By Dr. K. Javeed Nayeem, MD

A recent news report says that our local authorities have announced that all footpath encroachments along the Sayyaji Rao Road, the ‘Rajpath’ of our city, would be removed and every kind of roadside business there, would be banned, until our annual festival, the Dasara, is over.

Yes, this term ‘Rajpath’ was what was used by a great visionary sitting at the helm of affairs, many years ago, when he and his team embarked on the outlandish project of putting up granite balustrades all along our Dasara procession route.

These balustrades, according to his own proud proclamation, were intended and even promised to make our procession route a rival of its namesake in New Delhi, along which our Republic Day parade marches. It took a full three years for this dream to even begin to blossom and after its long and slow march, it took less than three months to fall down and meet the dust, like the short-lived blossoms that the sixteenth century English poet, Robert Herrick laments about, in his very touching poem, ‘To Blossoms.’ In its very first paragraph Herrick writes:

Fair pledges of a fruitful tree,

Why do you fall so fast?

Your date is not so past

But you may stay yet here a while

To blush and gently smile;

And go at last!

As it is open for all of us to see now, our ‘Rajpath’ man and his vision have failed miserably in their mission. It is something which I had predicted in one of my articles in this very same column even before the work was started, with a plea to abandon the proposal.

Having been made of granite, a hard but extremely brittle kind of stone, his balustrades began falling like ninepins in a bowling alley, in rapid succession. They fell, sometimes one by one and sometimes in batches, exactly like Herricks blossoms, well before their date was past!

And now, they remain only in interrupted spans, that only make their presence an eyesore to Mysore! Their missing remains can however be found lying in bits and pieces, in a forlorn corner of the premises of the Corporation Ward office on Thyagaraja Road. The sentimental among us Mysureans can go there and pay their last respects to them, if they wish to do so. I have already done it, a couple of times!

Coming back to the present move of clearing our footpaths, it is purportedly being done to keep the Dasara procession route free of all obstacles, to help the visitors and tourists who flock to our city during Dasara, to have a better tour experience and carry back happy memories of their visit to our city. A very kind and considerate gesture, no doubt, but I would like to ask if it is only the short-time visitors to our city who deserve this small measure of kindness? What about the year-long quality of life for the full-time residents of the city, who are the ones who pay hefty taxes year after year, all through their lives, to manage and sustain the city, only to bear the misery of negotiating through all kinds of obstructions and impediments, as they go about their daily lives? Are they mortals of a lesser kind, who do not deserve any kindness in this matter?

The most ironic thing is that they do not really enjoy the benefits of even this short-lived, month-long magnanimity bestowed on our city during Dasara, as most of them completely avoid stirring out of their homes during the festival season because of the heavily congested roads and public places. I, for one, manage my life very carefully, by completely avoiding the city centre, all through our Dasara and in the days following it, till all the tourists have happily gone home, making way for my own happiness.

So, with all footpaths being encroached upon across the entire length and breadth of the city, we citizens never get to see obstruction-free footpaths, although we dream of seeing them all through our lives! And, as a tax-paying citizen, I would like to ask, on behalf of every one of you, why we should have this footpath clearance drive only on our ‘Rajpath’ and just during our Dasara and why not on every one of our roads, all through the year?

I’m sure we are entitled to give ourselves a better quality of life in our city as honest tax-payers and if we aren’t, who else is?

Non-interfering signals

A good many of the traffic lights that were installed at astronomical costs, just a few years ago, across the many busy road intersections in our city, have remained non-functional for the last so many months.

While there are many like these which are not working and which therefore do not interfere with the erratic and discordant flow of traffic, the notable among them are the ones at the busy Akashvani Circle and those at the much busier intersection further ahead, near the V.V. Puram Police Station, both of which are the meeting points of five roads each.

The chaos and confusion that is prevalent there through a greater part of every passing day has to be seen and experienced to be believed. This shutdown is not just something that has happened now but something that we have been seeing with distressing regularity very often. And, when they become non-functional, they remain that way for months together.

Citizens have written letters to the editor about this problem a few times but nothing has changed. A report in SOM recently said that this was because the authorities had failed to pay the maintenance fees that they were supposed to pay to the agency that was entrusted with erecting and maintaining the signal lights. This is indeed a very bad lapse which should be avoided and which is easy to avoid, considering the fact that our authorities who have to make these payments are certainly not cash-strapped.

Let’s hope that they do it, which they may do very soon too, again, not because they want us citizens to have a less arduous life, but only because Dasara is round the corner and tourists are coming!

Ill-fated Irwin Road

The busy Irwin Road that runs through the centre of our city and which has thankfully been widened recently, albeit with one persisting bottleneck, seems to be plagued by one very refractory problem, which our exalted road engineers seem to be helplessly incapable of solving.

Along its entire one-kilometre length, right from the central bus stand junction till the Sayyaji Rao Road junction, runs an underground drain which has a row of about a dozen manholes. Now, the tops of these manholes, over the last so many years, have never been at the same level with the surface of the road.

There seems to be some kind of a weird, never-ending competition between the two. Whenever the road is resurfaced, the tops of the manholes find themselves three inches below its level and to correct this, when the level of their lids is raised, they find themselves three inches higher than the road surface! Either way, the result is that motorists and two-wheeler riders have been experiencing a most bumpy drive on this road with the latter especially, being in great danger to their lives, due to their extreme vulnerability.

The question I would like to ask here is, why is the quality of our road engineering so pathetically poor that we are not able to set right this simple and silly problem permanently? Or, do we need to get some kind of expertise from overseas, at great expense to the tax- payers, by sending a delegation of our engineers on a foreign tour, as we often do, for the simplest and silliest of reasons?

e-mail: [email protected]