Some thoughts for the New Year

The public library in the neighbourhood I grew up in mattered hugely in my boyhood. The rows of glossy Asterix and Tintin comics, the sturdy hardback editions of Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys detective series, and the black-spined Penguin classics were the sections I came to know first. A nominal one-time subscription fee let readers take home up to four books at a time.

Browsing and borrowing in this modest-sized public library took place amid readers – mostly men – silently poring over newspapers and magazines on reading stands lining two of the walls. The public library in the neighbourhood I live in now is run out of an upstairs room inside an uninviting GBA office building.

Public libraries can be truly beautiful community spaces. All effort must be made to revitalise them in Bengaluru and elsewhere in the state.

Individuals in Bengaluru interested in learning the Kannada language well are mostly left to fend for themselves. The Karnataka government, which runs thirty Kannada learning centres in Bengaluru – some housed in institutions such as the RBI and NIMHANS – has recently announced that it will set up forty more in the city and sixty elsewhere in the state. These centres offer classes in basic conversational Kannada over a three-month period.

The low ambition and narrow imagination behind this effort are simply striking. A city like Bengaluru ought to have at least half a dozen well-designed institutes that help interested individuals to acquire different levels of proficiency in speaking and writing Kannada through innovative curricula and teaching methods. In doing so, the city becomes more linguistically hospitable as well.

Single-screen movie theatres in Bengaluru are well on the road to extinction. Thirty years ago, there were close to two hundred of them, around two-thirds of which no longer exist. The city’s real estate realities make this decline appear inevitable. But can the government not step in to buy one or two iconic theatres in centrally located areas – to preserve them as heritage sites and cultivate them as living cinema spaces where high-quality films from across the world are screened daily?

In the hands of talented film curators, these spaces would provide rich cinematic experiences in a city that offers so little serious cinema to the public. They would enhance the city’s character too.

Set up by the state government in each of the 198 wards in 2017 – two dozen of which were mobile units – Indira canteens served the vital purpose of making meals affordable to daily wage earners, street vendors, students, and autorickshaw drivers, among others. Breakfast cost five rupees, while lunch and dinner cost ten each. The high food costs in Bengaluru make these canteens an especially valued welfare measure. They are known to have saved hundreds from going hungry.

With the number of wards in Bengaluru rising to 400 recently, the over a hundred new Indira Canteens will need to be set up soon to serve every ward. This phase of expanding the number of canteens is an opportunity to review this experiment so far and remedy its problems: the short operating hours – two hours per meal time – being one of them.

At the time the current state government assumed office, I wrote here urging it to enforce mandatory rainwater harvesting in buildings on plots measuring 60 x 40 feet and above. I also suggested that the social science textbooks make high school students aware of the deadly problem of fake news and enable them to shun it. I would like to bring these two issues to the table once again.

Happy New Year!

The writer is the Vidyashilp Professor looks for new ways of looking.

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.