[Urbanstudy] How Bangalore saw the big picture Samar Halarnkar

[Vinay Baindur]

http://www.livemint.com/2011/08/12200219/Urban-Change--How-Bangalore-s.html



Urban Change | How Bangalore saw the big picture
*
*If you live in an Indian city, you live with rebuilding and renaming. But
Bangalore, one of the world’s fastest growing cities between 1981 and 2004,
urged you to think beyond physical change

Samar Halarnkar



Let me tell you what this article will not talk about.

It will not talk about the little things that defined Bangalore: the
sun-shaded tunnels of green created by the arching canopies of grand, old
rain trees; the peaked, wooden overhangs called “monkey tops”, which once
graced every window on every sprawling bungalow; a climate so agreeable that
no house was built with fans; a gentility that allowed migrant and local to
live a life of calm reflection and commune with the great outdoors every
day; an effortless multiculturalism that accommodated a variety of cultures
and beliefs; and the light wind that blows almost incessantly through the
city, the Bangalore breeze.


Too many people in modern-day Bengaluru (do not expect me to use this name,
for the synapses that control nomenclature in my brain resist rewiring) talk
of these things and times gone by. Too many appear steeped in a past that
will never return. One city tabloid has a daily column in which old timers
reminisce of their Bangalore. Other newspapers reveal a similar, strange
affinity for faded days and forgotten ways. For a city more globalized than
any other in India, for a city that destroys its heritage so ruthlessly and
efficiently, for a city that embodies the future like no other, Bangalore
has a strange way of not letting go of the past.

This could be because “the past” in Bangalore is, often, no more than 20
years away.

If you live in an Indian city, you live with change—constant rebuilding,
tearing down, renaming, and the acceptance of a metaphor that says, if you
want to enter a new life, you must die to another. In Bangalore, whatever
passes, lives on as part of city’s great brains trust. In Bangalore, the
future does not come—as the American cold-war statesman Dean Acheson put
it—one day at a time. It comes many weeks or many months at once.

Between 1981 and 2004, Bangalore gained the dubious honour of being one of
the world’s fastest-growing cities. Its population doubled, from 3.1 million
to more than 6 million, compressing what should have been a slow
metamorphosis into an explosion of disruptive change. Between 1995 and 2005,
more than five multinational companies streamed into the city every month.

*The Bangalore breeze is about the only thing from the old town that
physically survives the transition to the 21st century (so, too, do a few
tunnels of rain trees, but every day they suffer new assaults). Since its
great acceleration into globalization during the 1990s, Bangalore has lost
about 70% of its once endless sea of trees, the local forest department
estimates.* In a city once known for its cleanliness, only a third of the
garbage is collected, as plastic bags spill their decomposing contents on
street corners. *A third of the city’s 8 million people live below the
poverty line—1.5 million in slums—and less than a fifth are a part of the
globalized elite.*

But if there is one thing Bangalore forces you to do, it is to look at the
big picture, even if some brush strokes are smudged. Globalization brought
unprecedented opportunity to the city that I, of no fixed address, consider
my hometown. I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s in a city that taught me the
virtues of easy living, sang froid and deep thinking.

Bangalore does that to you. It urges you to think beyond your boundaries. It
helps you collaborate with new people and new ideas. It provides an
atmosphere that lets you join the dots. “I was in Bangalore, the Silicon
Valley of India, when I realized the world was flat,” says writer Thomas
Friedman in The World is Flat, his 2005 best-seller on globalization.

By flat, Friedman means the connectedness born from new technologies as
trade and political barriers fall, allowing anyone, anywhere to do business
with anyone, anywhere in the world.

For hundreds of companies and a few million people, the big picture started
to emerge in Bangalore during the 1990s. It was during this decade that
academic Bangalore—the city that India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal
Nehru posited as the nation’s intellectual capital—sensed the opportunities
offered by the opening of the Indian economy and the demand, primarily from
the US, for cheap, intelligent labour for global technology markets. This
was the formative decade for Infosys, Wipro and a handful of other Indian
companies that were tapping global markets. In 1997, Karnataka became the
first Indian state to announce an information technology policy (as we shall
see later, that was the last look the government may have taken at the big
picture). It was in the 1990s that some of the world’s biggest tech
companies, such as IBM, Sun Microsystems, Cisco, Philips, Intel and Nortel,
entered Bangalore. Today, Bangalore contributes about 34% to India’s total
outsourcing revenue of nearly $50 billion (around Rs.2.25 trillion). This
flat world created for the city a wildly diverse economy. The business of
technology employs a little more than half a million people, but it provides
employment to maybe five times that number in sectors that closely follow
the rise of a young, globalized elite. From construction to taxi services to
retail to education, the demand for blue-collar, white-collar and collarless
professionals is ceaseless. More than half the population is from abroad or
from other parts of India, says The Bangalore Story, a 2010 report by
Tholons, a global strategic advisory company.

