way into the water. Workers clearing this filth claim to have found even pillows and suitcases...    This alone makes for a strong case for the city authorities to enforce waste segregation.  

How hard it is to make a manhole cover that is LEVEL with the road? Not very hard, but no matter how many times this is pointed out, BWSSB never does this. I spent some time trying to figure this out, and learned three things. A. BWSSB assumes that BBMP will keep raising the level of the road each time tar is added, so, the drain cover will be eventually level for a brief period However, any further raise in the road makes cover sink, and that too is visible in many places. BBMP could easily mill each road's old…

Last Saturday, the city woke up to media reports that Bellandur Lake was on fire. Coincidentally, I happened to bike past the lake early morning on Sunday. I was on my way to Kaikondrahalli Lake where I wanted to spend some time, before biking to Puttenahalli Lake in J P Nagar. It was a big day for the trustees of the Puttenahalli Lake as treated water would be formally released into the water-body that day. It was a milestone in their years of struggle to rejuvenate the lake. In nine months, the lake would have a large amount of water,…

Pic: Aditi Surendra Bengaluru had many lakes 40 years ago. Today there are a very few lakes left today. Most of the lakes like Varthur lake, Sarakki lake, Banaswadi lake etc. have been or are being destroyed because a few greedy, inhuman, insensitive and socially irresponsible people cause wanton destruction and grab the land as real estate prices go sky high. The Varthur lake is being filled with sewage and other chemicals. Once the lake is dead, these people can say the land is unfit to be a lake and use it to construct buildings. This is done to circumvent…

Bengaluru has seen many experiments in urban space management. Tender SURE is one of them that is hitting headlines of late. The idea of Tender SURE was born when the Bangalore City Connect Foundation (BCCF) funded and co-ordinated the design of the Tender SURE concept in the year 2009 and implemented a pilot project on Vittal Mallya Road. After the pilot project’s implementation, the BCCF joined hands with the Government of Karnataka (GoK), the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) and Bangalore Metro Rail Corporation Ltd (BMRCL), to implement the project on a few more roads. The technical assistance for the…