Posh rubble

Posh rubble

OFFBEAT

Subir Roy / Bangalore July 04, 2007



The street where we live in Bangalore’s Indiranagar is a bit posher than the one, in the same neighbourhood, where we lived earlier. It is broader, plot sizes are larger, the house more spaciously set out and more private cars can be seen being washed on the street in the morning — all benchmarks of the per capita wealth of the residents. A good number of the houses, all quite big, have only old couples living here, the next generation gone away to work, I suspect, often across shores.

As soon as we moved in, I realised the street was dirtier than the one we used to live on earlier. The sweeper who is supposed to do the jharu every morning is indifferent and often absent. But intriguingly, the people on the street don’t seem to care. They hardly speak to one another, and I doubt if there is a formal or informal local residents’ welfare association whose main job it is to make a noise with the municipal folks when civic staff are indifferent. In contrast, the residents on the earlier street are active, engaged, hold regular meetings of their association and publish annual accounts. Also, the MD of a well-known firm and his civic activist wife who also live there have donated a tidy sum to pave the walkway of the local park.

My initial disappointment turned into active dismay when a home owner down the line one fine morning had a massive ancient tree in front of his house cut down and the space paved. The tree was getting in the way of him being able to park his two large cars! Not all the people in the area are like this. A house on an adjoining street has grown creepers on the big tree in front of it, hung several little artifacts from it and are using to the hilt the free gift that Providence has given them, a great big tree virtually their own.

Thankfully there are still a lot of trees left on our street and it is usually totally quiet. So on the balance I considered myself well off. That was until the prosperous gentleman who owns the house opposite ours decided to renovate it. Nothing wrong in that but the way this is done makes a lot of difference to those who live next door. Thanks to evolving municipal rules, houses under construction are now supposed to have either tin or plastic sheets fixed to scaffoldings so that people around are not forced to witness the mess that construction inevitably creates.

Well, the municipality proposes but the petty contractor who invariably ends up doing the job ultimately disposes. Instead of a cover on an unlovely sight we now have tattered and dirty plastic sheets flapping from uglier scaffoldings, making the whole sight so much worse than what it would have been otherwise. This phenomenon is a common sight all over urban India. Indians who travel abroad frequently must be seeing how construction sites there are boarded up all around so as to not make the neighbourhood look ugly but we do not seem to care.

The sight in front of our house is unhappy but another spot nearby is much worse and I have to pass it on my walk every morning. Someone is spending a tidy fortune to build a mini fortress which is being extensively clad by common granite widely used in Karnataka. Nothing wrong with that, barring the destruction of the environment where the quarrying is done, but that part of the road in my neighbourhood has been turned into a stone cutting workshop, next to which is dumped all kind of building material, and in between this mess collects rubble.

Once in a while a tractor and trailer come and take the rubble away you-know-where. The commonest sight in any Indian town is such rubble dumped in vacant public spaces so that the tractorwalla does not have to make a long trip to an out-of-town dumping yard, assuming such a thing exists. India is shining and our urban areas are booming but how!