What do you do when buffaloes mysteriously eat away your green cover? Hunt down the real thick-skinned culprits that wallow in public funds! . . . → Read More: City Zen – Phantom trees and hungry buffaloes
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Until the mid-eighties, our groceries came bagged in old newspapers. We brought home rice and sugar in packages emblazoned with last week’s headlines. Fish and meat were first wrapped in banana leaves and then with brown paper. Beer bottles were surreptitiously swathed in double-rolls of weekend editions. Steel tumblers clanged at the nearby restaurant, then not yet suffixed with Darshini. Weddings were messy affairs even then but stray dogs industriously polished off discarded meals while cows champed on leaf plates. Recycling waste used to be a tradition, until we turned a new leaf. . . . → Read More: City Zen – Does our city need plastic surgery? Some old-timers fondly recall that much-reviled historic event, the Emergency, for a dictatorial government’s efficacy at enforcing law and order. “Trains ran on time, even criminals were shot at sight,” they reminisce with wistful pride. Sure, but why does a democratic society need a schoolmaster to rap its errant knuckles? . . . → Read More: City Zen – For a safer city, withdraw VIP security cover The ‘Graphic Bangalore’ theme of this week’s Time Out Bengaluru has showcased one of my cartoons among the “Funnies” along with a teeny self-portrait and a bio. . . . → Read More: My Mutalik cartoons in Time Out Bengaluru Ask your councillors where the parks have gone, and they will point proudly to a software park within ten minutes’ drive. Car parks, they promise, will follow. But a park by any other name doesn’t feel as green. . . . → Read More: City Zen – A park by any other name As man and best friend clash, no one is sure who’s the underdog. Dog-haters growl genocide, arguing that there are too many mutts for comfort. On the other hand, the overzealous Assisi-tants of St Francis whimper that every dog needs a home, never mind that some of us can’t afford the nutritional equivalent of a pack of bow-wow chow. Wait, aren’t we wagging the dog here? . . . → Read More: City Zen – For the love of dog! Excerpt from the second of my cartoon strip/ columns for @iJanaagraha, a Bangalore civic awareness website, on the challenges of being a morning walker in the age of footpath invasion: For the better part of two decades my dad has been a compulsive morning walker. Before he retired, he’d hit the road at 5:45. To maintain that daily routine in our city’s too-good-to-leave-bed climes, you must be driven by desperation or determination. Maybe both. My dad had a better reason: it was the only time he had the footpath to himself. . . . → Read More: The morning walker’s nightmare I’m curious about how a wall becomes a magnet for micturition. Back when Sulabh complexes and Nirmala Bengaluru toilets were figments of fantasy, public toilets were fortresses of glazed tiles guarded by cows and dogs and hidden behind foothills of garbage and other fragrant surprises. Forget about pay-and-use, most people wouldn’t accept payment to use them. They preferred to commit the deed at a safe distance. In time, the toilet’s circle of influence extended a good fifty feet from the inner sanctum. These communal relief zones also performed another important function – olfactory land marking. . . . → Read More: City Zen – Regret the incontinence – why we pee where we shouldn’t Kickbackistan is Thermal And A Quarter’s response to the corruption surrounding the Commonwealth Games 2010. . . . → Read More: Kickbackistan – kicking out corruption the TAAQ way My piece on the music of Thermal And A Quarter, published in today’s Mint Lounge, traces the history of the band’s music, its relevance and rootedness to Bangalore’s cultural milieu and argues that rock music can actually come from a deep place — if only you care to listen. . . . → Read More: Bangalore's own Roots Rock |
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Copyright © 2012 Bijoy Venugopal - All Rights Reserved |
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