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Bike rentals, a fashion in Paris

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In my schooldays in Coimbatore, Tamilnadu, bicycles were the prime mode of transport for the middle-class. The affluent among my class-mates came to school in own bikes. My parents didn’t get me one till I joined college in New Delhi. By which time (this, in late 50s) bicycling went out of fashion.

With aggressive marketing of Luna, scooty, and other two-wheelers bicycles became a poor man’s vehicle. We, who considered ourselves better-off on the social scale, preferred the rush, long wait and uncertainty of public transport to a bicycle for travelling to work.

Feedback on airport tree-corridor idea

Mrs Janet Yegneswaran of the Tree-for-free trust doesn’t share my enthusiasm for a green corridor to the Bangalore international airport. “Sorry, it’s not possible,” she wrote back, saying she has enough hassles already, of having to deal with the municipal authorities for providing tree guards to her roadside saplings. Planting saplings along airport highway entail large scale maintenance; would require lots of tree-guards (which, incidentally, cost more than saplings). And who takes responsibility for watering the saplings?

Bye bye, Bangalore; saying it with saplings

If everyone who goes abroad the first time – students, IT professionals or baby-sitting NRI parents – were to plant a roadside sapling to mark the occasion, we could have a green corridor all along the way to the airport in three to five years.

Residents' Initiative To Turn The City Green

Tabloids are not just about scandals, glambiz and other trivia. Bangalore Mirror and a local private trust have clubbed up to promote tree planting in their city. Mrs. Janet Yegneswaran, who founded the trust a couple of years back in memory of her husband, has been engaged in encouraging Bangalore residents and neighborhood communities to chip in their bit in her endeavour to make a difference to the city’s green cover.

Cooking Gas From Kitchen Waste

Left over food and vegetable waste discarded in a dump near our apartment complex raise a stink. Apartment residents hold their breath; and curse the municipal waste disposal staff, as they pass by the roadside dump. We could do something about it, if only we are so inclined, thanks to the work

done by Pune-based Appropriate Rural Technology Institute (ARTI) in developing a household biogas plant that feeds on our kitchen waste.

Stir over Sakrama

Agreed. Violators have rights. Right to protest government action, to appeal against penalty for their violations. Several residents associations in Bangalore have moved the court, seeking a stay on the Karnataka Sakrama scheme; which gives house-owners time till Dec.15 to 1) admit violation of municipal laws in their buildings; and 2) seek regularization on payment of penalty.

Widespread stir, public interest litigation, and a wait-and-watch attitude adopted by most house-owners raise a question mark on enforceablity of the scheme in its current form. Out of 2.1 lakh application forms sold in the state no more than 4,100 are reported have been have been filled and submitted to the authorities rill date. Deadline for filing applications expire on December 14.

Such large-scale non-compliance may well force the authorities to 1) extend deadline; and 2) re-work the scheme to make it more widely acceptable.

Manivannan’s here to stay; sorry, Shimoga

As a Mysorean my first thought on learning of the fall of the Yeddyurappa government was, “Manivannan won’t have to move, after all”. His transfer order to Shimoga would have been given effect had Mr Y survived Monday’s assembly session. Mysore municipal/MUDA commissioner Mr Manivannan would have moved to Shimoga, Mr Y’s native place.

But then no one could have guessed that the man sworn in a week earlier as CM would find himself unemployed so soon. I had signed off an earlier post (as a lark) with a wishful sentence – A dramatic turn of events on the day of reckoning may hold an answer to the prayers of public spirited Mysoreans.

Campaign style in Mysore and Kawasaki

Governance

My young friend C K Naveena wonders why candidates need to lavish so much resources on banners and hoardings at election time. “I am sure nobody votes for a person just because they see his cutout and banners in every street corner”, writes Mr Naveena, who edits Mysore Matters, adding, ”political parties need to realize this simple truth”.

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