Fear Factor at ATMs

It has been nearly a month since a grainy video spooked TV news viewers through its raw Hitchcockian brutality.  A woman enters an ATM kiosk to draw money. A man follows her. Seemed like a regular office goer, clad in a striped shirt and had a shoulder bag. But his sinister intentions become immediately apparent after he brings down the shutter in a jiffy. He demands money from her, but she refuses. Out from his shoulder bag, which many of us may use to carry files and lunch box, comes a large machete and a gun. After assaulting the woman he leaves with cash and a mobile phone.

Barring the minor success of tracking down the stolen mobile phone in Anantapur district, the ATM assailant is proving too smart for the men in khaki. His finger prints don't match with police records, thus showing he is either a first time offender or has come from some other state.

The assailant has also cleverly darted the trap the modern day criminals fall into - making calls on cell phones. Looks like the guy might be a lone ranger. For police it leaves only human intelligence or good old khabari as an option to hunt him down.

The police carried out a reality check of city ATMs and many of them were shuttered due to lack of security measures. The bank where this incident happened had no security guard and even the shutter was not latched on top, making the job of the assailant all the more easy.

To the general public it only meant lots of inconvenience, as they had long unlearned the habit of patiently queuing up at bank cash counters. Later many of them were restored once security guards were deployed, though many others measures suggested by the police remain unfulfilled.

Banks, which had already got many wake up calls, after earlier incidents of burglars decamping with ATM machines,  are still dragging their feet. They claim they will have to call for tenders and seek approvals from their corporate office to implement some of the proposed security measures. Slogans like 'Think global, act local' apparently has little to do with customer's safety!

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Jottings on Mysore Road

Nearly five years back while driving down to Mysore the worst on the traffic front used to get over after scaling the BGS flyover, but now one has to reach Wonder La to come anywhere near the fifth gear. The BGS flyover now acts as a short interval before the going gets even tougher. Even inside the sturdiest of vehicles one gets a feel of venturing out on a small boat into the sea with cyclone Phailin for company. Mysore road is not for the faint hearts. The twin infrastructure mayhem of an under-construction Metro elevated rail and a flyover plus the volume of traffic cracks even the most composed and accomplished motorists.

Buried among these works are the numerous deadlines and assurances. The last one was by a minister who said the at least the roads in these stretches will be less taxing on the commuters' spinal  cords and vehicles' suspension by Dasara. The latest buzz is that it will be fixed before the proposed visit of Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi as the ruling Congress party wants to avoid his barbs over city's infrastructure! Clearly the slight of a rival politician is more important than the agony of commuters who have to rough it out on these roads on a daily basis.
 
Whether it is a sign of rising population or growing empowerment, the number of speed breakers on the Bangalore-Mysore highway have risen dramatically. Earlier it used to be one speed breaker per municipality or taluk, but now it is one per panchayat or panchayat ward, which takes a toll on the pace. Lack of street lights makes life even more difficult for motorists plying in the night.
 
Cattle and bullock carts act as spokes to the journey. Somewhere between Ramanagaram and Channapatna we had a minor traffic jam - the reason? a bullock cart laden with fresh sugarcane crop had strayed into the wrong side of the divider. Hapless motorists could do little other than fume and honk while the cart ambled on the right side of the road. The bullocks and the cart driver were maintaining a zen-like composure, totally unmindful of the cacophony they had caused. Even the hyper-aggressive drivers of KSRTC buses and trucks had to grudgingly make way.
 
The cart guy wanted to go to a lane on the right side of the highway. However abiding by the traffic rules would have meant keeping to the left and taking a U-turn couple of kilometres down the highway - something quite alien to him. After all he needn't worry about  traffic police, fines, road tax or even fuel prices.
 
Some of the towns on the way have grown to become as crowded and chaotic like some Bangalore suburbs. The Mandya town with traffic signals, slow moving traffic and crowded junctions reminded me of BTM Layout.

