Monday, January 29, 2007

An incident in development

Bengaluru (or Bangalore) is supposed to be an IT hub, a kind of success story mediocre media’s justifies India’s existence (which adds up to a concept ‘brand India’, makes morons immensely proud). The embarrassing mediocre media has its own reasons; the reality though is Bengaluru is much more than IT. The place is known for its very rich tradition as knowledge centre. Bengaluru should easily be the Science capital of India. IISC, HAL, ISRO…and many reputed institutions have existed in this city before this unwanted attention (minor skirmishes in some streets makes it as ‘Bangalore tense’, courtesy Mediocre media). IT’s contribution though is significant, mostly confined to south-eastern part of the city. Bengaluru is also a garden city with charming climate. Bengaluru has the distinction of one of the rare metropolitan cities that has a natural habitat for wildlife (sanctuary) half an hour drive away. The birds and butterfly population and variety, have dwindled sharply in recent times, the city has become extremely polluted with not much emphasis on environmental guidelines. The average ambient temperature of the city has increased in recent times. Many homes and institutions never had fans now have started using ac. This has more to do with ‘construction boom’. Many skyscrapers have mushroomed in recent past. This blogger would argue that it is absence of architectural nativity, the reason for degradation. Many go to west and copy what they see there. They thus are not only not able to capitalize, include the local factors in buildings but also these building become threat. Take this example of a skyscraper this blogger managed to snap sometime back-these are the kind of glass houses mushrooming all over the world in the name of development. This building will never be able to use the salubrious climate of the city, these glass houses need ac all the time. Such building should not be allowed to come up, they might be suitable in Dubai not Bengaluru. They cannot even construct proper buildings; copying from west….and calls it development. Now probably to keep up with the ‘energy demands’ we may have to attack some country and kill people. After all India is superpower in waiting!!!.

Talking of superpower there is this public toilet which was constructed sometime back near a slum almost two years back with tiles and appropriate ads enlightening people on need for cleanliness and so on(this could be anywhere delhi, Mumbai, bengaluru or Chennai). The toilet still remains locked children still defecate in open, around the locked toilet and the ad still enlighten us to be clean. The word is still. The word is also Development.