Take off Lal Bagh`s purdah

Subir Roy: Take off Lal Bagh`s purdah
OFF BEAT/ The wall and the fence lobby are in a heated argument
Business Standard

There can be a vigorous debate on whether Bangalore can any longer be called a garden city, what with its galloping automobile pollution, multiplying traffic jams and systematic cutting down of trees in the name of development.

But the one area that helped the city earn the green appellation in first place, and still survives in all its glory, is the 140-acre Lal Bagh in the heart of town.

Laid out as far back as 1760 by Hyder Ali to celebrate the Mughal gardens of Sira, Lal Bagh is home to exotic flora and has become a leading, if not the leading botanical garden in the country.

Mindful of the city’s heritage, the last government gave a glittering edifice in the heart of the garden, the glass house, a new lease of life by renovating it.

Today the sun filters through clearer and firmer into the glass house, enabling those who come to visit the two famous flower shows held every year, to get a greater sense of light and life.

Today Lal Bagh prospers and it’s not declining, as aspects of Bangalore life are. But it is in the middle of a controversy that says a lot about mindsets.

The garden covers a lot of ground and it takes the better part of an hour to circumnavigate it in a car, despite the attempt to smoothen the traffic flow through one-way streets.

Every time I swallow the fumes and pass by Lal Bagh, I rue my station in life that does not allow me time to stand and stare and enjoy the peace within the walls.

But hope is at hand. The city’s municipal corporation is pursuing a proposal to break down the wall and put in its place an ornamental iron fence so that Lal Bagh does not keep itself hidden from passers-by and opens its green vistas to soothe the nerves of those driving on.

The best way to describe what this will do to Lal Bagh is to imagine living in a house with a terrace garden and large windows opening into it, which bring the garden and the plants right into your sitting room.

There is a controversy because the horticulture department, the keeper of Lal Bagh, is scared that pulling down the wall will pose a security hazard.

Thieves will jump the fence more easily and take away some of the rare plants. But then a security threat already exists. Theft happens with people jumping some parts of the wall. Is an average wall any more secure than an iron fence with spikes?

If you really want play safe, you will need the kind of high walls that surround jails, with barbed wire on top and maybe constant patrols with fierce dogs on leash. The point is, a fence is no more or no less a security barrier than an ordinary wall.

Others have more serious concerns. In our country, iron fences are stolen.

Masonry does not have similar resale value as iron. This is true, but if the fence along the main road before the Vidhana Soudha, another defining landmark of the city, does not get stolen, then why the one surrounding Lal Bagh?

If the answer is that the seat of government is crawling with policemen round the clock, the solution may be to have a set of ministerial bungalows on the road near the garden.

That way security will automatically get taken care of, the ministers will get to know how bad inner city traffic is, and maybe do something it. Most importantly, they will get to see the Lal Bagh greenery and start to love it.

Perhaps the most serious doubt raised about the whole project is over the cost involved. Knowledgeable people say it will cost a fortune.

Considering that the poor in the backward districts do not get enough water or food, should the government be tearing down a perfectly good wall and putting up a fancy fence around as much as 140 acres? There is a good answer to that too.

Let the project be privately funded. Let corporations come forward to sponsor parts of the fence. All that they need is to be permitted to put three inch by six inch logos.

I think that will find a lot of takers. After all, there is powerful symbolism in being a part of the process that opens up a great park and a vista.

At the end of the day, it is a matter of mindsets. Are you obsessed about security? Do you prefer the security of a wall to the open view that a fence gives, or the opposite? Some of us have actually lived through this debate.

A decade ago, when a set of Delhi journalists and JNU teachers were deciding how the National Media Centre, where we were going to have our homes, would be, the question of boundary walls came up — walls between, in front of, and behind houses, and walls around the entire campus.

Ultimately the fence lobby won over the wall lobby, thanks to the support from the architect and Panditji. The logic was: if we will be a community, how can we build walls between ourselves?

If you are not rich enough to afford anything more than a pocket handkerchief of a lawn, why not make it stretch further by adding a view?

To me the issue is captured in the name of a musical of the early 1960s. I forget what it was all about but I remember the title:On a clear day you can see for ever. That is if you don’t build walls around you.