This is a city which rather too easily allows to be swathed in banners and posters when it is celebration time for political parties or personalities.
For the record, there is a Puducherry Open Places (Prevention of Disfigurement Act) passed in 2009. The Act itself was necessitated by feuding between political parties for wall spaces, often leading to violence and arson. In strange fashion, the Act has somehow succeeded in checking clashes over wall space, though the disfigurement it sought to curb, has been flourishing.
The climax of the wall poster season is usually August when Chief Minister N. Rangasamy celebrates his birthday and with each passing year, the scale of hero worship among his supporters gets bigger and the larger-than-life projection beggars belief---the wall avatars ranging from Bahubali to Roger Federer.
And, now the poster menace has gone beyond terra firma and into the sea.
Those walking by Promenade Beach cannot help noticing a poster of a political leader tethered to what remains of a wooden pier of the abandoned harbour in the sea.
What next, one wonders in this poster-crazy city? Gas balloons to take hero worship to the skies?
Bandh problems
It would seem that almost anyone call for a bandh in Puducherry and a total success is virtually guaranteed.
Hardly 20 persons who represented lesser-known associations called a bandh last Monday to press their demands including thorough probe into alleged irregularities of private medical colleges.
That was all it took for normal life to be disrupted due to the closure of shops, commercial establishments, restaurants, eateries. In the morning, a group was seen going around the city in bikes and asking the shop keepers to down the shutters, almost all of whom readily obliged.
After reaching Bharathidasan Government College for Women, they went inside the college and asked the girl students to participate in the agitation. The irony was that the students of an arts college were being forced to participate in the agitation demanding probe into irregularities of private medical colleges. Without a clue as to the cause they were espousing, the students joined the agitation unwillingly.
During every bandh, police put up pickets and assure traders of protection. But, every bandh call results in a shut down of commercial activity in the city, very unlike in neighbouring Chennai.
Taking flight
Some residents, it appears, missed all the fanfare around the resumption of flight services from Puducherry which took place in April this year. The airport had re-started operations with Alliance Air, a subsidiary of Air India, flying to and from Bengaluru. A Puducherry airport official recently remarked how quite a few people were surprised when told about flights from the airport. The Tourism Department has decided to lend a helping hand by adding an icon for flights on its website, which leads to flight timings and the option to book a flight on the Air India website. Besides this, visitors to the website are being greeted with a pop-up which reads, ‘Fly down to Pondicherry for Gandhi Jayanti’
(By M. Dinesh Varma, R. Sivaraman and Annie Philip)