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Deconstructing Suranjan Das Road

Apart from the usual suspects – the civic officials and the contractors – the 4-5 kilometre long Suranjan Das Road, which provides a vital link between Old Madras Road and Old Airport Road, is also a conspiracy involving automobile mechanics, orthopedics and of course those offering quack remedies for neck and back pain. For the medical fraternity the road can be an ideal place to carry out experiments to determine the threshold limit of strain a human bone can be subjected to, before it reconciles to plasters.

In its monsoon glory the stretch near Gitanjali Layout resembles poor man's Venice. The road was meant to be four-laned, but now it has two lanes of antiquated concrete road and two lanes of mini-canal with nearly four-feet deep trenches all along. With the jurisdictional C V Raman Nagar MLA belonging to BJP and a Congress government at Vidhana Soudha, much water is expected to flow down these trenches before a four-lane road becomes a reality.

The stretch from the BEML Gate to HAL Aerospace Division has an uncanny knack of getting inundated with knee deep water, even if there is a 15-minute drizzle. During heavy rains it acquires the menacing ability to even make burly Tata Sumos gasp for breath, due to inundated exhaust pipes.

For those who wish to get a hang of what off-road racing is all about, but loath to drive all the way to the city outskirts, the stretch near the HAL vegetable market could be ideal to learn the basics.

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Bangalore Auto Drivers' Manifesto

Politeness is as alien to us as a pothole-free road or a well-paved litter free footpath in the city. If you find a polite auto driver, then you might as well buy a lottery ticket and be assured that lady luck will smile on you.

We strongly believe in the credo 'taking someone for a ride' and have even applied for an ISO certification in this regard. However, the insiders there have cautioned that we are in for a stiff competition from our counterparts in Chennai and Delhi. So we have to be on our toes and keep thinking about innovative ways to implement our credo.

Meters are meant to be ornamental, but sometimes we have to oblige pesky customers, who think they are doing something smart. Little do they know that our meters don't run as per distance covered, but on jumps and jerks the vehicle experiences on hitting potholes and speed breakers.

The fare meter works in different ways vis-a-vis potholes and speed breakers. As for potholes it is inversely proportional - the deeper the pothole, the higher the quantum jump in the meter. Whereas in case of speed breakers it is directly proportional. And in this regard we specially thank BBMP, BWSSB, telecom companies for tirelessly working round the clock to ensure that we are never away from potholes. We also thank the citizens of Namma Bengaluru for being generous in erecting unauthorised speed breakers every 20-30 feet distance on bylanes and that too more than double the Government stipulated height.  

We are hypersensitive towards distances and have a narrow range of 2 to 5 kilometres. Anything less or beyond is treated as if the customer has asked for a free ride to Mars or Pluto. This gesture (of contemptuously driving away without any basic courtesy of saying 'yes' or 'no') has earned us a global patent and you will not find it among drivers in any other city. In case if you come across any auto driver from other city trying to imitate us, please bring it to our notice (for contact number you can check out our website) so that we can begin legal proceedings.

Although traffic police have stipulated timings for charging one-and-half and double fares we believe that time is a continuum and hence cannot be compartmentalised. Our excuses to charge extra fare may range from somewhat plausible (we may not get passengers while returning) to whatever we feel like at the moment (it is raining ... lot of traffic ... I have headache ... and the like).

It is our birthright to stalk passengers alighting from trains and outstation buses. Also the right to exercise it much more aggressively during odd hours and quote fares which may well be higher than what the passengers may have paid for their train or bus journey.

Lastly, we have every right to enjoy pleasant afternoons by indulging in a siesta on the back seat of autos and woe betide if anyone tries to wake us!

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Treating Garbage: Lessons From Oslo

The heat and dust of elections and the race to the gaddi at Vidhana Soudha may have pushed the city's garbage issue underground for now. But like a bad penny it cannot be wished away and its stench is only round the corner.

The much touted drive for waste segregation had met with limited success and is confined to few pockets. Deep seated habits like poor civic sense and caste prejudice, coupled with government's half-hearted measures have ensured that it is no way successful in mitigating the garbage pile ups that dot the city's street corners.

