Category: BDA

The phenomenon – part one

I always wanted to pen down this story, but time was at premium. It finally finds its way into this blog. This is not a story of a place. Its an article about the phenomenon called Koramangala and my gratitude for a chance to breathe, live and loathe it.

The year was 1983. But we were living in 1682. The mood wasn’t exactly one of jubilation but more of an urgency. An urgency to find a place which we could call our own, in anticipation of a family which would shortly burst at its seams. With many siblings of my father yet to be married, there was never a perfect time for this shift. Our then rented home 1682, in Rajajinagar had a reason to be vacated. With burgeoning rental demands, and for reasons beyond my comprehension when I was just six, and with pressure from everyone around, we had to vacate the place.

Koramangala was neither in the city, nor was a village. At best it wasn’t even lands that belonged to the rich and powerful Reddys those days. It was more of unexplored forest, which BDA decided to tame in the name of site allotments. My father had been allotted a site for five thousand rupees. Five thousand was like a current day fifty lakh figure to him with his rather abysmal salary levels and the last thing he could do was cough up this amount for the property. He had two choices – Koramangala and Indiranagar. While he could somehow locate the former, he was afraid to go to the latter area !! 🙂

After a lot of discussion and math crunching all the brothers decided to pitch in for the house so that my dad could enable the change in life. This in my opinion was the beginning and end of a joint family. The beginning was one of happiness and the seeds for the end were being sown not withstanding my oblivion about it.

The nearest  bus stop to Koramangala those days (80’s era) was can-you-believe-it Diary Circle which is a good 3-4 kms away. I would say its good for a heart patient as such, but for the good-for-nothing health freaks that we are, this was way too much. This also is the sole reason why my dad and grandpa are living/lived a healthy life. They walked this distance at least for a couple to three years before the phenomenon started happening. With just six houses for the entire eight blocks of Koramangala, this was nowhere near a phenomenon in the making.

From there what happened until now is the phenomenon.

Palace road widening, GIM investments and the impacts

The road widening hooligans are at it yet again. This time they are aiming to chop off full grown trees alongside the palace road from both cauvery theatre side as well as from TV tower side. Reason is they want to make it a 10-lane road leading to the already glorious (for the wrong reasons) airport. Of course Mr.Srikantadatta being from the royal lineage wants 40 crores per acre or per squarefeet – all this while the government is already mulling whether palace really belongs to him or not in the first place. The palace itself is earning crores of money for all kinds of events and some sundry income from few roadside meters chopped off is a feather in wadiyar’s money cap. Here it seems both the government and wadiyar are equally selfish to their own ends. Whether its road widening or underpass or flyover, in the name of infrastructure the government seems to be siphoning off funds here and there in mass scale. No wonder in the recent GIM, the government has sanctioned power projects alone to the tune of some 2 lac crore if i am not mistaken, and pat came the query from the high court asking for the details of such blanket approvals and what exactly were these projects. While industrialization of karnataka is not bad, mass approval of projects without any consulting agency or committee just by the chief minister is a certain invitation for trouble in the short future.

 

 

 

Our infrastucture experts lag by a decade – KH road flyover mess solved

Ask a small kid and he would have given the solution. Ask an old man and his wiseness would have manifested as a solution. It took the Bengaluru infrastructure experts a few years to come up with a solution to the (stupid) KH Road flyover. What is wrong with the flyover many people might ask. Well I would ask – what is exactly right?

  • Its the world’s only flyover with a signal light at the center

  • Its the world’s only flyover where a cop sits managing traffic at this signal light

  • Its the world’s only flyover which is mismanaged to such an extent that it has made proper roads crooked just because it exists

  • Its the world’s only flyover (perhaps) which can crush an entire road beneath it and the people on it to death in seconds

  • Its the world’s only flyover where the span of the column can be considered so huge to cause regular traffic jams

  • Its perhaps the world’s only flyover that looks like an X in shape!

Yes we are talking about the great Double Road flyover. Finally atleast the mess it has created has been solved to some extent by keeping things the way they must be. See for yourself: (picture courtesy TOI)

Now for some questions on this way of traffic flow:

  • Isn’t one of this enough either mission road to residency road or double road to richmond road, why both ways the traffic now needs to flow on the flyover?

  • Is that design not silly ?

  • The bigger question is whether this flyover is now required at all once you see the traffic flow 🙂 ?

  • If they do decide next to remove this flyover, will it solve any issues if one ways are created accordingly?

  • Must a small stretch of road between richmond circle and VGP junction on double road make life hell ?

  • Will we never see architectural marvels in flyover making at all ?

  • What about the maintenance of such a flyover, what will be its state after say 10 years more ? Would you travel on it or under it ?

The issue is not with building flyovers. The issue is with people designing them and the limited scope of the needs of such a construction, that these people have in their narrow mind. Money flow aside.  Any guesses what the next great architectural marvel would be ? How about an underpass on both sides of this flyover ? Or better still a metro train running under this flyover ? Infrastructure planning is an art. Experience must speak by itself, without even a single question asked. You want an example, see for yourself the better part of Bengaluru infrastucture:

Image courtesy: BMIC – NICE

Web hosts and deciding for yourself which ones to choose

In my past ten years of my web designing, I have had the need to switch my web hosts for many different reasons. Either the web host would one day pack up and not exist the next day, or their webservers would go horribly wrong with errors each time and take a long time to get alright. Or maybe sometimes I’ve wanted to upgrade from paying just one dollar to maybe something more for more facilities. Whatever has been the reason, I’ve always wanted a single place on the internet which gave me a clear picture of the existing webhosts who were popular during that time, along with details of their pricing and how many facilities and what did they have to offer. Most of all, I wanted to have all this in one place.

One such website that provides me this concise information is web hosting rating. They have a very nice site, listing out the top 10 webhosts and predominantly display their traffic offering and price offering, enabling readers to have a birds eye glance of what they need to choose. Also a detailed review of each web host service is available when the user clicks from the front page, giving more than enough details of the intricacies of the facilities offered by them.

They also have an educational set of articles about the web hosting practices, the costing, and what it means to choose a good host. You can see this article for instance which talks about a review of a particular host.

So what are you waiting for? Check out the best web hosts of 2008 and sign up with the one you think is worth it in your opinion. Make an informed decision and get the best for your website!

CBI junction Magic Box – yet to work its magic

Nowadays I have become a frequent traveler on Bellary road to my office and I cant help but ponder over the status of the CBI junction magic box work that is going on for almost months together now. Yesterday I happened to see a hoarding put up and I almost from its apperance thought that its ready for inaguration. But however upon looking closer I made out that without even tarring up the road, it was next to impossible to inagurate it.

Then upon looking even closer, I realized that its the Ganganagar BJP unit, which had put up the hoarding to welcome Rajnath Singh and Advani to Bangalore. I am sort of miffed with the way BJP is operating just because it has got a long term government in place. They dont seem to realize that roads are chaotic everywhere, and absolutely no progress has been made towards resolving these issues amongst other infrastructural ones pending so far.

With this said I do hope that they finish up CBI junction magic box on time and then we must have a smooth drive all the way from Raj Bhavan upto Hebbal Flyover and beyond!

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