Do I love it or loathe it?

Have I landed up in the wrong place? Why should I stay in such a hostile environment? Sometimes I feel I was born in this place by mistake. My heart lies somewhere else. Some place far away. The hectic city life has taken its toll on me. This is indeed a dog-eat-dog world, a place overflowing with rat races. Building an association with nature has become so obsolete here. Sure we do have our parks and gardens and lakes, but we also have our development authorities felling trees by the truckloads in the name of road widening and other infrastructural projects. And in spite of all these "developments", the city doesn't have space to accommodate it's vehicular traffic. The public transport systems are jam packed and the three wheeled menace aka the auto rickshaw gets on your nerves like nobody's business. Welcome to Noise-galore, oops! Pollution-galore, nah! Population-galore, OK OK, lets just ban all this galore. Welcome to Bangalore!

To be honest, I really admired this city when I was young. Being from Bangalore was like a value addition of sorts. The weather, the cosmopolitan culture, the lifestyle. Looking back, the place was not as crowded or polluted this way. The IT revolution was unheard of and the concept of liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation were still in its infancy and sounded more like fancy nomenclatures. Yes we were happy about our city's development and the cash cows coming in, but we didn't bother to realise if we had the required infrastructure to accommodate them all. Bangalore wasn't planned to be such a metropolis.

So what do we do to tackle all this? We start off with destroying our tree lined avenues, we start acquiring properties and demolishing them, we start erecting structures which, leave alone for the future, isn't even sufficient for the current level of traffic. Our roads are currently handling more than four times it's specified capacity of vehicles (add to this the number of new vehicles getting registered in 8 RTOs spread across the city and it spells Mayhem with a capital 'M').

 

Image courtesy: www.time2news.com

Whatever be the situation, the number of people migrating to the city hasn't reduced one bit. Migration in the name of studies, for work, for settlement, etc. All I hear these days is 'Old Bangaloreans' venting out their frustrations on this haphazard and unclear development. What are we planning to become? The world's most densely populated city per given square kilometer? You need to stop at least five to six times before crossing a signal in bumper to bumper peak hour traffic. No wonder blue-chip companies like Infosys and Wipro have threatened to migrate to other states if nothing is being done about the infrastructure. 

All I have to say is, city life has really reached its saturation point. Moving away from cities is in vogue. We moved to large cities expecting civilisation, better lifestyle, convenience and of course, with the intention to make good moolah. But again, with the level of developments spreading across, I feel you can live a much better life in the suburbs and rural areas with the same (if not better) convenience levels as living in a city. Back that up with a more serene environment and the freedom from--- pollution, road rage, pressure levels building up, tolerance levels going down, etc.--- and the saying, 'You CAN have your cake and eat it too' is developed.

Why rot in hell when there are other options available?