Thoughts on the Bandra Worli Sealink

Even as there has been a lot of drama, adulation, sense of pride and hype over the opening of the Bandra Worli Sea Link, I have found myself going through a confusing set of emotions, all of which have been tossing around in my salad bowl of a mind.

Yes I certainly feel proud of the link. At all such instances I get reminded of a childhood essay I wrote long back in 1986 for which I received a proud second prize. The essay was about my ambition to become an engineer and make awe inspiring symbols of civil engineering like the  Sears Towers and Expressways like they are found in the US and the Europe and Japan. Machines, buildings, civil engineering processes fascinated me as much as nature if not more since childhood.

Some where along the way the more normative side in me overtook the scientific and I gradually started paying more attention to the problems which were difficult to be solved by engineering.

And in the sea link it was again the normative which has been over riding the engineering interest in how much of concrete was poured and how many times the steel cables can circle the earth. Is this how things ought to be?

I use the public transport in Mumbai quite frequently and even more now in the hype surrounding the sealink I found myself noticing that every bus stop that I passed in a journey from my house near home in Oshiwara to Juhu had a huge puddle of muddy water in front of it. So people would be standing in their bus stop and when the bus came those who were getting out and those who were trying to get in were jostling with each other and negotiating the puddle of muddy water as well.

At each bus stop my mind went through a violent commentary of abuses and remarks on society and the state of things even as my outward self refused to look away and kept gazing lifelessly into the chaos at each stop – a sadistic enjoyment even, thrusting a hot iron rod somewhere near my eyes but not within and enjoying the pain. School children, women in sarees, old men all went through enormous difficulty. Some of the more agile youth took it as a nice acrobatic challenge being able to leap from the dry patch directly into the bus. This is where our sports prowess stops – we dont long jump longer than this.

And then my mind started having images of the kind of banners and newspaper advertisement I would like to see in the papers this week. Would somebody calculate the number of such puddles of water in the city? There must be a good million I suppose?

Can we have a full page advertisement which proudly proclaims that our city has

1,00,7512 puddles in front of bus stops in the city,

1,33,214 instances of missing manholes in other wise normal footpaths because of which people still prefer to travel on the road,

23,732 instances where footpaths have been dug up for some utility work and have been such since more than two weeks,

34,237 instances of hawkers completely having taken over footpaths.

Why cant we feel proud of these numbers? Aren’t these also significant achievements of the great Indian intelligence that we like to tom-tom about from here to New York and beyond?

Then the banners -

Cant solve small puddles of water

Will become world class city (Bombay First and CAG )

Cant solve small puddles of water

Will feel proud of Sealink (this is aimed at the hordes which decided to take the first ride)

Cant solve small puddles of water

Will rush to name sealink after Veer Savarkar (yes this is to the Shiv Sena)

* I dont have the money but sponsors for the banners are welcome – if I cant do a turnkey job of putting up a bridge from scratch, atleast I can take up this contract. Maybe I can monetise the eyeballs also with some kind of an infra red toll machine which tracks the eye balls.

Another of the salad bowl image was a hallucination of an alternate to the opening ceremony. I imagined a scenario, where each of the senior leaders present for the opening ceremony were similarly taking pride in being photographed with Sonia-ji in front of the biggest puddle in the city contest. A nice polygon of muddy water, whose depth one would hesitate to test with ones own feet.

Before that there would have been a mad scramble with all the leaders having pulled Madam in different directions. Madam-Madam see my puddle..please-please..madam..this is not fair, you are spending too much time admiring Kripashankarji’s puddle..please see mine also..then some leader deciding to splash in his puddle like I would have done in the same sixth standard I wrote the essay in..all in joy with a glee..splashing muddy water on his spotless white kurta pyjama and those around him..Madam..smiling elegantly teeth to teeth..so happy with the work of her boy…another leader who had a chottu puddle would decide to pose with another leader with a big one and get pushed away with a “get your own puddle” line.

And then there would be a red ribbon the size of the diameter of the big award winning puddle to cut which all the dignitaries would wade half way through and after cutting the ribbon everybody would do an impromptu filmi jig! Madam the lead heroine and all the others the hero’s trying to woo her. They anyway have all those filmi’s under their belt.

