Bangalore, we are told, has been turned into a verb among people who have been worst hit by the global outsourcing trend. To be Bangalored is to lose your job to a faceless, and what's worse, mock American or British person wired to a desk in the south Indian city. This threat perception to jobs worldwide is ironically matched in Bangalore by expressions of anxiety that the IT industry will shut shop and move to more hospitable places. Only very rarely do popular discussions go beyond these high visibility zones to ask questions about the city's prospects at other levels. How many people in and around the city have been Bangalored to make way for the space that we know today? Equally important, how many ways of thinking about city life have been Bangalored in the rush to please the IT industry? So great is the identification between the IT industry and the city that there is an often expressed impatience about anything that might get in its way. Laws must be changed to make acquisition of land easier; traffic must be managed to let the techies get to work on time; politics must be shunned and politicians should leave the governance of the city to managers and bureaucrats. To borrow the words of Jurong Consultants Private Limited from Singapore which was invited in 2002 to draft a master plan for a 25 km electronic corridor to cater to one million people by 2021: Facilities would be provided for IT professionals to "live, work, play and strike business deals". Not even in the heyday of the public sector, which was confined to large enclaves to the north-west and east of Bangalore, was the imagination of the city determined by the demands of a single sector. Never before has the imagination of what sustains a city been so impoverished as in the last decade in Bangalore. It is as if the ride to economic prosperity has dried up not only the tanks and other water bodies that were a unique feature of the city, but also ideas about citizenship, urban values, or community spirit. With what resources can one imagine a type of urbanity that is not reduced to uninterrupted production and intensified consumption? Planning in the public sector enclaves did have at its heart a new citizen who was conceived in the space of patriotic production. There is neither need for us to exaggerate the fellow feeling that was created nor forget the fact that there were unpredictable and not wholly positive outcomes to these deeply flawed imaginings. But there was an active imagination at work, one that attempted to transform living spaces and produce a new kind of person. In her monumental work of the late 1950s, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs lamented the effects of sanitised city spaces and zoning laws on the everyday life of American cities, altering the rich mix of activities commercial and residential, if not industrial and transforming the relative unpredictability of life. What writers like Jacobs, Lewis Mumford and Richard Sennett described as desirable is exactly the kind of unpredictability from which the middle-class Indian wants to escape. Living now in what is arguably the most humane Indian city, Kolkata, I am compelled to ask: Is the price of economic development the eclipse of other social ideals? Kolkata represents the obverse of what Bangalore is: Wretched poverty, extremely low income levels that lead to petty crime, and crumbling public facilities. Yet in the midst of such an unreconstructed economy, Kolkata remains a space of great warmth and humanity. I can think of no other metro where the female body is not routinely violated or public life brutalised in the midst of heat and pressing crowds. There are reassuring ways in which people keep a track on others' lives: Other metropolises may pride themselves on preserving privacy, but in Kolkata one is left to be as private as one chooses. Parks are routinely frequented by couples who remain undisturbed, a rare phenomenon in India's metros. Bus conductors and countless others are polite and caring despite the trying heat and noise. There is a lively, decentralised urban aesthetic which draws on the Bengali language and sensibilities.In no other city can one think of a middle class that is never allowed to forget the larger milieu of which it is a part, sometimes in disagreeable ways. This city is no exception to the middle class yearning for greater and more privatised comfort. But at least for now it is probably the only Indian metro where people of all classes use the public transport. Will these ways of life be Bangalored if Kolkata embraces the path pioneered by the southern city? Will the Kolkata spirit show some resilience in the face of pressure to economically reinvent itself? Can urban planners and local politicians think of institutional mechanisms that will retain some of the admirable features of Kolkata's urbanity while achieving some of the economic well-being of Bangalore? Thus far, at least, the signs in both cities are not encouraging. The writer is professor of history, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata.
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