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This 3-part series of posts has been long overdue, but something must be said about the state of Pune’s infrastructure. I intended this to be an article series filled with sarcasm and wry humour, but things are too serious for that kind of stuff.

Quite simply, I have seen this city degrade in front of my very eyes, over the past year. The PMC has probably not even woken up to the fact that Pune is not the quaint, bucolic retirees’ haven that it was ten years ago, that it is now a fast-growing, bustling metropolis with a growing population, growing infrastructure needs and a changing demography. The “town” mentality still persists among administrators. The result is that the city is crumbling at the edges with the sheer strain of supporting the demands of its new residents, with the threat of completely falling apart. I shall examine three aspects of the city’s Infrastructure:

Part 1: Roads and Electricity. (this post)
Part 2: Construction and Urban Planning.
Part 3: Public Transport.

Roads:
Punekars, native and otherwise, will all unanimously agree with me on this one. The roads in Pune, big and small, peripheral and arterial, are in a horrific state. No, you have to see it to believe it. I remember reading an Archer novel once where the protagonist described Germany’s roads, post-World War II. Pune reminds me of that now. There are everyday instances of accidents, some very serious, because of the disgusting quality of roads, and the difficulty in navigating them. Motorcyclists risk damage to their lower backs, cars wear out their suspension and the Pune Municipal Corporation’s own buses, ancient relics already, break down every single day. Road repair is a joke, and it involves either filling mud or rocks into the potholes. That actually makes things far worse. Traffic congestion is another massive problem. All the gains that the Mumbai-Pune Expressway has made are lost with the countless minutes lost navigating traffic in the city.

Road repairs are another thing. The Solapur Road flyover, which every IBMer is all-too-familiar with, is singlehandedly responsible for all the pandemonium in the surrounding area. Any visitor to this area will be shell-shocked by the revolting scenes here. That flyover has been under construction at least a couple of months before I joined IBM (in July 2004), and it is nowhere near completion. There’s also some foolhardy road widening underway, and rampant, uncontrolled encroachment has ensured that only the narrowest of strips is left open for any sort of traffic. It is a nightmare to navigate. I speak of this road because I travel down that stretch everyday – Punekars will give you dozens more examples from across the city, each competing for the epithet of “worst stretch of road”.

Electricity:
For a city which projects manufacturing, IT and education as its pillars of growth, Pune’s electricity situation is shameful. You cannot run any of the three industries with a four-hour power cut every single day. God alone knows how much IBM spends extra every day to generate power to keep all of our systems powered up 24×7. Ditto for manufacturing and education. A city of Pune’s size needs an independent power grid. Growth in the city cannot, simply cannot be held hostage to policies applicable to the rest of the state. The stakes are just too high.

I have rarely seen the kind of construction boom that Pune is seeing – not even on the Ghodbunder road stretch in uptown Thane. Builder groups are probably smacking their lips when they see vast stretches of virgin land in front of them – Pune offers almost unlimited scope for expansion. You can afford to build horizontally (unlike in Mumbai and Thane, where the only direction now is Up). But land is not the only requirement for building a complete city. As Mumbai’s former municipal commissioner S. S. Tinaikar told NDTV shortly after the Mumbai floods – along with buildings, you also need water suppply, electricity, drainage, connecting roads, telephone cabling, and the things we don’t even think of usually – parks, schools, colleges, other open spaces – is the administration even thikning about that? And is there even a development plan for the city? Apparently not, if you look at the kind of expansion that’s taking place in areas like Aundh and Kondhwa. Every single open space is being bought and converted into every single kind of residential facility you can think up of – from low-cost housing to design-your-own-bungalows, from row-houses to twenty-storey behemoths. I’d like figures on how many new schools and junior colleges and public parks were constructed as compared to the number of residential complexes, in the past five years. And then reality will hit home.

Roads are now unable to bear the traffic that’s imposed upon them because of this expansion. NIBM road is very close to where I live. It’s a reasonably “posh” area, with restaurants, bakeries, the traditional “hangout” spots, and giant residential complexes adjoining the road. The road itself, however, has shrunk rather than expanded. People park cars, motorcycles, rickshaws on both sides of the road with impunity. The neighbourhood garbage dump accumulates waste day after day, until comeone from the municipality (or is it the cantonment?) is goaded into coming up and clearing it away. All added up, the road is choking. And NIBM road is representative of dozens of identical neighbourhoods.

