Upset by the death of MG Road, thrilled by a night bus ride in Bangalore- May 29, 2012

After a day full of site visits and meetings, I did not see myself cooling my heels in an obscure hotel in the middle of nowhere, an apt description of Electronic City in Bangalore. I took the opportunity to ride with someone into town and found myself at that familiar intersection between M G Road and Brigade Road. Right next to me was the Cauvery Emporium where as a child I remember buying Mysore Sandal Soap with my grandmother and staring at the bronze statues and silk carpets that my uncle Gopal would sometimes buy (he was passionate about these and they appeared super expensive to us).
I decided, for the sake of nostalgia, to walk down M G Road. It was about eight in the evening and the stretch that used to be the heart of the city with people jostling for space was a deserted, sad place with no pavements to speak of, a clattering ugly overhead Metro line and lots of traffic. Even after several malls came up in the city, this used to be a vibrant space. The metro seems to have sucked whatever life it had out and I was sorely disappointed.
Brigade Road was more like what it used to be, though it also seems to have relinquished it’s status as a prime shopping location. Even so, I enjoyed watching the passers by and marvelled at the wonderful cosmopolitan mix this city now is and the sheer feeling of youth and casual confidence here as compared to say Connaught Place in Delhi.
A good meal later, we (my colleague Nipesh did his own city trawl in the meantime) topped off a the evening with a small adventure we greatly enjoyed- we yapped away while riding in a City bus to Electronic City and then savoured a long walk to our hotel in dark deserted but beautifully tree lined streets escorted by a street dog!
Images below: The overhead metro has ruined the heart of Bangalore, followed by two shots of Brigade road at night.

Shooting in the dark: Affordable housing for Indian cities- May 28, 2012

I’m in Bangalore again, driving through the city to get from the airport to Electronic City, where we will spend two days brainstorming our preliminary research on setting up ratings for affordable housing. Always known for its simplicity and charm, Bangalore screams out its penchant for opulence today. Billboards advertise homes for Rs 5 crore and jewellery advertisements are numerous as well. Affordable housing is going to be difficult to talk about in this setting.
Why blame Bangalore though? Indian metros are seeing a distinct trend of imbalanced development. Two clear victims in this have been the poor and the environment. It is impossible for our cities to survive this way and we are at the brink of two types of disasters- social and environmental.
Gated communities are offering a refuge to the privileged and rearing a generation of people who will have words like equity, balance, multicultural and cohesion in their dictionaries without really grasping their meaning. Two worlds that do not understand each other are springing up before us. Intolerance is fuelling the flames and we are experiencing a severe social schism that urgently needs correction. How do we build trust and eradicate feelings of suspicion?
In this scenario, the concept of developers building homes for the poor strikes me as unsustainable. The gulf is wide. This will only be possible if the government steps in to make the investment profitable to developers. And if organisations and mechanisms can bridge the gap between developer and the low income customer. Institutionalising such a process seems an onerous task. Add to that the fact that access to finance is a key ingredient that also needs to be tackled in an institutional manner. Mammoth changes in policy and attitude are needed.
Working on this rating with Ashoka and other partnering organisations has been revealing. But I am unsure if I am any more optimistic than when we begun. At this point , I feel we are still shooting arrows into the dark and the answers lie right before our eyes, but we are unable to see them!

Weighty issues on my mind: Craving for fitness- May 27, 2012

I’ve wanted to write about this for the longest time, but never had the guts to. It’s my weight problem! I’ve been overweight for as long as I remember, precisely since higher secondary school. Even in college, weight was a hugely sensitive issue with me. Someone had to just make a passing joke about it and I would sulk the entire day, mulling the comment over and over, killing myself with guilt and low self-esteem.

And then I got married to Rahul, who always loved me for what I was and never ever ran me down on the weight aspect. Two kids down the line, my struggle with my weight has become more realistic and less paranoid. I’ve tried various things and I kind of know what works and what doesn’t.

