Balasaheb Thackeray

Balasaheb Thackeray was a tiger. He was a charismatic personality and no one can deny that. He and his ideology mattered to so many people was exhibited by the sea of humanity that flocked Shivaji park to see their leader one last time. People who came were not only his followers but also people who criticized him or did not agree with him. 

Let me first and foremost say ... If you can ... try and keep the personality aside from his political ideology.  

And as was expected, his death triggered the hitherto dormant topics of who will take over his position, what will happen to the MNS and SS? Will they come together? and so on .. I am not gonna waste time on that and neither am I qualified enough to do so. Having said that, I also see people saying .. I don't care about him. He did nothing good. Who is he to oppose outsiders coming to Mumbai? Why did he have such a hard stance against the minorities? 

 

Let me begin by asking you a question ... When your parents or grandparents tell you about how Kashmir was a heavenly abode and how it was inhabited by learned Kashmiri Pandits who were driven out of their own land .. Did you not ask why? Whats wrong if Balasaheb asked the same question at a gathering of 10k people? 

Mumbai is the favorite city for terrorists. No other city in this country has probably seen more organised terror attacks on it by self styled Jihadi outfits. What is wrong if Balasaheb condemned such acts of cowardice and called on the minorities in the country to not be a part and/or aide such outfits? Remember when a bullet is fired from a terrorist's gun ... it does not check if the target is a Hindu or otherwise.   

You talk of cricket diplomacy. Please go and ask the wives/mothers of the soldiers who died during the Kargil war or other cases of insurgency from across the border. Ask them if it is fine for our country to play cricket to establish Peace with them. If they agree to it, please feel free to criticize Mr. Thackeray. 

Yes he had a hard stance against the Gujratis, South Indians and others. But please do remember Varadrajan Mudaliar was one of the many smuggler's of South Indian origin who operated out of Mumbai. And all those gujju's who took pride in being the effluent class and termed the localites as "Ghati's" is fair eh?   

So going by the same logic ... all people who oppose Tamilian influence in Bangalore or object to the release of the Cauvery waters to TN should be termed as hardliners, right?

Is it okay if I call the office administrative assistant in Chennai, who refused to acknowledge me as a person because I could not speak Tamil properly an extremist? 

You say, he did all this to create a vote bank. If standing up for your own people is termed as vote-bank politics then I wonder what would you term the Kokrajahar riots as being a part of?  

       

I agree that his party's volunteers have been rash and have brought the city to a standstill on many an occasion. No one is above the law of the land. Go ahead and book them. 

I am not trying to defend Balasaheb's ideology nor am I trashing it. All I am saying is being judgmental about some one is very easy. Lets not get lost in doing that again. 

At the end of it, I leave it open to you to accept this or reject it. 

10 questions I’d like BBMP and the other concerned civic authorities to address asap

1. Waste Management:  We need a plan and a deadline. Right now there is neither. How long will you landfill Mandur? And come January, what is your plan? The city is stinking.
2. Garbage segregation has been advised. What are your plans to ensure that it happens? Apart from imposing fines on the owners? And if you do fine, what will you do with that money? 
3. Segregation done. What do you plan to do with it? Do you have any idea of what can  and should be recycled and how? At the moment, all that happens is 'we segregate and your contracted employees aggregate'.

A view of the KR Market area. The whole city is stinking. 

4. I hope you realize that we are on the brink of an epidemic. Viral fevers and flu are making rounds of the city. Dengue and Chikungunya are also knocking doors. What is your plan to contain this?

5. Who sanctioned the Snow City project in the Fun World Complex? We are facing an acute shortage of clean drinking water in most parts of the city. But we have a snow city for entertainment? A report in the Hindu claims that the snow is made from clean drinking water every day. Is this acceptable behavior from a civic authority?

6. What is your strategy for the stray dogs in our city? I hope you realize that simply sterilizing them does not stop them from attacking and biting people.  

7. The parking system in the city is a chaotic. We do not have enough designated parking spaces in most parts of the city. Why is it that irrespective of it being a P1 or a P2, you find vehicles parked under both boards on most days. What is your take on it? Why isn't the traffic police doing its job? 

8. Why does the city have so many missing manhole covers? Are we waiting for another unsuspecting kid to fall into it before we act on it?

9. I believe the BMTC comes under the BBMP. If yes, when will your BMTC drivers learn the basic rule of driving; Red means STOP and Green is for GO.

