An Open Letter to the BBMP

Dear BBMP,

As a user of your roads and pavements, I was very happy with you last year. You improved every single stretch of road that I use on my daily commute to office. When you re-did Old Madras Road and made it sparkling blue so that I could whizz along it and reach office in just ten minutes, my heart rejoiced. I read that the Chief Minister had said that Bangalore's roads were his priority, and I was so happy with him! Finally, I thought, Bangalore would recover from the neglect it had suffered under the previous government.

But now I'm very pissed off with you, BBMP. It's a small matter, but an irksome one.

For context, let me refer you to this blog post of mine, in which I've spoken about my ten-minute walk home from the bus-stop. The 'pavement' used to be a muddy stretch by the side of the road. It was dangerous (because I had to walk on the road at some points) and dirty (on rainy days), but at least it was better than nothing.

But now, thanks to you, it's become worse than nothing.

I'll grant you this - you started out with good intentions. One fine day, as I was coming home, I saw that my muddy stretch had been blocked off with paving stones. Clearly, you were planning to build a pavement there. I was happy. Finally, I thought, I'll be able to walk on a proper pavement and not just a muddy excuse for one.

Over the next few days, I happily watched the progress you were making. I gave my mental blessings and encouragement to the workers as they they filled the future pavement first with mud and then with small stones. During these days, we pedestrians had to walk on the road, of course, but we didn't mind. On a couple of mornings, traffic jams increased because of the piles of mud and rubble the workers left behind on the road, but we didn't mind that either. A few days' sacrifice in order to enjoy a lifetime of easy walking, we thought.

This was back in December, by the way. Mid-December, I think. During the last week of December, I went off on a ten-day vacation. Progress on the pavements had been slow, but I was hopeful that by the time I came back in January, everything would be ready.

Alas - you dashed my hopes with nary a care. It's almost March now, and the pavements are still as they were two months ago. I've lost hope of them ever improving. And the tragedy is that it's only the last step that needs to be completed - the laying of large pavement slabs over the already prepared pavements. Why this delay, BBPM? Is it that you forgot to order those pavement stones? Is your vendor taking a long time?

You know what, I really don't care why. All I know is that that non-existent pavement is endangering my life. My choice is between walking on those little pointy pieces of stone that you've so helpfully filled the pavement with (and twisting an ankle if I'm not careful) and walking on the road. I usually choose the latter. If there is an accident involving a pedestrian on that stretch, BBMP, you know who's responsible.

This may seem like a small matter to you. The lack of pavements on 600 meters of road? That's nothing compared to all the other work you've done over the past few months. But you know why it matters? Because this is for the pedestrians. All that road laying and tarring and what not that you did? That was for the car users - yes, we bus users benefited as well, but we know who you really had in mind. When it comes to the pedestrians,  you really don't give a damn. But if we bus-users and pedestrians all switched to cars one day (as I for one am increasingly tempted to do), then where would you be, BBMP? It's in YOUR interests to make things easy for us. Remember that.

Warm Regards,
A Concerned Citizen

2013 and 2014

A fortnight after 2014 began, let me try to sum up 2013.

I read more, and I read better (though I didn't write about all of the books here). I traveled a bit, but less than I would have liked to. Unfortunately, I wrote about very little of those travels. For the first time in many years, I suffered an infection that lasted longer than a couple of days - and made me realize how terrible the power of a tiny virus is. I wrote more, though less than I should have. I won the first significant writing competition of my life. In the same month, I also suffered one of the worst disappointments of my life. I faced interviews for the first time since campus. I got a new job. I made new friends. I moved far away from my comfort zone, and learnt quite a bit in the process. I surprised myself by being tenacious. I enrolled for a lot of Coursera courses, but completed none. I got two job offers without applying for them. I took a break from Facebook for nine months. I took up the A2Z Challenge, and actually wrote nineteen posts! I went jogging for three months and lost no weight, but managed to lose two kilos a couple of months after I stopped. I was called 'slim' for the first time ever. I experienced the phenomenon of 'Shut Down' for the first time in my career, and boy - was it awesome. Now if only the phenomenon of holiday weight didn't exist. I lost touch with a lot of people I shouldn't have lost touch with. I missed four weddings I should have attended, two for no fault of my own. I was forced to use a Blackberry for the first time ever, and am still in such denial about it that I haven't transferred my contacts to it yet. My husband and I got ourselves a housing loan.

But 2013 was also the year of lost days, a year of many negative thoughts and much unhappiness, a year of falling prey to habits and being stuck in a rut in many ways. I hope 2014 turns out better.

So these, for what they are worth (because readers of this blog know how good I am at keeping resolutions), are my resolutions for the year:

1. I will write more - though not necessarily on the blog.

2. I will maintain a diary, because it makes people more productive.

3. I will consciously plan and travel more.

4. I will complete a Coursera course. :)

5. I will read more and I will read better.

6. I will go jogging at least three times a week.

7. I will consciously be happy.

Relationships and our Childhood Selves

Once I start on a book, I generally don't give up on it, no matter how bad it is. However, I think I'm going to make an exception for Carl Sagan's Contact. I picked up the book (again from my father-in-law's library) because I'd seen bits and pieces of the movie, and aliens are always interesting.

However, no amount of interesting content will make up for dense, convoluted writing. Reading the book, I suddenly had an urgent desire to lobby for a law ordering scientists to stick to science and not wander over to fiction. How can such exciting things be written about so blandly? Even when the heroine falls in love, her emotions are described so - forgive me - unemotionally that I felt like clouting Sagan over the head with his own book (it was only later that I discovered that he was dead and buried).

But in the middle of all that detached dead writing, I stumbled upon a few sentences that suddenly made sense - at least, more sense than the preceding hundred and fifty pages. I don't know if this is proof of the whole monkeys and Shakespeare theory, but anyway.