Is the village prepared?
Something which isn’t obvious, but is a very serious problem. The areas where Pune is expanding – notably Aundh, Kothrud, Mundhwa and Kondhwa – were essentially villages (not even semi-urban areas) till very recently. And, like a tidal wave, Pune city has simply inundated them. I can see this in Kondhwa, where I live. There are huge buildings everywhere, malls, pool parlours, restaurants, every facet of a “with-it” suburb – but the shop-owner, the rickshaw-driver, the tea-stall owner, the occasional “tapri”, the roadside vegetable vendor – are all villagers – the real natives of Kondhwa – who have still to come to terms with the sudden inroads that the city has made. I can see, every single day, old men (and women) in the area at the local tea-stall, trying to cling on to the lifestyle that they lived for decades, until only two or three years ago. Perhaps I am sounding like a social activist, a la Medha Patkar, maybe? But this kind of thing could well have been avoided with proper planning. But the corporation is asleep at the wheel – or chooses to be asleep.

This is the backbone of every city. Every single major city has a well-entrenched public transport system. A good public transport system eases traffic congestion, reduces air and noise pollution, and moves large masses of people efficiently, regularly and cost-effectively from Home to Workplace and back, regularly. No city has grown beyond a certain point without a mass transport system. Mumbai has BEST and the local train network. Delhi has the DTC, private buses and now the metro. Abroad, Singapore has its MRT – the Mass Rapid Transport system. Pune has nothing. Nothing except for the Pune Municipal Transport Corporation buses. This fleet has run the same set of buses for as long as I can remember. The exact same buses that used to ply the roads of the city when I was a wee five-year-old on my occasional Pune visits, still ply the same roads. Belching smoke, tired twenty-year-old engines struggle to power dented, dusty, rutsy buses with broken seats, windows and panelling, across the city. Sometime this year, the corporation made a feeble, half-hearted effort to bring in a bunch of new buses and announced that it had “upgraded” the fleet. That is a downright lie. The vast, vast majority of buses on the streets are the old rickety ones. And it is a HUGE pain to travel by them. There are long lines for infrequent buses, the bus stops and bus depots are dirty nightmares. Pune needs double the fleet size, first-class buses, a three-fold increase in fares, and a complete route-remap. Pronto. The older this fleet gets, worse becomes the fuel-efficiency, more become the maintenance costs, pollution, driver and staff stress. Unless the PMT becomes something that the whole populace relies on and trusts, there’ll be far more people buying two- and four-wheelers, making traffic problems worse. There is also a thriving 6-seater and 8-seater rickshaw business, almost a parallel public transport system. I don’t know how far this is illegal, but the vehicles themselves are a complete menace.

In conclusion:
When none of the above – Roads, Electricity, Urban Planning, Public Transport – function at even a fraction of the minimum quality and reliability that is expected of a city of this size, how in the world does the administration intend to build it up into the “next Bangalore”? If things persist, forget progressing to compete with Bangalore, Pune might not even be able to be remain what it was a few years ago. Wake up!

(concludes)

Ok – Lotus Notes 7 has finally been released, and – I’m SO glad to be an IBMer – I’ve already got it installed on my ThinkPad! It’s SO thrilling to be able to try out all of the cool features I’ve been reading for so long on Alan Lepofsky’s blog! I’m exploring R7 all I can as I write this – just finished migrating all my local databases to the latest templates. Expect a few R7-related posts in the days to come!

It’s indicative of the kind of excitement surrounding Notes/Domino: everyone’s known of R7’s new features for quite a while now, and is already – within less than a week of the release – looking forward to Hannover! I don’t want to hear “Notes is dead” ONE more time now! ‘Nuff said!

A month ago, I mentioned that I had become a huge fan of IBM’s Lotus Notes, which we use all the time for absolutely everything at IBM. If I could run ssh sessions from within Notes, I’d use it for my development work too! (I’m going to ask some of the Notes design guys here if that’s planned for Hannover!)