And then I started thinking of the hordes which rushed for the first day first show and some of whose adulation for the link was covered in the papers. These would mostly also be the people who are most unconcerned about any dialogue at comprehensive transport and traffic management in the city. The types who will enrich the sealink makers with their 50 rupees, but not the numerous poor NGOs and initiatives – a number of which I have been part of – where cutting edge thinking about a holistic solution to the city keeps leading a still born existence for lack of nutrition.

I found myself cursing them with a full realisation that in the times we live in the curse would eventually rebound on me leading to more misery to my existence.

And then the mustard. Sharad Pawar did what should land him the top three if not the top position in the Maratha Hall of Shame. In the midst of the enormous allegations of corruption and impropriety I have always had a considerable amount of awe and admiration about the ease with which the man juggles agriculture and cricket and enormous influence of land politics and god alone knows how many other interests. He disappointed so much with his – Madam madam lets name the bridge after Rajiv-ji thing. I could imagine myself part of a heist, which whisks him away only to send him overboard mid-way of the link.

Of course he will have the last laugh. A decade or two down the line we will have his daughter as the Speaker of the house – much like Jagjeevan Ram’s daughter got rewarded. The Congress are good to sycophants.

The Shiv Sena would do better at aiming to name the bridge after one of their Standing Committee Chairmans in the past few terms who has made the most money. I would most certainly second such a proposal. Their bogey of doing good for the Marathi manoos and Marathi asmita is all too jaded now. Veer Savarkar could do best without them.

Feeling proud of the bridge between Sweden and Denmark or the ones in China or the Golden Gate bridge comes not out of the bridges themselves but simultaneously for cities and administrations which have a manic fascination for improving each and every small and big aspect of their cities and lives of the commonest of people, not just 50 buck toll payers.

Feeling proud comes when you are proud of being a city which is good to millions of its pedestrians, not so ruthlessly indifferent and cruel. Not so heavily skewed in favour of only those who will travel in air conditioned vehicles.

Out here bridge innaugarations and pride over them become and extension of the cheap, ostentatious, me too existense of what seems a cursed land.

Obama’s Cairo speech and the road ahead for India

I had the opportunity (25th June) to listen to the historic full speech of Barrack Obama on 4th June at the Cairo University. Follow the speech here.

The hearing followed by a discussion was kept at the American Center with a panel lead by Sadaf Aboli the President of NSUI-Mumbai and Mohammed Wajehuddin, Special Correspondent with the Times of India and moderated by Elizabeth Kauffman the Director of the American Center.

The speech by all means is a path breaking one, one which will in times to come serve as a good reminder should memory fail us about the good efforts started by this speech and there be moments of great tension in which all we can think of is applying swords to our throats.

It is only in America I think that such a quick turnaround is possible from a regime just a year ago whose ethos was so contrary to the one being pursued today. Many other parts of the world silently suffer totalitarian indifferent regimes even in so called democratic setups without being able to do much. India can be a prime example in my mind. Whether the complete lies of the Congress about a secular agenda and do gooder of the Muslims or the Shiv Sena’s blatantly to the contrary claims of having done any good for the Marathi manoos or Hindu religion (they cannot defend themselves against fellow Marathi breakaways, forget saving from the Muslims)

During the discussion session I had the following to share:

1) one of the key elements in my opinion was centered around one sentence ” But I am convinced that in order to move forward, we must say openly to each other the things we hold in our hearts and that too often are said only behind closed doors.” It touched upon something which has become characteristic in the Indian context. When did the general public or even organised groups and institutions speak their mind about what they feel about a particular situation or a party.

Yes the speech was historic and inspiring but more than that I see it as a long to-do list and more importantly I see it of relevance in the Indian context.

The binding thread through the speech was sincerity. It is sincerity which builds trust and which enables to be able to engage in mutual activities which heal wounds inflicted over years. And what I had to share with the group present somewhere was guided with my concern with the lack of sincerity in the Indian context about the deep communal divide which still exists within the Muslim and Hindu communities.

2) I shared with Sadaf Aboli my distrust of the so called secular agenda the Congress has followed in the past six decades which in my opinion is clearly psuedo secular and has very unabashedly and shamelessly worked at using the Muslims as a votebank with little regard for uplifting their conditions.

