GENRE: Voices

I had just spent a wonderful evening with friends on Residency Road, one mid-January evening this year. At the time, the world was between waves of the pandemic, but one could sense that people wanted to be out in the world again, meeting people, shopping, traveling. I was undoubtedly one of them. So here I was, returning home as I had always done before the pandemic hit, in an auto-rickshaw at 9 p.m. I was scrolling through social media on the phone, unaware of just how much the world around me had changed. But to be on the safer side,…

Perambur railway station is one of the important stations in the Chennai Suburban Railway network. In terms of commuter traffic, it is the fifth largest station in Chennai, after Chennai Central, Egmore, Tambaram and Mambalam. All of the suburban trains passing through this station, except one or two, halt here, and many of the long-distance trains also have a stoppage at this station. Perambur Railway Station is also the second oldest in the city after Royapuram railway station. The station was originally built in the 1860s to cater to employees at Southern Railway's locomotive, carriage, wagon and coach-building workshops.  The…

My duties as the Adjunct Professor of Marketing at SPJIMR calls for me to teach a full course to second-year students. And my course was set to start in early April 2020. I had a class of 60 students and 16 sessions to teach. Within a few days of the lockdown, students were asked to return to their home towns. The faculty were put through several sessions on ‘how to teach remotely’. Interestingly, Harvard Business School ran a whole series of webinars on how to teach using Zoom. My course started as scheduled in early April. The first few sessions…

Nothing fills me with greater sadness than to present you with this visual record of how a heritage street has declined to ruin. My oldest is a 1919 photograph of St Thomas’ Street in Fort St George – you see a long line of buildings on the left, each fronted by a verandah, thereby indicating that the street retained its residential character of buildings even then. True they were all offices, but the structures remained. St Thomas Street, photographed in 1919, courtesy Sarmaya India. My Old is a sketch of the same street from 1945, done by Ismena Warren for…

The Mumbai Climate Action Plan (MCAP), announced by the Maharashtra government on August 28th was meant to democractise decision making in order to make Mumbai sustainable by considering suggestions from citizens, experts and research organisations. However, the ground reality seems very different. Numerous projects currrently being executed in the city have drawn strong criticism from experts and citizens. Below are some of the concerns raised by experts which need to be addressed urgently. Induced demand phenomenon While some countries have dismantled their highways and coastal roads to promote public transport, Mumbai's approach is something called induced demand; the economic concept…

The past month has been a whirlwind for most residents of Jawahar Nagar. Our streets made headlines and featured in news snippets, a scenario many of us didn't imagine possible. It was due to the heavy downpour that the city experienced during the northeast monsoon. For many of us, this was reminiscent of the floods of 2015. The downpour left our streets waterlogged and residents had to scramble to reach higher ground and save their belongings. Jawahar Nagar during the rains On November 6th, we received an unprecedented amount of rainfall from 10 pm to 3.30 am. This led to…

There are two kinds of childbirths, a ‘normal’ childbirth - vaginal  - and a ‘lower section caesarean section’, more commonly known as a C-section.  A C-section is a surgery performed to deliver the baby through an incision made on the stomach and the womb. It involves expensive medical bills and the possibility of a medical emergency. The choice between a normal childbirth and a C-section is a burden on every expecting woman for many reasons, primarily, the side effects, the risks and the costs. In 2019, experts said that India may soon have the ‘most caesarean births in the world.’…

Reforming Indian agriculture in a way that would match the country’s food needs with ensuring farmers’ security has been debated for decades now. But a reform package, that would be welcomed by farmers and consumers from Punjab to Kanyakumari was never going to be easy or simple.  This Central government’s version of bringing about much-needed agriculture reform were three new farm laws that overrode all the other laws that came before it. Unfortunately, the new laws addressed the various issues that farmers faced in much the same way that the blind men of the fable saw the elephant. No wonder…

Homes in Siddharth Nagar, a slum in Andheri West, might soon get water connections after a 9-year long struggle. Members of Pani Haq Samiti, an organisation fighting for universal access to water, held a ‘Jal adhikari satyagraha' on November 15th, after which the Assistant Commissioner of the K West ward promised to write to the Municipal Commissioner (MC) for the connection. The approval of Iqbal Chahal, the Municipal Commissioner, is imminent. 2 million people in Mumbai are denied a legal water connection. This dates back to a policy by the Maharashtra Urban Development Department (UDD) in 1996 that cut off…

With intense spells of rain over the past month, there has been widespread flooding in Chennai. Areas such as T. Nagar, Guduvanchery and K K Nagar are among the many localities that experienced extreme waterlogging. Residents raised their concerns and requests to the civic body on social media by posting photos of water-stagnation and the damage caused by it.  Care Earth Trust, a city-based environmental organisation, saw here a need for better information at the ground-level for proper flood mitigation measures. And this information needed to be sourced from citizens themselves. Seeing as many in the city were taking to…