Here’s an entry about Lotus’ Formula Language from the redoubtable Alan Lepofsky. This is simply amazing! I’m going to give this a try starting today!

If any of you guys have any doubts whatsoever about why Notes is such a wildly successful product, just go through Alan’s blog. This is a treasure trove of Notes tips, tricks and advice!

Rediff.com has an interesting article about Arvind Thiagarajan, a 25-year-old Indian entrepreneur who, having come up with a revolutionary (I know that word is overused, but really!) technique for lossless data compression, went on to found MatrixView, a company “specializing in providing data compression and optimization solutions” for medical imaging . Two things stand out. One, the technique was so simple and straightforward that the scientific community was astounded to the point of being sceptical. Two, he set up a company whose products fell into a niche area dominated by imaging giants with huge research budgets and with expansive patent portfolios, with a technique whose own patent is still pending. That takes guts.

Most admirable. What isn’t is the reaction of the typical Rediff reader to this news article, instantly dismissing it as a “hoax”. But here’s another angle on this issue.

I wrote two little tales sometime in the past week, as part of a fun event that India Software Labs Pune organized, as part of the Science-Fiction story-writing competition. Now that the event is all over and done with, I thought it might be time for my vast reader population (please, please note that I’m always sarcastic!) to be offered the pleasure of reading these entries.

So here they are. The one that immediately follows, is my favourite (among the two), but the other one (in the previous post) won first prize! Enjoy!

The Brainwave

Gazing out onto the waterlogged area around Nariman Point, Mumbai’s Municipal Commissioner Ramnath Borkar was not a happy man. And nor would you be, dear reader, if you had Borkar’s job. It seemed to him that just about everything around him was falling apart.

You see, Mumbai had been lashed with the most fierce of monsoons. The last time Borkar remembered seeing such fury was ten years ago in 2005, when he was in college. But this was at least twice as bad. Big promises had been made then, innumerable committees had been formed, but the infrastructure remained right the way it was. This year, there were no roads discernible in Mumbai. Your guess as to where the roads actually were under the water, was as good as that of the stranded citizen beside you. It would take months to drain away the water, since over the last ten years, the water table had risen – the city had “sunk” with respect to the sea. So here he was, reliving the monsoon of a decade past. Then he was in college, just another Mumbaikar. Today he was the Municipal Commissioner of Mumbai, its de facto CEO. After the Mumbai Administration Act of 2009, the metropolis had been made a Special Administrative Region, with the BMC having full autonomy – and responsibility – for its functioning. An enviable job, you might think. But uneasy lies the head that wears the crown, and no head in the city was uneasier than that of Ramnath Borkar.

The Opposition in the BMC had savaged the Government over charges of kickbacks over purchases from Indo-British Machinery, or IBM. The BMC had bought machines worth Rs. 1000 crore, a full 10% of its annual budget, as part of the Shanghai Human/Infrastructure Turnaround project, now in its 5th year, with its aim (still!) to turn the city into Shanghai. (That, dear reader, also gave him the most uncoveted title of Chairman of S.H.I.T.) These massive machines, a revolution in mechanical engineering, were capable of moving huge amounts of earth. Projects that took a dozen years could now be completed in a year’s time. The other large purchase, also from IBM, was a bunch of wall-building machines. Together, they were supposed to bring the S.H.I.T. project to a close, finally. Then came the sale of IBM’s heavy machinery unit to a Chinese firm named LenovEarth, and that was all it took for the Opposition to be up in arms against the purchase. “A sell-out to the Chinese!” “The Government knew of the deal all along!” and other such accusations had now put his political future on the line.

And the icing on the cake was the embarrassing bankruptcy of his son-in-law, Ramesh Usgaokar. What had made his daughter choose such a dim-wit was beyond his imagination. A 5-watt bulb was much brighter than he was. Entrepreneur, she had described him. Bah! He couldn’t even spell the word! The fool had grand plans of building a Hovercraft industry. For the teeming fishermen’s community in and around Mumbai. He had set up gargantuan manufacturing plants, arguing that “economy of scale” would make his hovercrafts so cheap, everyone could buy them! “Mera sapna, sabka apna!” was his slogan – even that wasn’t original! Hovercrafts?!?! What was the peanut-brain thinking?! Consequently, then, had come the inevitable failure, and bankruptcy. And he, Ramnath Borkar, was supposed to bail him out.