A transformation so rapid, from small town to global metropolis, is
obviously not easy on those who see change but are not a part of it. So, the
1990s saw the most visible, violent protests against change. This was the
decade when farmers and Kannada chauvinists ransacked the first outlet of
Kentucky Fried Chicken, picketed multinationals Cargill Seeds and Monsanto,
and protested the Ms Universe contest. As the economy swelled to embrace
more people, such protests quickly faded, as did Bangalore’s once-regular
riots and confrontations—between Hindu and Muslim, Tamilians and Kannadigas,
between congregations of various languages in Christian churches.

The 1990s also revealed that while Bangalore’s citizens were going global
with a speed rarely seen before in the world, its politicians and public
services, which should have prepared for transformation, faltered badly. “In
the early 1990s, the quality of public service agencies in Bangalore was
noticeably declining,” says German geographer Christoph Dittrich in a paper,
Bangalore: Globalisation and Fragmentation in India’s High-Tech Capital.
“Despite being the centre of India’s information technology boom,
electricity, water and garbage disposal services were unreliable, if
accessible at all, and providers lacked accountability.”

The World Bank says half the middle-income population faces daily demands
for bribes from public servants. Bangalore’s rise as one of the world’s hot
tech cities often obscures, to those who run it, the primary source of its
new wealth: global investors. There is scant regard for the fact that the
city is more vulnerable than any other in India to a global recession, and
there is little effort in retaining global confidence in Bangalore by
transforming its infrastructure and offering more equality to its
disregarded poor.

There is one other thing that remains from the old city, something that
isn’t threatened, yet. If you are in Bangalore and, if, after a profitable
and/or pleasing day at work, you are vexed by the traffic, the pollution,
the unruliness and the acquisitiveness of people, raise your head and watch
the sky. The days tend to end in a blaze of glory. As you watch the
spectacular, crimson slashes of a Bangalore sunset, you cannot fail to see
the big picture.

Samar Halarnkar is editor-at-large, Mint and Hindustan Times.

Write to lounge at livemint.com

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Vikas_grower 08/14/2011 11:13 PM
An old wealthy businessman has 10 years to live and doesnt want to die
without heirs . On an advise by a tantrik he marries a 12 year old girl and
makes her bear 10 children in the next ten years before he dies.
The girl is what bangalore has been reduced to , today by the IT
enterpreneurial zeal during the decade 1995-2005.
Like Reply
Voyeur1 08/14/2011 03:16 PM
Of course our brain resists rewiring when it comes to nomenclature doesn't
it. It's not like anybody called it Bengaluru before did they? What, you
mean to say that the local populace calls it Bengaluru? and Bangalore is
only an anglicized version of the same? Go away.
Like Reply
Vikas_grower 08/13/2011 11:04 PM
A city whose ecological wealty lost to economical wealth.
Like Reply
Jimmy 08/13/2011 03:01 PM
*Yeah. All external people are Bangalore's saviors and all kannadigas
are chauvinists. I have been living ever since in this great city and I have
seen it transform into a megacity, people who come from outside have no love
or respect towards the city. They are here just to make a few bucks or are
here because their city of origin sucks. They have ruined Bangalore in every
possible way. The only way Bangalore can be saved is if everyone goes back
to where they came from.*
2 people liked this. Like Reply

Reactions

Fake IPL PLayer 08/14/2011 01:57 PM
  From  Twitter
I see crimson slashes of bglr sunset only cos i wrk frm home n dont hv to
deal with traffic http://t.co/CZskbCE N I dont c the big picture

Gautam John 08/14/2011 01:43 PM
  From  Twitter
Poignant. Me sad. We blew a good thing. | How Bangalore saw the big picture
http://t.co/LQd9yGB via @livemint
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