She began to understand why lovers talk baby talk to one another. There was no other socially acceptable circumstance in which the children inside her were permitted to come out. If the one-year-old, the five-year-old, the twelve-year-old, and the twenty-year-old all find compatible personalities in the beloved, there is a real chance to keep all these sub-personas happy. Love ends their long loneliness. Perhaps the depth of love can be calibrated by the number of different selves that are actively involved in a given relationship.

Note that even here, the scientist in Sagan is trying to come up with an equation to find the depth of love.

As for me, I think I'll just watch the movie.

I Want To Go Back To Hampi Again

It's winter and it's cold and it's sunny, and I feel like going back to Hampi again.

Hampi, two years ago, was magic. An overnight train journey from Bangalore, but it felt like we were on a different planet.

Red-brown boulders teetering precariously on hills. Ruined temples waiting patiently in the sunshine. The reconstructed monuments filled with tourists. The colourful shanty town with its cowshit-splattered streets and its numberless guest-houses. Flocks of foreigners flying by on bicycles. The Tungabhadra, flowing majestically through it all.

What I liked most was that we could lose ourselves if we wanted to - step away from the main touristy places and become one with the landscape. Climb a  hill of boulders and survey the almost-Martian landscape; sit on the cold stone floor of a temple and absorb the absolute silence; take a random footpath and stumble across a ruined building nobody might have entered in centuries.

It was hot, and our legs ached. We ate dosas from a hand-cart in the morning, curd rice on the banks of the Tungabhadra for lunch, and pesudo-Continental in a shady place for dinner. The temples smelt of pigeon-shit. The river was cold and slow and grey. The green sugarcane fields looked strange next to the copper-coloured hills. Monkeys sat on temple walls and made faces at us.

And through it all, there was a surrealness. How did this Martian landscape of red-brown boulders come to be on Earth? Had this deserted row of stone stalls really been a crowded market a few centuries ago? Did this cobwebbed monkey-infested stone structure really once contain the smell of incense and the sound of chanting and the glow of lamps?

Hampi, above all, was about the passage of time. The footsteps and laughter and prayers of people seemed to echo down the centuries to us. They seemed to mingle with the shouts and laughter of the Hampi of today. They seemed to say - yes, you shall also be gone one day, and what shall you leave behind?

Nevil Shute - Pied Piper

Nevil Shute's Pied Piper was one of the books I discovered while riffling through my father-in-law's library recently. The name sounded familiar - maybe I'd seen one of his books in my parents' library. And the concept sounded interesting. I started reading, and was hooked within a few pages.

An old Englishman travels to southern France for a vacation, and is stuck in a war zone when the Germans invade earlier than expected. An English couple at his resort asks him to take their children back across to England with him. The rest of the book is about his arduous journey with the children across France to England, trying to avoid the advancing German army. On the way, the group has many close shaves. Somehow, the Englishman also manages to add to his group - he picks up orphaned children of many nationalities.

It's an unusual book, surprisingly well-written. I had initially been under the impression that Shute was one of those pot-boiling thriller writers - but I was mistaken. Shute develops a believable cast of characters, sets his scenes carefully, moves his plot along quickly. I followed the little group's many narrow escapes with bated breath. Shute also develops a subtle side-plot, where the Englishman comes to terms with his son's death in the war - his son's untimely death is in a way one of the reasons he manages to successfully make the journey.

As I was reading, I followed their journey across France on Google Maps - I couldn't find the little mountain village they started from, but I traced their journey from Dijon across Tonnerre, Joigny, Montargis, Pithiviers, Angerville and Chartres all the way to the coast.

The book is a little nationalistic, of course - the Englishman is apparently the only one kind enough to help out the orphaned children. "I'll never understand you English," says a young French woman. But then, the times probably needed a hefty dose of nationalism.

We're All Americans

From Margaret Atwood's Surfacing. Written forty years ago, and truer than ever.

It doesn't matter what country they're from, my head said, they're still Americans, they're what's in store for us, what we are turning into. They spread themselves like a virus, they get into the brain and take over the cells and the cells change from the inside and the ones that have the disease can't tell the difference. Like the late show sci-fi movies, creatures from outer space, body snatchers injecting themselves into you dispossessing your brain, their eyes blank eggshells behind the dark glasses. If you look like them and talk like them and think like them then you are them, I was saying, you speak their language, a language is everything you do. ...  It was like cutting up a tapeworm, the pieces grew. 

Of Books and Bookshelves

Going through other people's bookshelves is usually a rewarding exercise. You often discover books that you wouldn't have come across otherwise - books that were popular in a particular year or a particular age, and then faded from memory. You also come across authors you might not have tried otherwise.

I was riffling through my in-laws' library recently. I've done it before of course, but this particular stash had older books, yellow with age, that had been bought at least thirty or forty years ago. My father-in-law is a scientist, so the vast majority of the books in the library are related to chemistry or other sciences. A few books on history, some slim volumes of Malayalam literature, some quiz books - these complete the collection.

And the thought struck me - this is how kids get formed. These were the books that were available to my husband when he was growing up, and they were what formed his personality and his interests. Science, history, Kerala - their library is almost a summary of my husband's interests.

And what a contrast to the kind of books I read as a kid. Both my parents are Literature graduates, and the vast majority of the books in their library are novels. There was some non-fiction, of course - but the boring academic work-related kind. So it was natural that I grew up reading more fiction than non-fiction, and still prefer it.

I now feel sorrier than ever for children who grow up without books in the house. Imagine - they grow up without knowing that there are wonderful worlds inside each book - worlds that they can create with the help of a few words, and their own imagination. These children probably know of only TV or music as entertainment - they don't know anything about books! How terrible for them.