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Great cities wither away when dreams of greatness fade

This week’s Metronama comes from Bangalore, nobody insists on Bengaluru as long as one praises the clement weather of the city after being introduced to a local resident. That category includes those who moved in from Jaipur in January. The ice-breaker, of course, remains blunt unless the praise is accompanied by a severe denunciation of the climate of one’s domicile.

A recent business trip to Bangalore added another entry to the countless visits I have made to Karnataka’s capital over the years. In the mid-90s, all those who cared about Bangalore – the administrators, the techies, Kannadigas whose families had lived in the city for generations – were a confident lot. They were sure that Mumbai would be knocked off soon from its position as India’s number one metro. But on the last few trips, I have felt that Bangalore wants to urgently encash its metroness before other upstarts, like Indore, vie for a piece of the action.

Indeed, the abruptness that marks the behaviour of the average Bangalorean ‘service deliverer’ (in the wide sense of autowallahs, waiters, cops, bank clerks) it seems to me, is a defeatist reaction. Mumbai autowallahs, for example, have calibrated their rapaciousness into a painless rip-off mechanism. Fare that should be Rs70 will be juiced up to Rs90. But in Bangalore, cheating is performed as a taunting, sneering exercise. “It will be double the meter,” a pleasant fellow told me on the famed MG road, apprehending my visitor status. And every pleasant fellow running an auto on that stretch stuck steadfastly to that quote. It was a cartel! And everywhere you go in Bangalore, you will be confronted by the remorseless members of the price-pushing gang.

The cops are not of much help. An out-of-town colleague once noticed that the mandatory driver-identification display stuck behind the auto-driver’s seat bore the picture of an elderly man; the driver was in his twenties. When she asked the driver about the disparity, he grunted and swerved to the first available traffic cop. The driver and the cop engaged in a brisk, brotherly conversation during which they both pointed a lot at my colleague. When she angrily let it be known that she was a journalist, the cop said, “Madam, there is no rule against a son driving his father’s auto. Haven’t you ever driven your father’s car?” Then the cop as well as the driver urged her to find another auto if she was feeling uncomfortable. “Anecdotal evidence suggests that at least a quarter of Bangalore autowallahs don’t have proper identification displays,” she later told me.

After a rather depressing day in what is still a pretty green metro, I retired to a beer-and-sandwich establishment near MG road that is touted as the refuge of Bangalore’s thinkers. Journalists tend to do a lot of thinking there, and the restaurant claims that our first prime minister enjoyed its restorative catering. I found that place completely disagreeable: the waiters were surly and it took twenty minutes to get the bill. But most unbearable was the attitude of the staff; the waiter at my table pushed my elbow aside to grab the menu. “What the hell!” I said. He let off a dark snigger. “Go ahead, complain. I don’t care. I have just taken a job in Mumbai,” he said. “And tell me, is it double meter from Dadar station to Prabhadevi?”

raghu@dnaindia.net