Yesterday’s Times of India, Bangalore edition, carried this article on how a chain-snatcher was caught by the public.

No doubt its good that a chain snatcher was nabbed, but what got me thinking is this excerpt:

“…some passersby caught hold of one of the chain-snatchers . He was thrashed by the public before being handed over to the police” [emphasis is mine]

Why is it not even a concern for us when we read this? Isn’t thrashing anybody an illegal thing to do? Isn’t the law & order system supposed to take care of the punishment? Yet, why doesn’t the police or even the journalist reporting it raise this as an issue? Or is it that we are happy to have dished out justice as we no longer trust the state and its ways? And this has become a part of our lives. Where does this lead us?

One of the evident side-effects of the Metro construction in Bangalore has been the incessant cutting of trees across all major areas of the city.

If you now take a look at Seshadri Road, Nanda Road and roads around Malleswaram, you will see how a once-lush-green canopy has given way to a bare concrete view. Is there really a need to take away a portion of Cubbon Park? Was there a necessity to chop trees in Lalbagh (which even today stands as one of Bangalore’s integral identity)? The planning and development of the Metro has taken quite a few people by surprise. There has not been enough information shared in the public domain by the concerned authorities. The benefits of the Metro were never really listed out in comparison to other cheaper modes of transport (bus services being one of them).

What has happened so far is that the Metro juggernaut has rolled on, sucking in millions of rupees on its way and destroying the very fabric of Bangalore that had made it a preferred destination for many in the recent past. Democracy, in its definition, somewhere does include the phrase public participation. And voting is just one part of this public participation. The other and more significant part is to ensure that our public servants are questioned on their policies and to have a say in everything that affects us.

Today there was yet another protest against the haphazard construction and destruction taking place in Bangalore in the garb of urban transport management. We gathered at the BMRCL office (on K H Road) and protested with placards and slogans. Leaflets in Kannada and English were distributed to passers by, highlighting the glaring lapses in the Metro execution.

The group Hasiru Usiru has filed various RTIs (Right to Information) and the information obtained is quite far away from what the initial plans of the Metro were. For instance, the Phase 1 initial cost was Rs. 5800 crores and the present Phase 1 cost estimate is Rs. 11500 crores! Add to that the fact that the Phase 1 project is only 25% done and you get a scale of things to come. While the initial plan stated that around 400 trees would be cut, the actual number of trees are more than 1200 – a number that is only going to increase.

While I do not possess the acumen to judge whether the Metro will be beneficial in the long run or not, what I do know is that a lot of this destruction could be saved or at least handled in a better manner. If you are interested in meeting the group and taking part in the protest, please attend the next meeting at Tagore Circle on 4th November at 5:00 pm.

You can find resources and information regarding the Metro at the Hasiru Usiru website.

Happy to inform that my book “Neumonia and Other Sketch Stories” is now also available at Blossoms Bookstore, Bangalore. Grab your copy today!

Book details here: http://www.sketchstories.com

Couldn’t help but see this as an exhibit on display. The tree stump is a work of art and the creator’s name is painted on the grill. (Click on image to see it in a larger size)

This tree was one of the hundreds that was cut on a road in Bangalore to make way for the Metro. The place looks barren now, with a lot of construction dust all around. A war-zone like feeling, with all the victims being mute enough to not bother us.

On one of the fine drizzly rainy misty weekends of Bangalore I walk into a fancy music and books outlet. One of those huge places which have rows of CDs/DVDs/Books all expensively priced with pretty looking customers carrying pretty looking baskets filled to the brim with pretty looking CD and Book covers.

Everything pretty all around, I walk into the store through the white metal detectors, wiping furiously my slush stained shoes on the black porous wired mat below. We don’t want to disturb this pretty scene now, do we?

I walk through the aisles of books and movies, occassionally catching a pretty face or two – on the covers of these of course.

A couple of kids come running from behind, overtake me from both directions as I amble along, and run to someone they call “Daid” in a heavy American accent. Both of them have a few game CDs in their hand, with a lot of blood and gore and monsters on them.

“We don’t have this one Daid”, the older looking one drawls in a squeakish manner.
“Yeaaah”, the younger one concurs.

Daid looks at the heap of CDs and nonchalantly slides them into the pretty basket he is carrying. The CDs find their respective places amidst a pile of books and settle down comfortably. The kids rejoice, jump a bit and run along to some other corner of the store. More blood and gore there I suppose.

I haven’t been listening to much music off-late so am pretty (that word again!) clueless about what is good these days and what is not. After much thinking and walking up and down various genres, I settle on a couple of old Hindi songs CDs. The rain outside continued to pour and the sound of the pattering would occassionally find its way into the store thanks to some customer walking in.