I shared the incidence of the fire at Behrampada as indicative. These are the very pockets, which bring the Congress to power recurringly time after time after time. And the kind of mind bogglingly bad conditions these people live in. One almost gets the impression that they do so out of an enormous love for living such. Because if things had to be improved then between Priya Dutt and Baba Siddique (not to forget the ‘very concerned’ humanitarian Sunil Dutt) and half a dozen other Muslim leaders that they have things would have improved 2 decades back.

http://www.dnaindia.com/mumbai/report_behrampada-toll-now-5-two-more-bodies-found_1266953

http://firozeshakir.blogspot.com/search/label/muslims%20love%20killing%20muslims

It is being able to address these kind of issues which were required before teh Cairo speech and after nothwithstanding whether you were inspired or not.

And I feel more than having academic debates about the semantics and the content of the speech, it is important to use the speech as a good springboard to jump into action whereever it is needed. And the speech was not just about restoring the divide between the American and the Muslim world. In the Indian context there is a lot of work which remains to be done even inspite of the Muslim community being an integral part of the country.

20 kms of highway per day

I watchethe India Tonight show on CNBC where Karan Thapar spoke to (promoted) Kamal Nath, the new Minsiter for Roads and Highways. The show was a cleverly planned sequence of questions aimed at potraying the new Minister as dynamic and in a good light. This MO of asking just the right questions and putting words into the mouth has become a too mundane strategy by now.

But besides that Kamal Nath mentioned that he would like to see the rate of highway creation go up from 2-3 kms per day to 20kms per day during his term leading to the addition of a ‘whooping’ (Karan said it many times over) 30,000 kms of highways during his five year term.

All through the show Karan had no mention of the beginning of the highway program during the NDA government or the fact that it was during that government that the real changes began and which are still the benchmark considering the poor preformance during the previous UPA term.

Also Karan did not have any studied reports to corroborate some of the claims he was making. Much as he is a intelligent person and I consider him so it is pretty clear that such shows are pre-scripted and even the most intelligent of people cannot come about for a new show every night prepared with all the information on a topic within less than 24 hours.

Its time the old school boys network stopped licking each other and got down to taking their role of leading the country seriously.

Who are these people?

I was there today evening to hear the experiences of the ‘Waterman’ Rajendra Singh and Janak Daftary who were part of the recent Ganga Yatra, which saw two teams from opposite ends converge at Ganhar near Varanasi. It was a motley crowd of around 10 people who un-filled the large Babubhai Chinai Room at IMC.

Pollution, encroachment and exploitation were enumerated by Rajendraji as the key drivers of Ganga’s sad state of affairs, which I may almost identify as demise. He discussed in detail the various measures (half hearted at best) since 1985 when Rajiv Gandhi decided to announce the Ganga Action Plan more as a political strategy to as late as last year when the Manmohan Singh government decided to give the status of National River to the Ganga (another political strategy which yielded as good results as in 1985).

In the beginning he also highlighted the deep connections of Mumbai with the Ganga even as we receive no water from the river and are as further can be. He shared how visitors from Mumbai were the largest category of visitors visiting the Gaumukh and Char Dham Yatra as also maybe among those taking a dip at various places along the river.

This and his other answer to a question about involving the politicians along the Ganga were the chief areas of interest to me which I also raised during the Q&A. Rajendraji expressed his inability to understand the mind and the working of a politician which was primarily driven by the votes he gets. He did not mention the notes(bucks) but I would presume that to be the other flip side.

My views during the discussion were linked to people from Mumbai being one of the largest contingents to Gaumukh and yet such an event in Mumbai drawing only ten people for discussion. A lot of those present in the room were not the kind to be paying any serious religious obeisance to the Ganga but still having a deep sense of reverence and responsibility towards her. How many of those who travel the Char Dhams and visit Gaumukh and take dips are the ones who find discussions on the state of the Ganga relevant and would be doing something to improve the state of the river? Where is the aastha? and who are these people?

The need of the hour is to take the discussion about the Ganga to far beyond the thousands who take interest currently and into the minds and lives of lakhs and crores who currently only treat her as a ritual or an adventure sport. The politician along the Ganga or anywhere in the country for that matter is very closely in touch with his/her voter and knows that most of these people dont give a damn about what, who or how the Ganga is. And once we are able to change the state of mind of millions then reviving the Ganga will not be difficult.

