A loss..

Today we witnessed the saddest day in our layout's existence. BBMP brought in JCBs and razed some portion of the clubhouse damaging a building that was visionary for the time it was built in (2000 or whereabouts) and stood for 23 years.

There are multiple layers to the story but the fault was solely with the residents getting too complacent with political assurances and connections and not taking adequate legal precautions to safeguard what was our crown jewel in many ways.

For many initial years, as a community we remained non-aligned to politics. While this had not helped, it didn't do us damage. This position had changed in the recent years. Some newer residents came in with clout (and arrogance attached to it), showed utter disrespect for existing rules and processes, others who also found the layout rules inconvenient joined them and eventually they all ended up in the committee with vested interests and their own agenda to serve and then decided just their mere presence was enough, and that complacence cost us really hard today.

Whether it is a Congress government taking revenge on a layout that has overly voted in the favour of BJP, or a BBMP trying to make this a poster punishment showing how they will serve justice, whether it is the builder trying to use this to take back the club house which is worth 100s of crores now, whether it is something else altogether, we ordinary citizens will never know but the debacle and the debris will be a sad reminder of today's events for a long time to come.

In the end, if they do end up opening the Rajakaluve from Goshala to the ORR (impacts properties all the way from Bagmane Tech Park to Bhagini on ORR), then I would still be happy for the turn of events today. But looks like just FC gate to FC back wall will be dug as a show and life will go on as usual. How that solves the Rajakluve issue in any way is an utter puzzle.

Bangalore has received a lot of bad press for the recent spate of rains. Infrastructure, apathy etc.

We have a neighboring layout, Ferns Paradise, which is a little higher than our layout - Doddanekkundi has a lot of gentle mounds - our gate is the lowest lying point between the neighboring layouts and apartments. They have been lax in managing their excess storm water and just let everything out into the street. All our requests to manage it within their premises have fallen on deaf ears. Naturally all water collects at our gate. We have ensured we properly treat sewage and also connect to Rajakaluve as per norms. But when there is a cloud burst like what we have had since two days, there is just too much water and the Rajakaluve is unable to drain it away fast enough. The night of last year's Diwali, when we had a similar outpouring, water had come up to our compound wall. But not further. Yesterday, thanks to two days' worth of onslaught, we were seeing water come up to our gate. This has never happened before.

There are also a lot of new homes in our layout which have connected their entire storm water profile to the sewage. Despite repeated requests, this problem largely still remains unattended to. As a result, the sewage chambers outside our home overflow when there is heavy rain since they just cannot hold all that storm water. Normally, the sewage water drains into the storm water drains but yesterday it just had no place to go since the drains were already overflowing.

Thanks to us, as a layout, being strict with keeping storm water drains clear at all times, our usual experience is that once this heavy downpour lets up even a little bit, water drains away nicely.  We were unsure yesterday how much longer the onslaught of rain would last so as a precaution, we moved our cars to the upper part of our street and also sealed shut our water sump with packaging material.

Luckily neither precaution needed to kick in. The Rajakaluve did it's usual magic and once the downpour let up a bit, water drained away as usual and this morning, when I ran on the layout streets, my shoes didn't even get wet.

The takeaway from this - a little less civic apathy as communities and as individuals, goes a long way. Unfortunately, this is not to be. We continue to see people push back when asked to follow rules. So, the saga repeats.

But I do have great faith in Bangalore's citizen activism. Within our community, we have been able to use the threat of stopping work to keep our storm water drains free from construction debris, for example. Hopefully, we can continue to exert pressure on the neighboring layout to manage their excess storm water without just letting it out onto the street. At a city level, we have solved many problems despite the government inefficiencies, hopefully, over time, we will take care of this too!

 

 

Remembering May 1997

It was March 1997. For our batch of students, the most frenzied phase. Entrance examinations, college examinations, board examinations, examinations, applications, admissions. We studied and prepped and we were ready.

If only..

Starting from the day our Math paper was published on the front page in Deccan Chronicle, the iconic Hyderabad paper, our lives went on a rollercoaster. The entire Intermediate board exams were cancelled and re-scheduled to late April/early May. In what was a never-before-possibly-never-after, the IIT-JEE entrance exam was also compromised that year. Luckily the EAMCET examination was compromised just the year before so we were spared having to re-take that one as well. But the end result of all this was a medley of confusing mess of exams all sitting on top of one another, leading to a hectic May. Heck, I didn't even re-appear for the JEE since I was really exhausted and frustrated with this whole rigmarole. 

Then the results came - we basically had a fair/stalls setup in different places/districts where memorandum of marks were distributed. Students who needed them urgently had no choice but to travel to those locations to collect. If you didn't need them in a hurry, you could still wait for the usual channels. We had written umpteen letters to authorities to have the results delivered by the deadline for application to BITS-Pilani which was June-30. We got them ON June-30, thanks to then CM, Chandrababu Naidu really stepping up. From picking the marks to rushing to the only post office that was still open - Secunderabad HPO, to sending a telegram of the marks to BITS-Pilani before close of admission deadline (this was the only BITS at the time), we didn't even have enough time to look through the marks sheet and process the results and spend a moment to enjoy/relish the end of 15 years of hard work put in high school and +2. Such was the state of affairs. We went home exhausted and relieved more than anything else.

Then the local counseling got delayed. I had to make a call between taking the BITS admission or waiting for the local prospect. I had more or less decided to go to the US after engineering and so didn't want to spend even the engineering years in a hostel and so, my choice was simpler.

Local counseling started. I picked JNTU over OU - it was basically a choice between 20KM commute vs 2 KM and I picked the 20KM commute and I remember my Dad saying throughout the way back that if I have a chance, I should change it - why would I put myself through that pain for four years when I had admission to a college next door. But, I was sure I didn't want to pursue EEE, so wanted to at least give myself a chance to change it. Thank God, I was finally able to move to ECE for having picked this horrible commute, else, who knows, I might have regretted the JNTU decision big time. Or, in the very  least I would have had to listen to many "I-told-you-so", "You-should-have-picked-OU" lines. Given whom I married later, of course, now I can safely claim it was all pre-ordained that I rejected every other (and better) college to end up in JNTU - just to meet him ;)

Well, all that frenzy done and dusted. Now all set to start engineering, right? Hell, no. We joined on December-29-1997. Do NOT ask why. The local process kept getting delayed. And as if to stake a claim to being the batch of 1997-2001, we joined formally with just two days left in 1997 and went to college exactly for those two days before breaking for the new year :)))

So we ended up studying and clearing one year worth of first year engineering material in a record five months!

Anyway, rewind to that phase between July 1997-December 1997 - 6 months. A bunch of teenagers who finished college, were ready for engineering, knew which college they were going to and basically, HAD NOTHING left to do except wait. That was the time of our lives! We went to every eatery in Hyd, every movie theatre, saw all kinds of crappy movies, ate all kinds of food, basically hanged-out around the town like there was no tomorrow.

Thanks to that frenzied May, 25 years ago, we had a blissful 6 month following. The best time of our lives!

Of course, it was agonizing to live through those 6 months, not knowing when we will start (basically like our pandemic now), but thanks to being young and the advantages that come with it, we did manage to really enjoy ourselves thoroughly!