Armed with just two CDs, both in my hand and not in a pretty basket, I walk up to the cash counter and wait patiently behind a lady who is carrying a pretty bag and a pretty basket too. While the cashier is summing up her purchases, along comes her kid with some fancy looking Playstation CDs. She doesn’t bother to look at them, unlike Daid, and passes them on dutifully to the cashier, who sweeps his bar code reader on them. The numbers tumble forward on the cash screen and the lady dishes out her credit card. I am still waiting with my two CDs in my hand.

A cashier at the other counter finds himself free and gestures me towards him. Feeling like a rather low-value customer, I walk up to him and lay down my CDs on the white counter. He picks up the first one and sweeps the bar-code reader on it. The numbers appear in green on the cash screen. He picks up the second one and sweeps the bar-code reader yet again. But nothing happens. No beep, no numbers increasing. He repeats the act. Nothing. He then looks closely at the label on the CD and keys in some numbers. Again, nothing happens.

He looks at me for a moment and then calls another cashier. The other dude comes around, sweeps the bar-code reader on the CD, then peers into the reader, taps it a bit and tries again. The thing refuses to read anything anymore.

Then, taking me by complete surprise, the cashier announces, “Sorry Sir, we can’t sell this. It is not present in our system.”

“What?” I ask out of disbelief, and the cashier thinks I hadn’t heard him so repeats himself.

“You are not selling me this CD because you don’t have it entered in your system? You are willing to lose a sale for this?” I ask back in further disbelief.

“Yes sir, we cannot help it.”

I laugh it off in a rather smirking tone, but no expression registers on the cashier. He is waiting for me to get the hell out of there and service Daid who is right behind me now.

“I think this is quite absurd. You are losing a customer because of your system. Just write down the code for now on paper and enter it later,” I suggest to him.

He looks at me for a moment and then disappears into a door behind the counter. Daid grunts a little. I prefer to believe it was because of all the blood and gore his kids are excited about.

The cashier returns and tells me, “That’s a good idea sir. I will write it down on paper”.

He jots down some digits, gives me a hand-written receipt and collects the cash. He then starts packing the two CDs in a small white plastic bag when I butt in to tell him that I don’t want the plastic bag. He looks at me for a moment as though there was something definitely wrong with me and then gives me the two CDs without the bag.

I take them in my hands, walk towards the exit, still wondering how a store could be so dependent on technology that its main focus of selling would be overshadowed.
In the background I hear the noises of Daid’s two kids who seem to be on a morphine-influenced drive up the technology curve.
I think to myself how even essential childhood fun is now being served by pixel-image creations magically served by bits and bytes. Are we just going to have more and more people who are comfortable to replace common sense with technology?

I walk out to my car, dodging the drops of water falling gently and eagerly play the CD that the store had refused to sell. The music submerges all random thoughts and I am finally able to smile at life through the fuzzy wet windscreen.

It is 7:45 am and I have just jumped out of bed, staring in horror at the clock which wasn’t supposed to be so ahead in time.

I squint my eyes and double check the chrome minute hand before my brain finally registers and confirms the time. It is indeed 7:45. Suddenly, my cellphone starts beeping. It takes me a moment, just a fleeting moment, to understand that this is not an alarm tone and instead it is someone wanting to communicate.

“Hello,” I say in my modified non-sleepy voice so the other person doesn’t really think I wake up this late.

“Dude, can you make it to the Egg Factory for breakfast?” says the Devil.

A pause before I can comprehend. He continues “We shall have an omelette dude”

The Devil calling this early in the morning? I couldn’t believe that he, of all the people in this world, had woken up this early. There is usually one thing that you could always win your bet on – The Devil not waking up early in the morning. That myth has now been shattered.

“Sure man, I will try to be there by 8:30 or so,” I reply, still maintaining my non-sleepy voice.

“Dude, I am already on my way,” he announces with, what seemed to me, a flourish of victory at having woken up earlier than anyone else in this city.

“Oh ok,” I say and hang up. A mad rush follows and I manage to get out of home by about 8:30. I wanted that omelette, of course.

I look back in the rear view mirror as I exit one of the traffic signals leading from the front, with the entire herd of metal and fuel closing in on me. I feel the traffic build around me and slowly ensnaring me in its ever expanding embrace. After dodging a few small cars and many not-so-small cars, I finally reach Brigade Road, that former heaven of a 20 year old me.

I pick up my cellphone and call up the Devil. No response. What ever happened to my omelette, I wonder, as I move towards the end of Brigade Road.

