What do Bengaluru's youth really care about?

Hindustan Times

6 days ago

Is activism dead in Bengaluru? I thought about this as I waded through knee-deep water in South Bengaluru. Once again, the rains are upon us, and once again, the city is waterlogged.
Netizens in other cities are gleeful. Bengaluru gets half the rain of Mumbai, and has half the population, said one. Yet it suffers from more flooding than Mumbai, every time it rains. What will it take for this city to wake up and get BBMP to do its job?
Am I living in Varthur or Venice, asked dancer Ramaa Bharadwaj on Facebook? We need gondolas to wade through our streets.
Does Bengaluru lack the time or inclination to protest and seek good governance? Is it because we are an IT and tech city that keeps workers so busy that it induces brain fog for everything else?
One citizen, though, has taken action. Dhivya Kiran, 43, from Richmond Town has served a 50-lakh legal notice to BBMP stating that he has suffered 'physical agony and emotional trauma,' directly because of Bengaluru's potholed and damaged roads. On May 14, his advocate KV Laveen served a legal notice that lists physical and emotional pain directly caused by Bengaluru's roads: jerky stop and go traffic resulting in 'severe neck and back pain,' that had him make four emergency trips to the hospital and orthopaedic doctors. Well done, I say. Finally.
It is not as if Bengaluru doesn't have citizen groups. The list is long. There are organisations like Oorvani which publishes Citizen Matters, a great read for those who want to keep in touch with civic action groups and their activities. I Change Indiranagar, HSR Citizen Forum and other flourishing neighbourhood Resident Welfare Associations (RWAs) mobilise their neighbourhoods. National organisations like Janaagraha began in Bangalore. Some offer channels of intersection between government and society: Bangalore Political Action Group (BPAC), Rise up for Rights, Friends of Lakes and others come to mind. In addition, groups like Namma Bengaluru Foundation, Aravani Art Project, CIVIC Bangalore, Flourishing Bengaluru Collective, and many others also attempt to make governance accountable.
What is interesting though is that many of these efforts are spearheaded by land-owning, home-owning middle-aged folks. Remember when colleges were the hotbed of protests? Well, that doesn't seem to happen in Bengaluru; which leads me to the question: what do Bengaluru's youth care about? What uniquely animates Bengaluru's youth relative to say Delhi, Mumbai, Shanghai or San Francisco?
Sure, all these cities have ambitious, insecure, anxious, eco-conscious, evolved young people. Some even ditch their jobs to volunteer, write poetry, climb mountains, and start companies. The problem though is the immigrant nature of Bengaluru's population. Attend any launch event in Central Bengaluru, and you'll hear Hindi, not Kannada. Upwardly mobile Bengalureans, it seems, are from elsewhere. They throng to Bengaluru, attracted by its cosmopolitan populace, great weather and startup culture. Bengaluru thus has become a city of immigrants, where nobody takes ownership of its issues (save a few patron saints of lost causes). Why would people protest when Bengaluru seems better than where they came from?
The second reason for this lack of activism is what the city does to your psyche. At the end of the day, Bengalureans like many South Indians are not inherently flashy. We keep it down-and-low. Our humble-bragging and hustling is restricted to LinkedIn. This is the problem. Where is the time to protest and join parades when you are happy eating benne dose in CTR or bird-watching in Cubbon Park? The simmering prolonged discontentment that needs to happen in order for collective action to take place simply doesn't exist here because the Bengalurean is inherently live-and-let-live in nature.
But back to the question: what do Bengaluru's youth care about? If I had to pick one, I would say that they yearn for community, perhaps because they move here sans family or friends, to get a job, most often at a startup, where they are surrounded by rootless folks just like them. If you are in your 20s or 30s in Bangalore, you learn quickly to join groups, to speed-date, to attend art, yoga, journaling or hand-pan music workshops, improv theatre classes, and niche clubs for board games, manga, anime and quiz. All that coding during the day must result in a longing for something physical and sexual because dance classes are huge, ranging from pole dancing to salsa to get this— lap dancing. It seems that finally, a city that was defined by tech is learning to embrace the humanities, and here lies my hope.
In order to save the world, you have to read Homer and enjoy Keats. You have to read UR Ananthamurthy and Kuvempu, attend Shivarama Karanth's yakshagana revivals, learn to draw like Hebbar and attend performances under Chowdiah's violin. The humanities humanise us. They make us care. They allow for empathy. If you are sitting in a cubicle, you won't care about the woman wading through water. The great thing about the comeback of the arts into Bengaluru's ecosystem is that it offers hope for a more empathetic society. Cross pollination between the worlds of art and tech may nudge us to collectively demand better governance from our politicians and bureaucrats.
So yes, activism may have been dead in Bengaluru during the go-go years of IT. But thanks to art, theatre and music, it may well make a comeback.
(Shoba Narayan is Bengaluru-based award-winning author. She is also a freelance contributor who writes about art, food, fashion and travel for a number of publications.)