I have to say this, though. My motivations for losing weight remain a strange mix of three things:

Health-I worry about the slight knee pains I have now and then, weak ankles, and the usual lifestyle disease worries.

Looks-I really do want to wear what I want without worrying about how the outfit will look on me, or worse, whether the shop would have it in my size…hugely embarrassing and depressing experience when they give you that sheepish but unapologetic look!

Self-esteem- I have this self-image of myself as a reasonably thin person. When I look in the mirror, that’s who I see. When I break the illusion, on some days, I see this obese person who is me, but isn’t me really! I don’t want to be schizophrenic. I simply need to thin down into my real size!

Of late, I’ve started realizing that I truly crave for fitness as well. Its a new target, one I am turning over in my head and hoping to really internalize in the next few weeks. Come July, I intend to develop a more holistic training routine. 2013 will see a new me, for sure!

How travel shaped me: Nostalgia! May 26, 2012

For me, vacations are about travel and there is nothing as exciting as planning a trip somewhere. My mum is an avid traveler and even on scanty budgets, we traveled quite a bit when I was young. Living away from family meant trips to Goa and Bangalore were normal. But we took an annual trip to someplace else as well. I remember coming awake in an open jeep to a watch a magnificent white peacock dancing at Kanha National Park. Car breakdowns near Kota, at an obscure village in Hassan district on our way to Belur-Halebidu temples are specially memorable as a child. I was happy to sit idle at strange places while people around me fretted and stressed out! Once, we drove through the Chambal Valley and dad could not have enough of trying to scare us with dakoo (bandit) stories!
The exposure of travel is priceless indeed and many observations regarding culture, environment, art, architecture and human behaviour stay with us because they came to us when we were busy having fun- traveling!
I fell in love with India’s heritage because I traveled to many major and minor sites as a child and young adult. I That I went on to study architecture and took a certificate in conservation during my masters in planning is no coincidence, in hindsight!
No experience was too harsh either! We slept on the station platform once and got thrown off a train another time, literally with bags and baggage going plonk, plonk, plonk at regular intervals down the platform as the ticket collector pushed them off a moving train! I can laugh now, but I remember that as a long, long night. That we plodded on despite obstacles clearly imparted some life skills. Despite travel anxiety, I can convince myself to let go and am confident things will work out and the usually do!
June is the travel month for our family. Cannot wait for it to begin!

The movie culture: the moronic feat of watching two in a day May 25, 2012

Going to the movies has been a vital element in urban culture. I lived in Mumbai as a young child and was taken by my parents to watch a few films a year. During summer, my cousins from Goa came to stay and the film outing became a gala event. Once I remember an older child in our apartment building (we called her Shilpa Akka) took us all to watch one of those Sridevi type family dramas in Hindmata, an iconic talkies movie hall in Mumbai.
Things changed drastically when multiplexes started out. As college kids, we stood for hours in a narrow long snake like line behind PVR Anupam in Saket to fight our way and procure tickets for Rs 7. Regular tickets were priced upwards of Rs 70 and were totally unaffordable for us. Before college, back during the Lucknow days, going to the movies was a luxury. We lived far out of town and there were a handful of theatres considered appropriate for girls from ‘good’ families! Sahu, Mayfair, Novelty, Pratibha- only these four. If you didn’t want to be prodded, ogled at, etc.
And then multiplexes mushroomed all over the country. Movie halls came to our doorstep, sometimes literally. And movie going became accepted among the urban middle classes as a more expensive (read upmarket) affair replete with goodies from the confectionary stall. Popcorn and coke combos entered our lives and menus kept expanding to give movie goers the experience of dining and being waited on while plonked on plush seats in front of a large screen with Dolby sound!
I’m a bit soft in the head today from watching two films in a day, do forgive me the wandering narrative! Chhota Bheem, the movie we took a whole kiddie gang to in the daytime was the expected horror. No nuances, no humorous, no variation in the storyline. Ugly unreal creatures and mumbo jumbo with Bheem fist fighting his way to hero hood once again.
The second film, Men in Black 3, was more of the same but far better made. Humour and technology saved that one, but nothing to write home about.
Clearly, the film and animation industry crave moronic kids and adults for whose pleasure they can continue to churn out this formulaic stuff. What we city dwellers wouldn’t do for a spot of entertainment!

