Of squalor and living

The following is the content i sent to 2 newspapers for their letter to the Editor column. It did not get published, but nevertheless was worth the try to air my views.

Sir, As a Post-graduate student, born and brought up in the city of Bangalore, it really saddens me to the plight at which, the supposedly called ‘City of Gardens’ is leaving its inhabitants reeling in a cloud of dust, stink and garbage. Most of which are seen on a daily basis on the way from and to college. I have been seeing a line of mini garbage collection vans filled up clumsily and left unattended, raising a stink on the road just before S.G.I.T & O Centre behind Nimhans in Byrasandra. What’s amazing and appalling at the same time is that even though the whole road reeks of the decomposing material, there are vendors still selling their wares and food items on that stretch, with no other option for survival.

Though we pride ourselves as the ‘City of Start-up’s’, it’s really high time that the citizens as well as authorities buck up and clean up after ourselves, cause let’s face it – we are so used to seeing this daily squalor that we have accepted it as a part and parcel of our daily lives. This has to change, not just for good will, but for our own sakes, because frankly we become the reason for our own existential problems and have to be mature enough to own up to the blame instead of passing the buck on to others.

Meghana Ravichandran

Of worldly woes

A close reading of the article ‘The Upside-Down World’ authored by Edward Galeano led me to question as to how true and near to the truth is the author trying to bring us to of the plight of the oft media pompous big wigs of our current social world setting?

It’s quite bitter to think of how mislead the bigger majority of the world’s population is as we read through the article – “…history makes mistakes: she gets distracted, she falls asleep, she gets lost.” With the whole story of many people being only a collection of stories of the majority in power, it gets one to think how much of this intended ‘surprise’ in change in pace of history is as true and untouched from tailoring of the bourgeois.

Just like that of former American president Bush declaring that “The world is a dangerous place”, the only thought that comes to mind is that the great powers that lead the UN in the front for peace are very clearly by far the most ammunition and heavy weapon wielding of all.

Though this article chronicles that of a world gone to rot, where the bulls get the butter and the rest sit behind shutters, it’s really frightening that what’s told in way of a fantasy is the reality of a haze drawn global condition that threatens a global coup to cause the downfall of the proletariat, who though they know the problem of the moment, can’t change the fate to come.