JOIN USLong time Bangaloreans must often wonder at when the city lost its soul. I’m convinced it changed for the worse when its denizens stopped respecting the trees.
Trees have been brutally chopped and removed for road widening or mutilated for the aerial passage of cables.
If the concrete poured around the base of their broad trunks didn’t kill them, they have been defaced with the nailing and sticking of posters offering PG accommodation, 24 hour PAN card processing, insurance policies, taxi services, job opportunities and what have you.
The saddest part, perhaps, is that trees no longer dominate the cityscape.
Buildings taller than the towering rain trees known for their shade put those trees in the shade.
Time was when the pink of the Tabebuia and the orange-red of the Spathodia shone against a brilliant blue sky. Now, for those of us who are aware of their existence, a carpet of fallen blooms urges us to raise our eyes in admiration of Nature’s splendour.
It is true that many trees have been lost in the growth of the city. But shouldn’t those that are left be visible?
Most trees are hidden behind huge hoardings that are put up in strategic locations to catch the consumer’s eye and seduce him into spending a little more.
Flood- lit ones exhort you to buy an apartment for a modern lifestyle pigeonholing the nouveau riche into a slot that is a tad more important than the pensioner whose paradise was his small home on terra firma.
Anybody and everybody is advised to invest in their castle in the air and live like a king. Gaudy pictures display jewellery of new and fashionable designs, never mind that the high crime rate in the city makes wearing even a mangalsutra a security risk.
The most annoying banners/posters are the season’s greetings shouted out by the local politician.
Now if only his/her name wished the locality on the occasion of a festival, it would have been tolerable.
But no, his full length photograph dominates the poster and random faces, ostensibly those of his followers fill the rest of the space.
Luckily for us, when more than one festival is accommodated on the poster we are spared the torture of seeing the same faces on different posters for different occasions.
Many of these eyesores were brought down during the recent elections.
However, huge hoardings with advertisements that endorse products and property still stare out from the top of every building, at traffic signals and even over the graveyard wall.
So who is to blame – an uncaring, greedy municipal corporation that permits these ugly ads or a city peopled with the self-possessed who only know the power of possessions?
What a pity that we constitute a very small percentage who will gladly give up the goods for the trees.