The parking lots are empty and suddenly I get the urge to park my car in one of those empty lots. Now, you may not appreciate this urge of mine. But trust me, parking on Brigade road is a joy which you can only understand when you go on this road on busy Saturday evenings and fail to find a single parking spot for over an hour. So yeah, I slide my car between two slanted white lines and halt a few inches before the yellow and black striped pavement. A security man in uniform appears out of nowhere with a bag of five rupee coins. He asks my car number, punches in a few keys in the parking meter, which does its gargling sound and sputters out a white ticket. I place the ticket back in my car, cross the road and walk up to the coffee shop in the basement.

When I order my coffee, the Devil calls up and asks “Where are you man?”

Before I can answer he informs me that he was done with breakfast and was already back in his office. I didn’t want to do without my omelette for the day of course. But heck, this coffee shop did not serve omelettes.

“Anything egg based?”, I inquired trying not to look too inquizitive.

“Egg puff sir,” replied the lady at the counter, who was wearing a white coat similar to those worn by junior doctors in pathology labs.

I throw out the pathology bit from my mind and order one of those egg puffs with my coffee. Omelettes can wait, but I can at least aim to get a part of the deal with an egg puff.

My coffee arrives and so does the egg puff, which for the un-initiated is a half-boiled egg covered with some spicy gravy and finally wrapped with flaky stuff that is usually found in, well, puffs.

I finish these two and as I get up a young man approaches and starts cleaning the table making me seem like a baby who didn’t know how to eat a flaky egg puff. I rush back out on to Brigade road. The traffic has increased but the parking lots are still empty. A thought of coming here on a Saturday morning and parking my car for the entire day strikes me. An evil thought I decide, also slightly influenced by the amount of parking money involved in that plan.

I drive my car back into mainstream traffic and 20 minutes later swerve into the road leading to my office. Right ahead of me, a car had managed to brush a TVS-50 (which, for the uninitiated, is a tiny scooterette with 50 cc of power. The uninitiated take up a lot of my time explaining) and a card board box had fallen upside down on the road. When the TVS rider walks up and turns the card board box around, a few things from the box fall on the road. To my extreme surprise at concepts of probability and coincidences, those things are nothing but egg puffs.

“What is with this stuff and me today morning?” I think to myself and then I notice that the rider was picking each one of those puffs from the road and putting them back in the box.

Someone was going to have an egg puff today that had touched an asphalted road. A road which many cars had passed over. Cars which had driven over slush and mud and sundry other things. Someone who had an evil thought of blocking parking lots in the city might end up eating that egg puff. Who knows?

I pass by the flaky crumbs which were strewn on the road and enter office, with thoughts of karma and omelettes mixed in a heady combination readying me for the day.

A few days ago, we forced our way out of leisurely slumbers to the Chitrakala Parishat institute. Veeral (cousin and a student at CKP), who was our photographer and guide told us about the Dastkari Haat which was organized in the institute and so we decided to take a look.

The place was teeming with artists and their beautiful works from almost all parts of the country. There were abstract sketches, modern clocks, Madhubani paintings, crockery made from natural stones found only in the state of Manipur, puppets from Rajasthan, Sarees (I write this for the record, upon insistence from the Mrs. of course) which were reportedly very beautiful, and a whole lot of other artifacts.

I was impressed with, and in awe of, the immense talent that our country possesses in its artisans. The people selling and showcasing their works were not business dealers. They were wonderful artists, and this reflected in the way they spoke in great length and detail about each one of their works of art. Here are a couple of the many photographs which Veeral took:
A work in wood:

Puppets waiting to be looked at:

It was an afternoon well spent.I also got to know that the Dastkari Haat Samiti might be visiting Palace Grounds next before leaving Bangalore in a few days. You might want to follow up on that and catch the troupe.

Those of you who are in Bangalore must have observed the incessant felling of trees with the aim of widening the roads.

I am sitting on board a flight from Bangalore to Delhi. The passengers are still trickling in and rushing to occupy whatever little overhead baggage space that is still available. The air hostesses are wearing devilish red and the air conditioning seems to be working overtime. I raise my hand upwards and turn a knob to switch off the cold air hitting me from the top. I am sitting at the emergency exit, a place I usually try to seek since it has the maximum leg space (perhaps more than the business class too).

I sit back, take a deep breath to prepare for a long tiring journey (2.5 hours to be precise) and buckle-in the seat belt mechanism with a satisfactory click sound. A tall well built man comes down the aisle and takes up the window seat. He looks at me, smiles and says with a loud voice, “How are you doing?”

“Pretty good”, I reply and continue burying my face in the day’s edition of the Times of India. The river Kosi has spread havoc. But this news is not the main news, a status accorded to the political turmoil of a neighbouring country.