The other day I happened to read New York Times link forwarded by a friend on waste management done in the Norwegian capital Oslo. It was quite literally an eye opener. Oslo has a waste-to-energy incinearator on its outskirts and it turns garbage into heat and electricity. Roughly half the city and most of its schools are heated by burning garbage.

Households separate their garbage, putting food waste in green plastic bags, plastics in blue bags and glass elsewhere. The bags are handed out free at groceries and other stores. The plants uses computerised sensors to separate the color-coded garbage bags that race across conveyor belts and into incinerators.

Household trash, industrial waste, even toxic and dangerous waste from hospitals is grist to the incinerator. Its appetite is so huge that the city's garbage is just not enough and hence it is shipped in from faraway places such as England, Ireland and neighbouring Sweden to keep the plant running. It has even set sights on the American market.

And mind you Norway is no way starved of fossil fuel reserves. It is a major exporter of oil and gas, and has abundant coal reserves.

In fact the whole of North Europe has become a hub for waste to energy plants and Oslo is now facing tough competition from Swedish capital Stockholm. Environmentalists there fear that in order to keep these plants running people may be encouraged to produce more waste!

It holds an important lesson not just to Bangalore, but to whole of India. The country is urbanising at a brisk pace and even Tier 2 and 3 cities are feeling the pressures of overcrowding and strain on infrastructure. Already our cities are getting reduced to eyesores and badly need such innovative measures to treat garbage.

Moreover with most parts of the country are reeling under power cuts, the power generated by these units could lessen burden on our power plants and grids. It will also lessen the environmental cost in setting up a thermal or nuclear plant. And I am sure that in India raw materials will never be a problem for these garbage plants.

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Dwindling Mango Showers

Another scorching summer is upon us with hardly any 'mango rains' in sight. There was a wet spell in the beginning of April, but looks like it was more of a one off case than a pattern this city was once famous for. It used to get showers whenever the mercury breached the 32-33 degree Celsius mark.

The city used to bask in soothing sobriquets such as 'air-conditioned city' with tales regarding its salubrious clime spread far and wide. A couple of years back a friend from Kolkata had visited here and was quite amazed by the weather and told me "Now I know why many people who come here for work or studies settle down for good.”

Old timers who had worked at the numerous cantonments dotting the city recall that in the seventies Bangalore was considered as 'no fan' station by the army as the weather used to be too pleasant to warrant ceiling fans. For the armymen stationed here it used to be winter uniform all year long. Now AC ducts seem to have bored its way into offices and even homes.

In fact in 1990s when American technology majors came scouting for  centres for outsourcing in India, the Bangalore weather acted as a lodestone in making many of them set shop here.

Seven years back when I came to this city from Chennai (which as per a very common PJ has basically three seasons - hot, hotter and hottest) the pleasant weather at Bangalore used to make me feel languid and drowsy all the time.

Few days after coming here I was having breakfast at the now defunct Brindavan Hotel on MG Road and I overheard a native (probably a guide) explain to a backpacker foreigner couple how the city is blessed with pleasant weather and it rains whenever the temperatures cross a limit. The couple was also happily nodding in agreement. Another friend of mine, who too had stayed in Chennai, had warned me that clothes take longer time to dry up in Bangalore.

All that now seems to be from a different era. Nowadays while hitting the roads during afternoons one even gets to see mirages, something associated with more hotter and arid climes. To ward off hot sun, I see women on two-wheelers wear headscarves in a manner that would make Taliban proud. A visit to a beach resort is no longer necessary to acquire a sun tan, few hours out in the sun during afternoons is enough.

Weathermen say it is the price we are paying for rapid urbanization and the heavy toll on tree cover. This is more so on the outskirts like Whitefield, Hebbal, Sarjapur or Electronics City, where the skyline almost resembles Vashi or Gurgaon with high rise apartments, offices and spanking malls. Luckily the city centre has some huge green spaces like Cubbon Park and many cantonment  areas where the greenery is more or less intact.

With the concrete structures replacing large swathes of greenery at an alarming rate, the days of mercury hitting the 40 degrees Celsius may be round the corner.

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