10. When will the roads in Bangalore be user friendly? 

    

Humanity goes down the drain in Bangalore

Some days back (on Sept 26, 2012) Niveditha attige put up a status on Facebook which read;

“Traffic from all 3 sides stood still at a junction...though one of them had a green signal....to allow the AMBULANCE to pass through from the 4th side...!!! Proud of all Bangaloreans who were in JP Nagar RV junction today morning at 10.30!! It may be a rare sight in Bangalore....but is it so difficult to make this common sight????”

Made me happy as a Bangalorean, but pleasantly surprised me too. This kind of discipline is something I have not seen in Bangalore in the recent times. I see chaos, indiscipline, impatience and yes, arrogance in drivers and riders alike. The situation described above made me think for a while that maybe a few instances like these might obligate the drivers/ riders to behave better. But, I was wrong in expecting that. One sunny day does not make a summer, one good incident does not really mean we know how to behave while driving.

What happened on 23rd October’s evening jolted me back to reality and made me realize the hopelessness around while showing me the city’s arrogance at its best.

Location: Road in front of Accenture Consulting Services office near Dairy Circle, Kormangala.

Time: Around 6.40 pm

Scene: A well decorated ambulance (on account of Ayuda Puja) races into the usual traffic on the location. I was the one closest to the ambulance. The driver politely asks me to move ahead and help and clear traffic since it is an emergency case. I make my way around cars and tempo’s alike requesting them to move since an Ambulance is stuck behind us. I come up near a Rasam orange Swift and request the driver to move as an Ambulance wants to make its way. The paan chewing dude, arrogantly looks at me, sizes me up with his eyes and then blurts out, “Yaake? Nimoru yaarana idaara adaralli?”  (Why? Is some one from your family being ferried in that ambulance?)

Blood rushed to my head and I realized it. I controlled my longing to pull the guy out of his vehicle and bash him up bloodying his white shirt, but I had to make way for an ambulance.

Anger in me made me speak, “Yaake na? Yake nim maneyoru yaarana sai tidrunu heege matadtira?”   

(Why? If some one in your family was dying in an ambulance, would talk in a similar way)

In the fit of rage I flew into when dealing with the guy, I forgot to make a note of his vehicle number. 

Thankfully the signal turned green and everyone finally made way for the Ambulance to move. 

I rode back home pondering, is this acceptable social behavior? Have the people turned so heartless that they don’t understand the importance of a situation? What has this city come to? Otherwise, we do not follow any traffic rules in this city, but you want to do that when an ambulance is screeching around to reach its destination to save a life?

This was definitely one of those occasions when I was ashamed to call myself a Bangalorean.                                                                                                                            

The Cycle Lane project in Jayanagar

It was a painful Monday morning when I rode along the familiar road to office. Monday blues had kicked in. But I still managed to notice something was different on the familiar roads. I quite literally stopped at the side of a road. A cycle track had now been carved out on both sides of many roads in Jayanagar 5th and 4th T-blocks. 
I stared at both sides of the road in wide astonishment and then continued on my way to office. That journey woke me up quite literally. I wondered who or what might have possibly triggered this kind of a project? Projects like these are generally triggered by a social cause and/or environmental triggers. I completely understand that Bangalore's face has gone a major re-structuring in the past 2 decades. 

Bangalore's population is at the moment bursting at the seams. And the water shortage in many areas is an indicator of the same. The pressure on the roads (read vehicular density) is increasing day by day. And in the midst of all this, this project to me seemed as a huge waste of money. 

Roads of Jayanagar 4th Block. 

                                  The cycle lanes are supposed to be dedicated paths at the sides of the roads. This is the condition of such designated places. 

    
As shown above, these are pics taken in Jayanagar 4th block. What you see marked as a thin white in pic 3 is the demarcated cycle lane.  

According to a source on the internet, the project was conceived in April 2009 and was named as Project Vidya Path (Path of Knowledge). It sounds an apt name considering that there are quite a few schools in the area. The basic idea of this project was to have a part of the road segregated and marked as exclusively for cyclists and kids. The idea is to ensure that the kids have a safe ride to school and back home. Very noble thought indeed. 
But, the first question that springs to my mind is .. Should we not first look at making the roads of a better quality than what they are in right now? Most turns on the cycle lane end up in gutters with or without dressed stone to cover them or in open garbage heaps. You can see the same in a video below. 
Shouldn't the project have involved doing a feasibility study on understand where the garbage heaps are, how should we stop them from overflowing on to the road and interfering on to the dedicated lane? Which areas are designated as parking spaces and should we re-align them to not clash with the lane? ... Sadly none of this seems to have as can been seen from the pics below. 

A car is parked right below the Give Way signs for the cyclists.