Water sagas: Stories of community action and despair about our most precious resource- May 24, 2012

A few days after I read about CII’s initiative to initiate blue ratings in India, probably the first in the world to monitor industrial water usage in a holistic manner, an encouraging story about the revival of a river caught my eye.

Today’s The Hindu supplement carried a great story about the revival of the Hindan river that originates in Saharanpur and joins the Yamuna, crossing Ghaziabad and other parts of the NCR. The Jal Biradari is a community organization comprising environmental activists and citizens from all walks of life that has consistently campaigned to create awareness among villagers about issues like falling water tables, pollution and exploitation of water resources. They do this through padayatra, or simply by walking through villages and interacting with people.

In contrast, the urb.im blog outlines Mumbai’s struggle to put into action measures to clean and manage the Mithi river, a massive gutter that flows through Mumbai. Images of the July 2005 floods in Mumbai are still fresh in people’s minds. Public clamor for a clean up that could create much-needed green spaces for the city grows, but migrants keep pouring in and the poor who live alongside the sad trickle of water are increasingly threatened, by lack of action and potential action alike!

Rampant discharge of industrial effluent into rivers is the primary cause of the sad states of rivers like these across the nation. Coupled with increasing urbanization and the consequent pressure on land (often translated into greed for land), rivers are threatened; and so are we who depend on water for our existence. The ill effects of polluted rivers need no elaboration- among other things, toxic vegetable and fruits threaten to damage our future generations irreversibly!

Interestingly, one only needs to stop discharging the effluent for a river to do its own thing and clean itself up. More importantly, green areas that allow groundwater recharge are critical to our survival. Governments, while they blame private developers for the evil deeds and wish to regulate them, are known to be responsible for the ‘unkindest cut of all’. The proposal to develop the Mangar village area into an amusement park is one such hare brained scheme in the news recently.To amuse the people who won’t be around when the water taps run dry?

 

Coming to terms with my hypocrisy: Urban vs Suburban in India- May 23, 2012

I don’t like the concept of a gated community, yet I live in one. I believe traveling by public transport is the right thing to do as well as immensely enjoyable and cheaper, yet I admit I do drive to work at least half the time. My action towards conserving electricity is to set my air conditioner’s thermostat to 27 degrees C instead of the preset 24 degrees C.  I can no longer live comfortably without air conditioning.

Someone asked me today whether they should invest in a posh apartment somewhere in Noida that would be delivered four years later, or buy a flat in a not-so-upmarket but conveniently located South Delhi neighborhood. I began to tell them about lifestyle choices and how, once they are made, they trap you in their iron grip, dictating your daily choices thereafter!

We should know! We moved to Gurgaon as renters initially. We were about to have a baby a few months down the line and where we lived in South Delhi, we couldn’t envision being able to even take the baby for a walk in a pram! The secure, open, green spaces and childrens’ play areas in Gurgaon’s gated colonies made perfect sense at that time and continue to do so now. Neighboring families were kind of clones of ours- similar age group, life stage, backgrounds, lifestyles, even aspirations at times. And so we bought into this lifestyle. We did not, however, bargain for a car trip for daily shopping and a completely automobile dependent urban environment where crossing a road could lead to a mental breakdown!

Inside the above-mentioned not-so-upmarket South Delhi neighborhood, afternoons are drowsy and evenings lively. Neighbors fight over water supply and often have nothing in common, but it’s possible to get all your household supplies within walking distance. Ice cream can run out at ten in the night in the middle of a dinner party and it would just mean running round the corner to replenish your stock!

I’m comparing the above two scenarios because price-wise, a family would have to make this sort of choice. I made mine for specific reasons, but now I live a life at complete odds with my ideological stance. Is that hypocrisy? Yes, it is. Can I or would I change that? No easy answers to that!