I was raised in Mysuru and have spent all of my childhood here. I attended school and college in this beautiful and amazing city.
Though I have lived outside India for over two decades, I try my best to return every year to visit my family. Each visit is meant to feel like coming home. Instead, it increasingly feels like watching someone you love slowly lose their way. Mysuru was once known for its greenery, its calm, its dignity. It was a city that moved at a human pace — clean streets, functional roads, orderly traffic and a shared sense that public spaces mattered.
Today, Mysuru feels like a fading memory. What greets visitors now is stark and painful: garbage patches everywhere, plastic choking footpaths and drains, broken roads that seem permanently under repair, traffic signals that either don’t work or are openly ignored and unchecked encroachment of streets by illegal vendors and food carts.
The city feels crowded, chaotic and neglected. Civic sense appears to be eroding before our eyes. This decline did not happen overnight, nor can it be blamed on growth alone. Cities grow — that is natural. But Mysuru has grown without discipline, without enforcement and without accountability.
Rules exist on paper, but not on the ground. When violations go unchecked, disorder becomes normalised. When garbage remains where it is dumped, people stop seeing it as a problem. When traffic laws are ignored without consequence, lawlessness becomes routine.
Dangerous acceptance of decay
The most troubling aspect is not just infrastructural failure, but collective resignation. A dangerous acceptance of decay has set in — where chaos is dismissed as inevitable and cleanliness is treated as optional.
Visitors feel the shock immediately. Residents, over time, lose their reference point for what the city once was and what it still could be. Having lived in cities where systems work — not because people are perfect, but because rules are enforced — I can say this with certainty: civic sense flourishes only when governance does its job. People respect public spaces when they believe those spaces are protected and valued.
When enforcement disappears, even well-meaning citizens eventually give up. This is not an attack on Mysuru. It is an expression of grief. I love this city deeply. I breathe it. I feel it. That is why it hurts to see it reduced to indifference by authorities who fail to govern and by citizens who have stopped demanding better.
Basic non-negotiables
Cities do not recover through slogans. They recover when people refuse to normalise decay. Mysuru does not need grand visions or cosmetic fixes. It needs something far more basic — and far more urgent: Enforcement, accountability and civic pride restored as non-negotiables.
Clean streets, functioning roads, regulated commerce and respect for traffic laws are not luxuries of ‘developed’ cities. They are the minimum expectations of any city that respects itself. The question is no longer whether Mysuru can be restored, but whether we are willing to demand better from our institutions and from ourselves.
Decline should never be accepted as normal. If we truly love this city, then caring must translate into action and nostalgia must give way to responsibility.
Mysuru can still reclaim its dignity — but only if we choose not to look away any longer.
This post was published on February 16, 2026 6:27 pm