What Bengaluru's leaders have forgotten about legacy

Mint

05-06-2025

On Tuesday night, 3 June, as the Royal Challengers Bengaluru cricket team won its first Indian Premier League title, I felt a sudden unease. Not because I don't love cricket or the joy of celebrations—I do—but because I've lived long enough in Bengaluru to dread what happens next. Traffic snarls, jammed roads becoming choking funnels, rains turning half-built streets into muddy rivers. So, instinctively, I started mapping my next day's routes, mentally avoiding potential flashpoints. But not once—not even remotely—did I imagine lives would be lost celebrating something as simple as a cricket victory.
And yet, painfully, that's exactly what happened.
By Wednesday night, 11 people had died in a stampede at Bengaluru's Chinnaswamy Stadium. Among them: the 18-year-old son of a pani puri seller; a 14-year-old girl who'd arrived excited and hopeful; and a 22-year-old engineering student proudly wearing his RCB jersey. Families stood shattered outside mortuaries, unable to comprehend how quickly celebration had turned to devastation.
When I heard politicians responding casually—some even comparing this avoidable disaster to stampedes at massive events like the Kumbh Mela—I felt a deep, searing anguish.
My thoughts turned to Whitefield, Gunjur, and Varthur—places where I've stood helplessly watching commuters struggle, fall, and bleed on neglected roads. Lives continue to be quietly damaged every day, as if we've all become numb.
Meanwhile, we live surrounded by concrete jungles rising rapidly, apartments still unfinished, some with nothing more than a foundation stone and yet brazenly proclaiming 'Live in Nature's Womb." Irony couldn't be crueler.
It wasn't always this way. Bengaluru once had leaders who, despite their flaws, were acutely aware of the legacies they would leave behind. Consider the Wodeyars of Mysuru.
Yes, their rule was feudal and complicated, yet it held a genuine commitment to lasting change. Historian Ramachandra Guha, in his landmark book India After Gandhi, points out how Krishna Raja Wodeyar IV, guided by visionary engineer Sir M. Visvesvaraya, built the Krishnaraja Sagar Dam—not for short-term applause, but to ensure prosperity for generations.
Janaki Nair, in her insightful book The Promise of the Metropolis: Bangalore's Twentieth Century, highlights how the Wodeyars granted vast stretches of land to establish institutions like the Indian Institute of Science, investing quietly yet profoundly in a future beyond themselves.
Travel further back and you encounter the Hoysalas. Their extraordinary temples at Belur and Halebidu, as art historian Gerard Foekema describes in Architecture Decorated with Architecture: Later Medieval Temples of Karnataka, weren't mere vanity projects. They were deliberate gifts to future generations—cultural treasures still admired centuries later.
Cut to today. Bengaluru's infrastructure is crumbling. Ambulances sit paralyzed in traffic, helplessly unable to reach those in need.
Meanwhile, startup valuations and Shark Tank theatrics dominate headlines; IPL wins overshadow basic public safety. We've even embraced 'doglapan"—that shameless hypocrisy of our business and political elites—as a form of casual entertainment, further numbing us to the negligence and chaos unfolding around us.
Yet beneath this glossy surface, our roads remain a cruel reminder of the city's neglect—daily accidents, broken commuters, mud mixing with blood, and ironic billboards promising utopia amid urban chaos.
History, though, remembers differently. It records every choice, every moment of disregard. Bengaluru's rulers must realize that true legacies are built from mindful acts of responsibility that are performed consistently.
Bengaluru's leaders need to think deeply about how history will remember them—not as overseers of a city in decay, but as mindful stewards who choose accountability and care over spectacle and neglect.
History never forgets. It's time Bengaluru's leaders remembered this, too.