“Is that the Delhi edition?”, the man asks.
I look at the top of the paper and strain my eye to read the small font which says New Delhi.

“Yeah”

Upon hearing this, he reaches out and picks up the paper from the pouch in front of his seat. What if it was the Bombay edition? He wouldn’t have read it then?, I ask myself.

“By the way, my name is Anil”, he announces with an outstretched hand across the seat that lies vacant between him and me.

I shake his hand and introduce myself. I immediately sensed that it was going to be the talkative co-passenger type of a flight.

The air hostess walks down the aisle, suddenly stops and looks at this man who is toying with his expensive looking Blackberry.

In a stern voice which would have done any school principal proud, she says “Sir, please switch off your mobile phone.” Clearly, this air hostess is pretty annoyed about something in her daily dealings.

My fellow passenger has apparently initiated a shut down of his mobile device and just shows the instrument to the air hostess, pointing out the shutting down message to her, with a frown on his face. The angel in red scoffs, checks herself quickly and just walks away. Far from a customer-is-the-king philosophy, but I don’t blame her. My fellow passenger sure isn’t going to get a good meal, I think to myself.

“Bangalore traffic sucks”, he says after a while.
“Yeah”
“Delhi is much better”
“Yeah”

“I think it is because it is where I’ve lived all my life”, he continued.
“Yeah. True”, I take an effort to seem interested.

“So you are a Gujarati”, he affirms based on my last name. “I, by the way, am a Punjabi”, he announces.

I nod my head. Couldn’t agree with him more on this, factually.
“We Punjabis just like two things in life – eating and drinking”, he chuckles and I add in a smile.

“Work in Delhi?”

“Sorry?”, I look at him

“Going for work there?”

“Yeah” and I tell him where I work.

“Great. I work for a private equity fund. Investments et al”

“Oh, that’s nice”

“Which college did you go to?”, Anil continues

I tell him my B-School and turns out one of my former batchmates has worked with him in some investment related role. I try to recall the batchmate but unfortunately don’t have much to say about him.

“You travel often to Delhi?”, he changes the topic

“Not really. Once in a while”

“Ok. The only city in this country having good infrastructure is Chandigarh”.

I nod, with an all-knowing fabric stretched across my mind.

“I’ve travelled a lot around. Work takes me places”

“That is nice. I don’t like much travelling though”, I add

“You know, the only city which has really made tremendous progress is Ahmedabad. In fact the entire state of Gujarat is developing at a great rate”

“True. The Modi government has done a lot of development I hear”

“Yes, and corruption is at an all-time low. They are doing some great work out there”

“But I think the communal riots and subsequent genocide was sickening. Not sure if the development and progress is acceptable when there has been such a horrific past.”

“Sugar comes along with its propensity to cause diabetes”, he chuckles.

“Sorry?”, I fail to understand

“Simple yaar. Medicine is always bitter. It is a trade-off. Somethings need to be done, can’t help it”

I didn’t have much of a response there. Hundreds of people died brutal deaths in those riots and here it was being casually brushed aside, an insignificant event that didn’t deserve to be spoken while sipping on fresh lime juice in an expensive airline.

Our conversation continued and I learnt how carefree about the world people can really be. No carrying burdens of the society, no worrying about your role and its impact and definitely not bothering to build an opinion of things that didn’t affect you directly. It was a different world, but a world that seemed easy and smooth.

Was that the right way to go? It didn’t have any issues or dilemmas or social empathizing, it was individualistic, free and devoid of any bindings. Analogous to being a libertarian compared to a socialist? As I thought about all this, the conversation moved from the good hotels in Bangalore to the most expensive watch outlets in Delhi.

Food arrived, so did coffee and tea in small compact flasks. Clouds filled up the view outside and the lights dimmed. A short nap and I find myself landing at the Indira Gandhi Airport. We get out, take the bus to the terminal, bid goodbye and find our respective cars to go wherever we were supposed to go. A hundred cars whiz by as my taxi gets on to the highway and picks up speed. A hundred lives, a hundred minds, a hundred souls. Who is right and who is wrong. How many rights are there and how many wrongs. What is right and what is wrong.

Bangalore rocked by a series of bomb blasts a while ago. Reuters states that 7 blasts have occurred while ibnlive states 5 blasts. According to some sources, three people have died with several injured.

Some of the other news reports:
Associated Press
Times of India
BBC

Some sources say that the bombs were buried under ground. Disgusting.
A woman died while she was waiting at a bus stand. A woman. Waiting. Dead.

I just hope, fervently hope, that the culprits are caught. But will that be justice enough? No. When will the country ever become insulated against all these man-made calamities?