Another such example. One just needs to take a ride along Jayanagar to see for  themselves

A classic case of confusion. Who is the BBMP fooling is my question?  Should I park my car or give way to the cyclists? And many such parking signs show up all along the cycle track. 

Also seen is another classic case of the way things work in India. "Jidhar paint ka dibba khatam hua ... udhar cycle lane bhi khatam hui."  Work is patchy and incomplete in many places too. Mind you this is all money going from your pocket. For a project that was conceived in April 2009. This shoddy, patchy and incomplete work is what the BBMP has got to show in it's progress sheet for the neighborhood of Jayanagar. When I mentioned about this project on Facebook, I got a few comments not agreeing with me. The point made was that we need it since the pressure on the roads is increasing and that the cost of fuels is going up and this is going to be the way forward. Mind you, I am not against anything of that sort. I am in fact for it. But, I am a citizen of Bangalore, who is seeing blatant mis-use of tax payer's money for such lacklustre work from the civic body of a huge cosmopolitan city.    

 The questions that arise are ... What is the practical use of this track?  What is the growth in percentage of the number of people who have taken up cycling as a mode of transport in the city?  Should we not assess the quality of our road firsts before we kick start such projects? Does one size fit all? Will a 1.5 metre wide demarcation work on all roads? Many of the roads are less than 20 feet wide, should such streets also have the cycling tracks on them? 

I leave you with a video that we shot. Hope this clarifies my angst at the planning and execution of this project. The only hope is that BBMP pulls up its socks and does justice to this project. Just don't want the project to fall funded by the tax payer's money to fall by the way side just like the board that announces it proud inauguration details was found to be. 

Link to the video: 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6U2cPXasSs&feature=youtu.be

Photos and video courtesy: Anitha Raj, my lovely wife.  :-) 

    




     

We, the people.

I am amazed at times when I look around myself. They say, how you behave is a reflection of how your upbringing is. In India, I think majority of us have been brought up on the ‘Chalta hain’ /  ‘Chalayachach’ / ‘Idu ella nadiyode’ attitude.

Casual behavior is accepted as a way of life and sometimes even glorified. Why can’t we behave in a disciplined way? Who gives us the permission to take things for granted when it comes to social behavior? One thing goes wrong in the system and we are up in arms against everyone concerned with it. But who gives you the right to ask that question?

Let’s see a few common examples;

1. We cut across lanes without thinking about who is driving/ riding in the other lane. Why can’t you maintain your lane or signal appropriately to change lanes?
2. You honk mindlessly even if some poor dude’s bike has broken down. Is it his fault that his bike refused to start when the signal turned green? Why can’t you wait for a second and give the dude time to push his bike to a side of the road?  
3. You blame the government for not doing anything about the roads in your city, coz you are inconvenienced while travelling on them. Fair question.  I have one too …  Did you pay your taxes on time and in full?
4. You aim to save tax by fudging medical bills worth Rs 15k each year. Fair eh?
5. You (read men) have the audacity to use the whole wide world as a urinal. Who the f**k gave you the right to do so? You don’t even spare the compounds of Hospitals. But complain of things not being in order when you had to use the same facility.
6. Normally people wait in lines to get their tanks filled with petrol, but you cut through the line thinking it’s your inherited right. May I ask you why?
7. You don’t bother about wearing a helmet and ride with 2 pillions but complain that other people don’t know how to ride. Who needs to read the rules?
8. Garbage from your house belongs to the huge dust bins stationed in your area. But it is much easier to just empty the bin on the divider of the road. And you complain that the area stinks and no one bothers about it. Lovely eh?
9. You grease the palms of the guy who delivers LPG cylinders to your house, so that you jump the line. Who gives you the right to give moralistic lectures to people?
10. Early in the morning, your pet feels the pressure in his bowels and you take him out for a walk. It merrily pisses or people's cars and poops on the road. You return home happy a chore is done. Rasta kya tere baap ka hain?
11. Red, Green and Amber are just colors. Either of them are up on the traffic signal .. all of them mean 'Go'. Are you color blind or just plain idiot?

 How and why are we a country like this? In general all across the society no one wants to take up any extra social responsibility, but are always first in line to crib/ complain and argue about things not being in order. We think of making our cities world class but behave worse than uncivilized people would do. Then how will we be what we dream to be of?

I do not want to paint a pessimistic picture of our country. I think we belong to a beautiful country and can be one of the great nations in this world. But for that all of us have to behave responsibly. If we do so, no one can point a finger at us and say we are a third world country. It is my dream to see our country as a leader in most things. For this We, the people need to act. Now.