A massive communication campaign is needed to highlight the fact that the National River has indeed become a sewer and everyone who has been involved in any ritual which invokes the Ganga needs to be clearly involved in discussions surrounding issues like grey water recycling (the sewage which defies the Ganga comes grey water) and energy conservation (the dams that devastate the upper reaches of Ganga are for generating electricity)

Pushpa Vijula one of the participants opined that most people in Mumbai are so caught up with the daily roti and kapda that there was no time for giving time to these things. To which my strong retort was that my mirror was not shown at the people in that category. It was clearly shown at the rich and educated classes from all castes and tribes and especially the Marwari’s and Gujrati’s a lot of whom are patrons of IMC and have enough time to spend time in casinos around the world and money on expensive liquor and cruises and multiple char dham yatra trips but will not spend time to come for such a talk and much less spend a dime on supporting organisations and individuals who support the cause.

The need of the hour is to clearly bring a sense of shame and responsibility to these shameless people, a lot of whom also have an exaggerated sense of India’s greatness in coffee table discussions but are clearly the cause of the lack of any greatness left in Indian culture.

The way forward

We have now gone through an election which has been landmark more for the wrong reasons. Going forward we need to take the learning and benefits forward and note the mistakes. The thoughts I list below are not group or party specific. If some of us can work across our identities then that is where the magic will happen. The need for change in political culture is overwhelmingly there.

The way forward clearly involves the following:

1) Building networks of people around various issues. People concerned with police reforms, judicial reforms, water, slums, transport, governance, taxation etc. These networks will have to play a role in 2) and 3) below also. This is also where democratic consensus gets developed on various policy requirements, whether better armed police and intelligence or water recycling or housing.

2) Having consistent activity around the issues This will have to be at the level of the local community and the larger policy. If there can be consistent activity week after week then only can there be trust established. if there is random, far spaced activity then forget it. You need to be available to the community.

3) Aligning donors. Politics is fund intensive. Back end office, full time people, activity logistics, the requirements are endless. Anytime we need 10,000 people on the donor, membership list. This in turn is dependent on 2) and 3) above. If you are not doing great work then donors are questioning. And at the same time you need funds to do great work.

4) Communication. This is very critical. Politics is about large numbers of people being in touch with what you are doing and if after doing all of the above you fail in communicating properly then it is reduced to nothing.

Please do share your views and it would be good to work together.

Slumdog millionaire

These are pictures I took on 19th March 09.

Stones throw from the corporate glitz and record land deals of Bandra Kurla Complex. Hadnt watched Slumdog Millionnaire then or now as I upload this. Cannot help wondering how many people employed at BKC must have seen the movie but not the reality of Kherwadi just next to them.

In the first picture I would like to meet the school boy sometime.

These pictures were taken during low tide at around 2 pm when the tide was such -http://www.mobilegeographics.com:81/locations/658.html?y=2009&m=3&d=19

Cannot imagine what the situation must be in a 4m + tide.

Mainstream Media – Mainstream Party

Same coin – head and tail. When I see the coverage going on in the mainstream news channels I cannot help but get amused about the ways in which they try to make subtle, their not so obvious support to the Congress.

It almost seems that the mainstream media has somewhere clearly come to understand its role (in no unambiguous terms) as one of propagating the views of the mainstream parties (read mostly Congress). The idea being that even if there is a lot of discontent out there in the public the lack of visibility of other options will keep forcing the people into the Congress’s hands. Doesn’t require rocket science to plan it out once you have the resources in hand.

Being mostly a NDTV follower (and I would like to understand why) I can best comment about that channel and can so clearly see the channel being out of sync with so much of the discussion I see in my meetings and interactions with the public.

People are fed up of just seeing the same Rahul Gandhi’s, Milind Deora’s and the Singhvi’s and other spokespeople. Public would much rather be knowing about the wave of discontent with the mainstream parties and the views and efforts of the new entrants. Of course people who are already there will get a bit more time but whatever happened to media having a pulse on the society. What happened to doing own research as opposed to relying on press relation teams?

I clearly see myself as a very unique proposition and somewhere an outcome of 26/11, which has enormous news value with a lot of people even mentioning to me that they would love to hear me on TV but somehow I or a lot more like me never get invited to give a byte or analyse public issues. And I certainly will not run after them for coverage or be mum about their obvious gaps.

Most of the talk shows and bytes invariably end up having Milind Deora as if no body else in the city had any view? As if nothing beyond South Mumbai existed. I think most of the anchors should stop hob nobbing with the elite and also spend some time among commoners.

