Bangalore — you either love it or you hate it, right? Love often polls more votes than hate for this city. It's obvious if you just look around; you don't even need to ask — why else would a sea of humanity constantly surround you?
So when there's a discussion titled “Can Bangalore become a great world city?” you're headed to, you kind of anticipate where the argument will head — of course there will be cynicism, there will be infrastructure and development that will be disparaged over, the city's administration will be trashed, the old Bangalore reminisced. Bangalore will be held up against other world cities and its shortcomings bandied about for all to nod their heads in agreement to etc etc.
Well, the recent discussion at the British Council organised along with Association of British Scholars, Karnataka Chapter did all this. What was different was that the panellists turned things inside out, with a reversal of roles. There was Aliyeh Rizvi, writer/theatre person and descendant from the family of Sir Mirza Ismail, who shaped Mysore State as its Deewan, and consequently, Bangalore. There was Arjun Ramegowda Narayan, CEO of Catamaran Ventures (a venture capital firm), who's a descendant of Bangalore's founder Kempe Gowda. Both brought to the table a quirky (and rather rare) ability to laugh at themselves and admit their confusion as Bangaloreans. Pitted against them was Umesh Malhotra, founder, Hippocampus — a migrant to the city who defended it passionately as being all-embracing, while admitting how the influx has made it more intolerant and aggressive.
A question, and a book in answer
The occasion for the discussion was the launch of photographer Mahesh Bhat's book “Bengaluru/Bangalore - In First Person Singular”. The same topic had triggered Mahesh into working on the book when Nandan Nilekani, then Infosys CEO, had asked Bhat the question, he said. That, clubbed with economist Richard Florida's idea of creativity and the Creative Class being the economic driver for a city's growth got Bhat to look through his lens at the booming changes in Bangalore.
The topic was looked at telescopically at the discussion — can Bangalore qualify as a world city, leave alone great? And what are the factors that prevent it from becoming one. Of course, Arjun wondered if Bangalore could be a city at all. “For me Bangalore seems locked in a permanent adolescence; it far exceeds its own conception.” Arjun also voiced the confusion that Bangalore has become: “Bangalore has a very inarticulate image of itself. What the city is, and what it is not, is not very clear.” As a member of the audience later pitched in, there was no clear Brand Bangalore that emerged, and no collective sense of pride. Was the essential mistake in trying to imitate another city, and morph into a Singapore rather than evolve its own character?
“Layers of immigration have destabilised the city, with a clear ‘us' and ‘them' divide,” said Arjun. Bhat continued the idea with how apathy to the city might be stemming from the constant divide that's been there in the city — between pete and cantonment, old parts and new, leading to the lack of a cohesive “my city” feel.
Both Aliyeh and Umesh pointed out how it was not just citizen cynicism that was coming in the way of Bangalore becoming world class, it was the combination with government apathy. “The people living in Bangalore are of two kinds — one that subscribes to a state of mind of being Bangalorean, and then the floating migrant population who take what they can out of the city and leave. The apathy we see is more visible in the second kind,” surmised Aliyeh.
And very obviously so, joined in Arjun, because for people who come from outside there is no “context” of the city. Umesh gave the example of how even city design contributes to this — in new areas like Bellandur, how your sense of identity is limited to a myopic “my apartment complex”. “You put four high walls around and 500 families inside it, create a village in itself and they call the others outside the wall ‘those terrible Bellandur villagers'…These people will probably take up a cause, like water shortage, but use borewell water from a village 10 kilometres away, destroying paddy fields, and they may not even know about it,” said Umesh.
Aliyeh was quick to add how for the traditional Bangalorean the ‘city' matters, while for the migrant, it's the ‘cause' that matters.
Umesh steered attention towards a gaping hole — that the poor migrant (who is 80 per cent of the migrant population) is often forgotten while making policies and building the city. “Migrants (the rich ones) are money-making machines and want to dictate policy making. But we're letting a very small section of society decide what Bangalore should be. Are we building a city only for those who drive cars?”
So what will make Bangalore a world city? “We need to keep the past but not make it a nostalgic sentimental trip. It's important to have the ‘local', and then work on the various other parameters of quality of life like heritage, safety, transport…but what do you define as ‘local'?” said Aliyeh, in a sense coming back to the essential puzzle. Despite the general dystopian view of things, the discussion concluded on a positive note that Bangalore's dynamism, diversity, and hospitality, and its ability to embrace a person for who you are rather than what you have.
