 "Priya Ramasubban")
The best-known thing about Mysuru-born Baadal Nanjundaswamy, during the last 10 years that he’s called Bengaluru home, is that his art, much of which is transient, gets things “fixed” in the IT city.
Over time, he has developed a strange association with potholes: he is frequently on a hunt for the meanest potholes around. And Nanjundaswamy’s “protest art” keeps the civic authorities on their toes.
When Nanjundaswamy placed a 20-kg life-sized fibreglass crocodile in a 12-feet-wide pothole filled with green and blue water last year, the intense attention it received on the social media embarrassed the authorities enough to cover it.
For long, Nanjundaswamy’s work has had a tongue-in-cheek or comic spin. When chunks of concrete blocks on the road, which were to serve as dividers, proved to be a traffic hazard, he painted them bright red and wrote, “I <3 BBMP (I love Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike, the administrative body for local civic affairs).” The authorities quietly cemented the divider and painted it.
But at a time when Bengaluru stands embroiled in a bitter battle against unhinged construction, Nanjundaswamy’s work has turned darker.
This past Sunday, when citizens protesting against a proposed steel flyover in Bengaluru reached Freedom Park to participate in a day-long hunger strike, waiting for them were replicas of axed tree stumps. Like a scene from a cemetery, each of these stumps had a cross sticking out.
The steel flyover, which could save seven to 10 minutes of commuter time, threatens to claim 812 of the city’s trees. As Bengaluru, a retirement haven during the Raj known not so long ago as Garden City, figures out how to become a world-class city, people like Nanjundaswamy want to preserve what is special and pristine here.
Trees, many of them rain trees and flowering ones like gulmohar and copperpod, are the biggest casualty of the development drive. The second phase of Bengaluru’s Namma Metro requires about 1,700 trees to be “pruned, relocated or axed.” For a single stretch from Baiyappanahalli to Whitefield alone, the Metro authorities are waiting for permission to fell about 275 trees.
Relocation sounds good but inspires little confidence amongst the people: a fair number of trees that were transplanted to make way for development projects have not survived.
Architect and urban planner Naresh V Narasimhan remembers the time in the 1970s when he spotted six cars while cycling to school over a distance of 8 km
One of the things that gives a city its intrinsic character are heritage structures, which include both buildings and trees, says architect and urban planner Naresh V Narasimhan.
“Cities shouldn’t look like they were made yesterday. No city in the world can instill pride in its citizens unless it has historical continuity. Politicians say that they want to make Bengaluru like Singapore or Kuala Lumpur, but Bengaluru should be Bengaluru or else it’ll become sterile and lose its vibrancy,” says Narasimhan.
Narasimhan has fought hard to save several heritage buildings in the city. The most well-known of these is a British-era building called Balabrooie. Styled in classical European fashion, the notable occupants of Balabrooie include Mark Cubbon and the first three chief ministers of Karnataka. Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, M Visvesvaraya and Rabindranath Tagore are some of its residents after the place became a guesthouse.
In the absence of the heritage tag, the building was to be razed in 2014 to give way for a legislators’ club: Narasimhan was one of the citizens leading the efforts to save Balabrooie, where the trees are reported to be over a century old, if not older. “Bring your umbrellas,” Narasimhan wrote on the social media for the protests that were meant to be around noon. Today, the iconic bungalow serves as a guesthouse for VIPs visiting the city.
Two years later, the challenges have changed, but the long-drawn struggle to save Bengaluru continues. Last month, Narasimhan rode up and down the 6.7 km stretch for the proposed steel flyover over the course of two days and nights: the idea was to look for ways to combat the steel monstrosity. The urban planner came back with four alternatives that would cause far less damage than the flyover.
“My father was one of the founders of INTACH and he was one of the people who saved the High Court from being demolished in the 1970s and early ’80s. We have a long tradition of protecting the city’s heritage. Perhaps, that’s where the desire to save the city comes from,” says Narasimhan.
Actor Prakash Belawadi believes that the Emergency instilled a sense of activism in people like him
A prominent face among those staging a satyagraha against the flyover is that of theatre person and activist Prakash Belawadi. “My parents were theatre people, so I was always exposed to what was happening in the society,” he says.
It was the Emergency that radicalised people like Belawadi. “Freedom is not a given. It’s something you have to constantly fight for and get,” says he. “And with that freedom comes the responsibility to have the courage to say what is right and wrong, and to act when necessary by public intervention.”
