Chaos. A search to understand the word better revealed: “Complete disorder and confusion”. In Physics, it is explained as “the property of a complex system whose behaviour is so unpredictable as to appear random, owing to great sensitivity to small changes in conditions”.
That is as far as understanding the word is concerned. This simple five-letter word can however send the brain into a spin when we experience it. For that, you need to be in Bengaluru – probably the most ideal place to experience chaos in action.
Let’s start from the very beginning about the city and chaos.
A city is an urban area with a high population density. It has a high concentration of residential areas. A city is a centre of commerce, culture, administration, markets, educational institutions, hospitals and medical centres, sports, and recreational and leisure facilities spread across it. These are linked by roads and streets, and supported by essential mobility infrastructure, water supply, and sanitation systems. Ideally, it needs to support a sustainable cradle-to-grave life, guaranteeing a comforting sense of safety and security.
Chaos in the city sets in with the failure of civic systems, processes, deliverance of services, enforcement and law & order mechanism. When that happens, masses take the failure for granted, and take advantage of the lenience of laws, weak enforcement, which translates to lack of deterrence to unlawful behaviour – and civic administrative shortfalls.
In chaotic Bengaluru, unpredictability and randomness prevail. One just can’t be sure how long it takes from point A to point B by road. The cause could be anything from traffic gridlocks en route resulting from unqualified drivers – although armed with valid licences – contributing their worth with their “driving skills”; incomplete road or drain works; a road rage incident holding up traffic, regardless of whether an ambulance in an emergency is stranded in it; convoy of a political heavyweight forcing traffic movement to a grinding halt; or processions on the roads … it is like rules and their enforcement do not exist, or enforced for questionable reasons.
The visual aspects of chaos are pedestrians being forced to walk on the roads (jay-walking) due to absence or lack of proper footpaths; insecurity of women, elders and children in public spaces; public urination and spitting; littering without a care for its implications; unauthorized constructions, building plans and encroachments…the list goes on.
It is more than two decades since then Bangalore, now Bengaluru, shed its last vestiges of being the “Pensioner’s Paradise”. Today, that once-Pensioner’s Paradise is one of the cruellest for elders and pensioners. One of the impacts of chaotic Bengaluru is that it has become unfriendly to elders. It is as if the city has been designed to be vengeful at their very existence.
But chaos doesn’t have a design. It’s an evolved condition. It is more like one that is allowed to develop, thanks to successive ruling dispositions over the years, irrespective of their political ideologies, and the ones they can’t do without – the bureaucracy. Both nurture a not-so-secret key ingredient for the chaos in Bengaluru. It is called apathy – comes with a large degree of seemingly innate indifference.
The elders, however, may draw some consolation from the fact that it is not just them that a chaotic, unkempt Bengaluru targets. In fact, no one is spared, irrespective of age group, gender, or communal/caste identity. That way at least, Bengaluru is secular – it presents an equal ‘Hell’ for all, without resorting to the pet exercise of politicians these days, called identity politics.
We are not even talking about heavy rains and the inevitable flooding of the city’s areas. We are talking about everyday-Bengaluru, that the city that has changed from its once-pristine condition. Only that rains add to the chaos that prevails daily to the already existing chaotic conditions in Bengaluru.
Attempts are being made to solve Bengaluru’s problems. But the proposed solutions are more like treating the big toe while the actual problem is migraine. The problems will only persist with such approaches. Solutions need to come with a changed mindset, and they need to be simple, direct and effective. For instance, tunnel roads can never be a solution for the city’s traffic problems. It will only add to the road area, encouraging people to use more private vehicles instead of goading them into taking a much-improved and enhanced public transport or mass rapid transport system.
The challenge lies in changing our mindset, not in proposing solutions with our present agenda-driven mindset, which would only prolong and compound the problems, further contributing to Bengaluru’s chaos.
In many ways, the smooth functioning of a city like Bengaluru is an expression of a healthy democracy, a failure of which compromises democratic values – our very freedom of movement and our right to life and safe living, without which democracy has no meaning. The machinery of solutions for the city needs to begin with genuine pride for Namma Bengaluru!
