The Diary Of Charles P. Chinnappa, Bengaluru 2071

  Documenting Bengaluru was much needed for me; I have visited a few times over the years, albeit for a day or two each time. I am never able to explore town and go to areas that have memories or personal meaning attached to them; that being said, I always pay a visit to NTAM at Silk Board junction, or as some would know it, the National Traffic Awareness Memorial. Most tourists come here to laugh at a city brought to its knees during the events of The Great Jam of 2034 or engage in the ‘Can You Walk Faster Than The Average Traffic Speed?’ challenge, which can be successfully attempted by any creature capable of walking. But I come here for a different reason. I come here for the silence. It is eerie, inspiring and disconcertingly loud, like the grave of a great general who led their army to victory but caused many a life to be lost along the way. If you don’t know what this is about, let me enlighten you. The Great Jam of 2034 was and will probably remain the third biggest manmade...

  The tree-lined avenues, glass house, iconic rock and verdant spaces of Bengaluru's botanical gardens are a sight to behold, which is one of the only truthful things the city’s tourist guides will say to you. Except they’re still lying, because you cannot see them up close; well, not anymore. Almost the entire area is closed off and inaccessible to the public (only one of its gates remains open for you and me); one would be lucky to catch a glimpse of the huge silk-cotton trees or the glint from the little hilltop shrine on a particularly clear day. Lalbagh is one of many old parks in this part of the country that were hastily converted into FSR (Food Security Research) facilities once urban areas hit (and in Bengaluru’s case, crossed) their NWB (No-Way-Back) population threshold in a desperate attempt to develop new technologies to keep people fed. Bengaluru reached its highest population figure of thirty-four million inhabitants in 2060; there is a theory amongst those with a wr...

They say the one thing that has never changed about the ML Freshwater Reserve, or as the area’s inhabitants call it, just ‘Tank 7’, is the birds. Plenty of egrets and cormorants fly around the treatment plant that sits right in the middle of the always-moving water every morning and evening, soon after sunrise and just before sunset. This might be the evolutionary quirk of old habits dying hard, as the facility used to be a protected island and green reserve many decades prior. One could take a boat around it back then. As I walked on the unpaved walking path that surrounds its western edge, it was relatively silent and tranquil for a late 21st-cetnury urban area. There are no walkers around at this time of day and besides the quiet hum of the couple hundred windmills floating on the lake surface to power the area’s streetlights and air purifiers, not much can be heard from where I stand. Actually, I meant ‘sit’; I’m on the ground right by the water as I write this sentence. In a few m...

Author’s Note: Ever since we started to settle in groups at fixed locations aeons ago, the concept of the ‘city’ has been the single greatest social, economic, cultural and evolutionary device humanity has ever ‘invented’. To enumerate even a fraction of everything that has come from the unique micro-planet that is the urban space would be an impossible undertaking, of course; the intellectual would call it a centre of thought, the practical would call it a centre of work, the academic would call it a centre of learning, the artist would call it the centre of culture, and the pious would call it a blessing. One would assume then, and rightly so, that the city is an eternal construct; where everything is born, always using itself to go further, make more, think more, evolve. However, this is not always the case. Sometimes, cities stop growing. They lose their ambition, the previously eager and youthful spark in their eyes dulls with weariness, they sit down to ‘take a break’ and never s...