Subir Roy: The great Indian summer

OFFBEAT

The great Indian summer is here and those who manage the affairs of the air-conditioned city of Bangalore are showing the utmost concern for its residents. It does you no good to live in an artificial atmosphere, cut off from the realities prevailing in the rest of the country. That way you stop feeling Indian and maybe start feeling global. So in the brief three-month period of the year, March to May, when Bangalore gets its only taste of hot weather, the city is being given an authentic taste of India.

There is a problem if the maximum temperature does not go beyond a certain point. So the least you can do, and the city fathers "" bless their souls "" are trying to do just that, is to compensate by cutting off power and water supplies as much as possible. That way the otherwise spoilt people of Bangalore, who really never get to know the searing heat of the subcontinental summer, get to feel the real thing.

Just as I finished keying in the previous line, the power came back. It was gone for only about two hours. Nobody should complain that this is not enough. Chances are, the power will go off again in a couple of hours, then come back and then go again, until it is evening and dark. Then power will come back again, this time for good. Yesterday, the power went off three times, in all for several hours, and that has been the pattern lately.

If Bangalore is trying hard to be Indian with partial success when it comes to power, it is probably outdoing most other parts of the country when it comes to water. The city is not really overflowing with water in the best of times, and this year, as summer has set in, there is absolutely no reason to complain of being pampered. Piped water, which used to come once in two days, is now coming once in three. Plus the volume, when the water comes, is down by at least a third. Citizens can take heart. A leading daily has announced that in some outlying areas piped water is now coming once a week and if the rains take long to come this once-a-week water supply will be extended to the entire city.

Bangalore is doing its bit but I have to admit that the entire country is not falling in line. Delhi, as becomes the national capital, is sticking to the agenda, what with power cuts and dry taps being the order of the day. Mumbai is a culprit but there is still hope that the Tata and Reliance power companies which are buying costly power from elsewhere to ward off power cuts may not be able to keep doing so for much longer. Then Mumbai, which likes to feel different, will join the Indian mainstream.

But there is no hope for two renegades. Kolkata, which used to do so well in the seventies and eighties in terms of power cuts, is in danger of being given up as a lost cause. I hear reports that people there have been assured or warned, whichever way you like it, of impending power shortages, but there is really no sign of that. It is shocking that the RPG power company which used to be so swadeshi earlier, is determined to take the city to its past sahib days when power cuts were unheard of.

The other renegade, the city that seems to be determined to become non-Indian, what with all the new foreign investments coming in, is Chennai. You could earlier be assured of a water shortage there almost any time of the year but now that it virtually gone. All I can say is that in this era of globalisation when some Indian cities are trying to break ranks, Bangalore, which earlier had such a colonial character, is determinedly trying to join the Indian mainstream. It deserves every encouragement in this endeavour.

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