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Torn In Two
Kalpana, Gopalan
Kalpana, Gopalan
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"In the 1980s, the city of Bangalore was shaken from a slumberous existence into a startled realization of its new-found destiny as a metropolis and the ‘city of the future’. In the five decades since Independence, this small and unremarkable town metamorphosed into an internationally known boom town, overtook Mysore as the urbs prima of the Karnataka region, and outdistanced its neighbours in Chennai and Hyderabad. No other contemporary Indian city allows us to track the passage from small town to metropolitan status within a few decades as well as does Bangalore (Nair J., 2005). The physical growth alone was striking. Between 1941 and 2001, the population of the urban agglomeration of Bangalore grew from 410, 967 persons to 5,686,844; the city itself expanding far beyond the 66 sq.km. to become an urban agglomeration of 531 sq.km. The increase of the built-up area of the city between 1945 and 1973 was three times that of the previous 33 years (1912-45), doubling in the seven years between 1973 and 1980 (Nair J., 2005). Largely unprepared as it was for this hurtling destiny, Bangalore’s response was characteristically dichotomous. On the one hand, there was a throwback to a nostalgic past, the expression of a longing for the good old days of a ‘garden city’ and ‘pensioner’s paradise’. A mythicized past, placid and restrained, offers an ideological refuge from the bewildering and dismaying onslaught of modernity. Juxtaposed with this is the more recent futuristic vision of the city as conforming to international standards, for which Singapore was the single most important model (Nair J., 2005). Whether it be an escape to a romanticized past or a neoteric future, both reflect Bangalore’s ambivalent response to a baffling present that it only reluctantly acknowledges. They equally mark the fear and dismay with which it greets its phenomenal growth. Both are essentially middleclass imaginings, a reaction not just to the developmental imperative but to the emergence of a plebian democratic polity that accompanies its wake. The new economics contends not only with fragments of the traditions and formative cultures of the past, but with new definitions and styles of democracy from below that do not comprise a ‘consensus’ on the image of the city (Nair, 2005). There is reason for this. Between the longing for a Bangalore of a bygone era and the futuristic visions of the Singapore-in- the making lies a complex history of a city that has been marked by national, regional and global forces in its passage to metropolitan status. The transformation of Bangalore has thus been crowded into a short span that affords none of the advantages of gradual growth, as in presidency cities such as Bombay, Madras or Calcutta. Its meteoric rise to a globally integrated location of software development and modern service industries produced, and masked, profound changes in the metropolitan social map, creating aggravating disparities and a highly fragmented and polarised urban society. Bangalore is becoming a multiply divided city where both social and geographical barriers are reinforced. While a relatively tiny stratum of affluent urban elite takes benefit from the city’s transformations, the urban poor are further marginalised. The trend for IT expansion in Bangalore began with specialised IT parks that are self-contained to act as “islands” or “pockets” of first world amenities. However, beyond these pockets of world class facilities, the digital divide is ever increasing between those that are benefiting from the IT boom and those that are hardly touched by the IT phenomenon. This raises the question whether developing the city as an IT hub is the only dream that is to be pursued or should a balanced development plan, benefiting a wider constituency be followed (Ghosh, February 25, 2006) (Nair J., 2005) (Yahya, 1-21) (Dittrich, 2007, p. 46).", Introduction, pp. 83-84
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2010-07
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