More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Values. A city is a living, throbbing organism with a soul of its own and, it would often seem, a thinking mind. Cities have memories and dreams, they nurture ambition and bemoan failure. Like individuals, cities derive their character from the values associated with them.
It is perhaps woven into the texture of the human mind to build and enjoy, then to overbuild and suffer, then to collapse and complain, and then to become argumentative about what happened. That was the story in Bombay and Patna,
Journalism alone could count Bal Thackeray, M. V. Kamath, S. A. Sabavala, Raja Hutheesing and A. F. S. Talyarkhan at the Free Press Journal, Frank Moraes, Sham Lal and N. J. Nanporia in a less inspiring newspaper, and R. K. Karanjia and D. F. Karaka in spectacular corners of their own. In the bylanes of Kala Ghoda were M. F. Husain and K. H. Ara. In what was not yet Bollywood were Balraj Sahni and K. A. Abbas and Bimal Roy and, beyond my immediate ken but within hearing and meeting distance were Ebrahim Alkazi, Nissim Ezekiel, Nani Palkhivala and D. D. Kosambi. One could not ask for a more
...more
But, under the crush of a covetous political class, it grew beyond its capacity to absorb people even as more people came in. Violence and mayhem turned Bombay into a provincial town. Naseeruddin Shah was trying to be nice when he described Bombay as ‘the mother-in-law of all Indian cities’.
Industry tycoon John D. Rockefeller led a consortium of civic leaders to convert a derelict area of Manhattan into the magnificent 16-acre Lincoln Centre for the Performing Arts, the world’s most spectacular cultural hub, and home of the New York City Ballet, Metropolitan Opera, New York Philharmonic Orchestra and other resident arts companies.
Bangalore in its youth began in gladness but thereof came in the end despondency and madness.
‘Zurich is a relatively small city and we lived in a suburban area, quiet and great for kids,’ Shalini said. ‘Safety and security—and civic training—were parts of their culture. At five, our son Vedant used to walk to school. Alone. Parents were not encouraged to take their wards to school. There would be policemen around who would train the kids on how to cross the street.’
Then a small company named Infosys, founded in Pune in 1981, moved to Bangalore. In 1982 a Maharashtra-based family-owned vegetable oils trader of pre-Independence vintage decided to diversify, and opened its headquarters in Bangalore as Wipro.
A bigger sin, in Ravichandar’s view, was the new work culture that the information technology business introduced, to the discomfiture of the city. ‘The way IT developed,’ he said, ‘it brought with it migration and a parasitic work style under which expats would come in from all corners of the world, plug in their computers, complete a specific assignment on hand, then plug out and fly away. IT people represented a kind of fashionable rootlessness. And the way the rootless changed the behaviour patterns of Bangalore created in turn identity problems among the locals.
When rice became scarce during the Second World War the Maiyas experimented with semolina, leading to the invention of rava idli, a hot staple today in South Indian menus the world over. The
Musical waves swept in from elsewhere too. The Internet age saw bands with names like Thermal and a Quarter, The Burning Deck, Lounge Piranhas, Sulk Station, Space Behind the Yellow Room and Clown with a Frown, playing everything from electro-pop to space funk to thrash metal.
As the moneyed chase money, progress turns to perdition. Bangaloreans are no longer citizens; they are digits, statistics, percentages and fractions for knaves to make profits from. Dawn never comes to the late riser.
