Havoc in Bangalore

The past week was terrible for people in Bangalore. Almost every day of the week, the weather would follow the same pattern - it would get very hot during the day and then the evening would arrive with very strong winds, heavy rain and lots of lightning and thunder. Apart from the usual flooding of roads as well as the houses of some unfortunate folks and consequent traffic snarls, this time many more (at least 150, by most estimates) than the usual number of trees were uprooted. Most of these were Gulmohar (Royal Poinciana) trees that line many of Bangalore's roads and that look beautiful when in bloom. These trees seem to have awfully shallow roots for their size and they fell over electric wires, telephone wires, cable TV wires, vehicles, houses, etc.

So we have had intermittent power, noisy telephone lines, now you see it, now you don't cable TV, no internet connectivity, etc. in our house. Many people were much worse off. I hope this week would bring better weather.


As if this was not enough, the software engineers of Bangalore now have their lives made even worse by robbers. In the last few months, quite a few techies have been increasingly becoming the targets of robbers and muggers who perceive them to be "soft targets" with loads of money and offering little by way of resistance. In the last month alone, two people from my office were mugged in two separate incidents in the vicinity of our building in the night. Call centre and BPO workers have also been hit similarly. To make matters worse, the police commisioner thinks Bangalore has actually become safer in the last few years and quotes some questionable statistics to prove his point. We have already given up on our government which seems more eager to cling on to power by appeasing its coalition partners than bother to develop the state and the city.


(Originally posted on Advogato.)

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