Big City Blues

Big City Blues
After Mumbai and Kolkata, Bangalore is set to become Bengaluru
The Times of India


BY merely lending a Kannada inflexion to its name, Bangalore can hardly hope to redeem its sylvan past. Bangalore is not just India’s IT capital and a global outsourcing hub; it is also a city trapped in the angst and turmoil of economic and social transition. Till a decade ago, it was a city of awesome trees, cool weather and simple, Malgudi-like folk. Yet, it was considered to be as cosmopolitan as Bombay, sorry Mumbai, and, in fact, fondly called Bar-galore for its numerous bars. The British set up a cantonment, while post-Independence India developed the city as centre for education and industry. People from all parts of the country would visit and stay in Bangalore as students, researchers or employees in industry. The city’s Kannada flavour, like its flowers a subtle rather than overbearing presence, blended well with offerings from the temples of modern India. But this was not Bengaluru, as today’s traditionalists, floundering for roots in the present anarchy, might like to imagine. Bangalore has always been a proud industrial town, a success story in Nehru’s modernisation drive; the seller of boiled beans or Bendakalooru, is not exactly central to its cultural imagination. While Bangalore, or for that matter any city, goes into the throes of self-discovery, it should seek to reinvent itself in an urban rather than rural idiom. Town is town and country is country — the two imaginations should intersect, but not collapse into each other.

What ails Bangalore today? Unable to handle the IT boom, its social and physical infrastructure is beyond collapse — visible economic inequality, choked roads at all hours of the day, streets overflowing with garbage, a failed drainage system and an airport that is not equipped to handle the increase in traffic. Infosys mentor N R Narayana Murthy seems to have given up on the city, quitting from the body meant to oversee the construction of the Devanahalli international airport and even contemplating expansion of business in other cities. He should instead stick to the city and along with other concerned citizens do some soul-searching on what has gone wrong. IT has created opportunities and incomes, but it has failed to make up for the collapse of earlier support systems. The shift to a post-industrial economy has been rude, and everyone is not smiling. Bangalore, as indeed the rest of India, deserves a more gentle transition to globalisation — not the feeble sentimentalism of boiled beans.