As a defender of freedom and free speech “as long as it doesn’t hurt another person,” Belawadi has also voiced support for the Bangalore Literature Festival, which saw opposition against its co-founder Vikram Sampath, and has been involved in campaigning in favour of a heritage policy for the city’s structures. Belawadi was one of the organisers of an event held last year that got together 200 men and women, all dressed in red, to trace the boundary of Tipu Sultan’s fort and the city’s lost history. The campaign for a heritage policy continues to gain momentum.
For Nitya Ramakrishnan, one of the founding members of a steadily-growing group called Whitefield Rising, standing up for Bengaluru started with a tree back in January 2013. When a tree near her Pilates studio was to be cut to make space for new construction, Ramakrishnan began to ask around how she could save it. Short of chaining herself to the tree, there was little she could do, the senior IT professional was told by many.
Then entrepreneur and activist R K Misra told Ramakrishnan: “I can try to save that one tree. What about the rest? You citizens must rise up to the occasion.” So with the agenda of “ask what you can do for the country,” 50 people attended the first meeting of what was to be called Whitefield Rising in March 2013.
The citizen-led movement, which now works on everything, from waste management to organising a neighbourhood watch, has over 17,000 members on the social media. The actual number of people on the ground differs, explains Ramakrishnan, because each cause has a different person who leads the initiative, and members work as volunteers only.
Earlier this year, when Delhi experimented with the odd-even system to combat traffic congestion and air pollution, Bengalureans had a field day with memes focused on Whitefield’s endless traffic woes.
The base for all humour was that the odd-even system wouldn’t work in Bengaluru because it was a well-known fact that techies on their way to work to the IT hub have often been known to start on a Monday and reach only by Tuesday.
“No urban city allows trucks to ply on roads during business hours, but for some reason they are allowed in Whitefield because of which we have kids sitting in school buses for up to two hours,” says Zibi Jamal, a media consultant who is one of Whitefield Rising’s core members. Last year, there was a ban on long-distance trucks travelling through the area, but it was short-lived. Whitefield Rising continues to negotiate with the authorities over the matter.
Not only has Whitefield Rising worked to organise traffic conditions, it has also managed to get relevant authorities to consider the idea of express trains halting there to reduce traffic.
This project has since then inspired other citizen-led initiatives in other parts of the city, like Nallurahalli Rising and Doddanekundi Rising.
Documentary film maker Priya Ramasubban’s determination to save Lake Kaikondrahalli was cemented when she came across ‘thousands of black and yellow dragonflies’ near the water body
Focusing on hyper-local issues is the way forward, believes documentary film maker Priya Ramasubban. “To get involved in everything at the same time may dilute the work you are doing,” she says.
With a history of being involved in socio-cultural projects, when the Chennai-born film maker moved to the city and took a place near Lake Kaikondrahall , she found that the water body that spreads over 48 acres had all the makings of a dump yard.
It was no different at the other lake sites: a few had even caught fire because of untreated waste dumped there.
In 2008, when she came across “thousands of orange and black dragonflies” near what was more of a marsh and less of a lake at Kaikondrahalli, she took it as “sign” that she had to do something.
“It was a magical, mesmerising moment,” she says in a short film that documents the lake’s rejuvenation, Kaikondarahalli Lake — The Uncommon Story of an Urban Commons. The effort to save the lake involved endless meetings with civic authorities, mobilising support from local residents, collecting funds and planting over 1,000 trees.
Today, the place has turned into a bird-watcher’s paradise with over 35 species of birds, including darters, pheasant-tailed jacanas, painted storks, pelicans and great cormorants.
But a citizen-led approach has its share of challenges. “Once a place is done, it is the authorities who have to devise a mechanism to keep it going,” says the film maker.
This is because the lake is under threat, again, as a citizen with strong political connections is allowing untreated sewage into it. “It is a critical situation right now, and nobody will realise how critical it is till the lake dies. So, while citizens can get a lot done, after the first few kicks to the scooter, the oiling has to be done by the authorities in charge to keep a good thing going,” she adds.
Though Bengalureans have been experimenting with how to save the city, it is the battle against the steel flyover that has brought many groups together. Ever since the flyover was announced, “beda”, Kannada for “don’t want”, has slowly come to replace selfies and landscape pictures on WhatsApp and Facebook cover photos.
While historian Ramachandra Guha joined an 8,000-strong human chain to protest the flyover, Sunday’s event also saw writer and director Girish Karnad attend despite his ailing health. “The city’s health is more important than mine,” said Karnad who came to the venue with a portable oxygen tank.
