Up and down in Bangalore

Subir Roy: Up and down in Bangalore
Business Standard

I loved the name Old Madras Road the moment I heard it — so quaintly charming. My copy of the Eicher City Map for Bangalore calls it both Swami Vivekananda road and Old Madras Road in brackets.

But in over three years, I have not heard a single person call it by the former name, indicating that a sensible city has rejected misguided attempts to rename a road, for whatever reason (the Ramakrishna Mission is located on it), whose old name has stood the test of time.

Like all good things, the appeal of the road rests on solid functionality. It draws an incredibly short line right into the heart of town from its eastern periphery. I love the way it crashes distances every morning when I have to get to work quickly from Indiranagar.

Parts of it pass graveyards which are silent throughout the year, but see a quiet bustle when relatives come to place flowers at the graves of their dear ones on All Souls’ Day.

Almost opposite is a mosque placed in what looks like a vineyard with posts supporting creeping vines. Next to it are the sprawling grounds of an army establishment where the jawans periodically hack away wild undergrowth and repair boundary walls.

The almost rural surroundings change before you know it and you are soon in the midst of a much older town on a road gone narrow as you pass through Ulsoor with its temples, shops that sell puja essentials, books, clothes and Primus stoves.

Like most living things, the road is changing. The old Muslim shopkeeper who sold me a kerosene stove when I first came to Bangalore and hadn’t got my gas connection yet is gone. His shop is boarded up; the building also will soon go, I am sure, giving way to redevelopment.

Almost next to it is the Ulsoor police station which has just undergone a transformation. With minimum touching up, it now has a brand new exterior.

The change inside is more extensive, with new computers and the like thrown in. It has just been redone by software company Sasken as part of a corporate campaign to upgrade Bangalore’s police stations (Toyota has done the same with a police station in another part of town).

But as much as I love Old Madras Road, of late I have taken to avoiding it, particularly on the journey back home. A part of the drain wall supporting the road next to a dried up lake that is being excavated, has collapsed in the rain. There is a barricade around it and traffic has now to travel single file, leading to massive jams.

But even before this traffic would come to a crawl near that spot when it rained and the collected rainwater spread a deceptive calm over a massive set of potholes. Regular users know what depths the road can go to beneath the water and carefully skirt the spot, making traffic again move single file.

This has gone on for days but nobody will fill up the massive potholes. On Tuesday morning when I passed the spot on the other side of the carriageway I saw an earth mover and a gang at work to restore the caved in road and fill up the potholes.

The filing up could not be done earlier. There is some money in restoring a support wall but precious little in just filling up potholes. If you want to see emerging IT-enabled India and mofussil India all on the same road, come to Bangalore!