Or have most of us got it wrong. Here is only a business with no moral compulsions. Whoever pays or builds a vested interest gets through.

What certainly does not seem to be in the picture is a conscience which apparently is supposed to be associated with the media.

I hope some impartial media observer (if we have some such thing, we are so boringly medieval in such matters) can do a factual study and do a good number crunching on the various points I have made above to come to a clear picture. I dont think I am much off mark. And I wonder what the arrangement must be for such a relationship.

New entrants not welcome

I think the comments of the PM can rightfully be described as a cover up for the accumulated guilt conscience of the Congress. Yesterday I spoke to Mid-Day about the same

http://www.mid-day.com/poll2009/2009/apr/140409-Mumbai-News-Independent-candidates-PMs-statement-smaller-parties-Dr-Manmohan-Singh.htm

I am clear that the Congress had the 1950’s, 60’s, 70’s and 80’s to do a lot of good and we all know the mess they left us in. The license raj and the institutionalized corruption and poverty clearly is a Congress legacy to the country. That Congress was responsible for liberalization is also a myth which is over hyped by the mainstream media which is almost the PR firm of the Congress.

The media will not highlight the people and the policies which lead to India being brought down to its knees in 1991. The Congress conveniently placed a Sikh at the helm to cover up its 1984 debacle and killed two birds with one stone.

Now that the country is waking up to their bull shit the Congress is going about with a mis-information campaign to instill doubt in the voters mind that the absence of a mainstream party in the center will have a detrimental impact on foreign relations and external security.

Having a vicious party like Congress at the helm has proved to be more dangerous for the country than anything else. What the country desperately needs is new people with integrity and ideas. Ring out the old. Ring in the new.

No criminals in politics

March 25th I spoke at the No Criminals in Politics function organised at Prabhadevi. The general position on the subject is that people should not vote for candidates who have a criminal background and parties should not nominate candidates who have a criminal background. A criminal is defined as some one who has been charge sheeted in a police station.

The point I had to share with the audience was that in the past 30 days I have been hearing numerous tales from people I meet at the grassroots and people who have contested elections in the past about the huge amounts of money which is distributed in slum areas in the 24 hours before the election. 500 and 1000 rupee notes flow liberally with the intention of influencing the voter to vote for a particular party. And I have by now heard the names of almost every politician in the city, Page 3 or non-descript.

Now the moot point is that are there necessary and sufficient conditions for this position? Is it sufficient that only a person should not be charge sheeted himself and it is perfectly okay if his/her party distributes money for him/her to win elections? Are these stories of money flowing around baseless allegations? How do we find the truth?

I also agreed with Mr. Indur Chughani’s position that we should be saying no to parties across the country which field candidates from anywhere. Thus a Congress fielding criminals from UP should be boycotted in Mumbai also.

Waste ho!

Read with interest two posts in TOI today.

Demolition of flyover gets under way on April 3

NCP leader dumps garbage at Thane civic headquarters

One matter relating presumably only to traffic but having a significant waste aspect to itself and the other a waste matter at heart. In the case of the Thane matter its interesting how such an important issues has only political brownie scoring value.

It’s an issue which I would rate far higher than the Ram Mandir issue or the Nuclear Agreement issue but which unfortunately doesn’t catch the attention of neither the public nor the political class. And it is an issue which I intend to go strongly with to the Parliament if given a chance. Read this link

In the case of the flyover it is six years now since I met Bejoy Davis and got to know of his process of converting debris into BIS quality paver blocks. That time I was very strongly involved with mangroves conservation and debris (and waste in general) was the biggest enemy of mangroves and I was very happy that somebody had found a solution. Since then I have pursued the matter in discussions with junior and senior municipal staff and corporators but we have seen no policy support for the matter.

Has an Environmental Report been filed by the contractor about the metric tonnes of debris that will be generated? Where in Mankhurd is the waste being taken? Is it in a CRZ area? Can the waste directly be transported to a facility where it is converted into paver blocks? Questions which would be asked and answered in most developed cities which we wish to emulate.

Not just the environment, waste has economic aspects to it as well. How many thousand crores does the country spend on waste collection and can fiscal incentives, which minimise waste (and cost of collection) at source be a better option?

In the Thane case is the TMC willing to forego the pick and dump approach to giving better fiscal incentives for segregation and minimisation at source?

Till the answers come – Waste ho!!