No, sir, things were not looking up for the Commissioner. Flooded roads. Next-gen building machinery. Hovercrafts. The words circled around him like vultures, spelling doom. Flooded roads. Next-gen building machinery. Hovercrafts. How was he going to get out of this? Flooded roads. Next-gen building machinery. Hovercrafts.

DING!!!

Brainwave! He knew what would save him! Save his Government! Save the city! Oh, and save the damn-fool of a son-in-law too!

All of his problems had fallen together, like pieces of a jigsaw, to form the perfect solution! Sunshine broke onto Borkar’s face! He considered running naked out onto the streets, a la Archimedes, screaming “Eureka!”, so elated was he, but decided hastily against it. He didn’t want a fresh attack from the Opposition about a lunatic Commissioner, especially if they had footage on National Television to prove it.

With alacrity, he convened a meeting of his cabinet. And outlined his plan to them. As they listened to their boss, a dozen sunshines broke onto a dozen faces of a dozen ministers!

Exactly one year later, Ramnath Borkar was a hero. The stuff legends are made of. Every single honour had been conferred upon him, national and international. He was scheduled to visit tens of universities the world over to address courses on Urban Administration. A Chinese delegation had met him only yesterday; they wanted to start a project to make Shanghai into another Mumbai. And today was the day, one year after that historic cabinet meeting, when he was ready to show his master plan for Mumbai to the world. From atop the Commissioner’s official vehicle, Hovercraft One, he began his speech:

“Bhaiyon aur Behenon!

Today we mark the completion of the Venice In Mumbai Project! We have dumped our transportation problems of the past century, into the dust-bin of history, where they belong! With our Hovercrafts, we can now cruise down our Waterways without any worries of traffic jams or delays! Indeed, who needs roads when we have our waterways? Who needs cars when we have hovercrafts?

Indeed, by replacing all of our roads with waterways, and cars with hovercrafts, we have achieved fuel and transportation efficiency other cities can only dream of! We have created Tomorrow’s Venice!

These enormous walls around the city are testimony to our expertise in infrastructure building. These are the edifices which will keep water flooded onto our roads, maintaining our waterways. We must thank IBM/LenovEarth for their EarthMovers and WallBuilders, without which we would never have been able to complete this undertaking in the short time span that we did!”

He looked across at the Opposition. There they were, looking black as thunder, unable to digest the fact that IBM had become the most admired company in India, and that Ramnath Borkar was reponsible for it. Then he glanced at his dim-wit son-in-law, waving a little foolishly to the assembled crowd. He had become rich beyond his wildest dreams, and he hadn’t a clue as to what had made it happen. Perhaps someday, some angel Up There would tell him it was his father-in-law. He concluded,

“Finally, I present before you Ramesh Usgaokar, Entrepreneur of the Year for 2016, whose company has built the hovercrafts that we all use. He has, singlehandedly, given birth to the Hovercraft manufacturing industry in the country!”

Srikanth Dev looked at the vast gathering of people in front of him. It was in this huge hall in the Leela in Mumbai, that the launch of IBM’s most revolutionary product yet, was being held. Perhaps the most revolutionary product ever. And it was he who was going to preside over the occasion. He felt a sense of immense pride mingled with great excitement. After all, it was his magnum opus, the culmination of years and years of hard work, the occasion he had lived the last twelve years for. He was, after all, the lead design architect for the product, the first IBM product that involved the medical community as much as it did the technology community. Doctors, neuroscientists, programmers, designers had all worked side-by-side for the past decade in the most secretive of locations to build this revolution.

Lotus MindNotes.

The first thought-based release of IBM’s Lotus Notes.

He cast his mind back twelve long years, to 2005. Fresh out of college, a year into IBM, he had proposed an idea so revolutionary, even the guys up at Watson Research had laughed and dismissed it. Quantum computers, they said, were more probable than what he was proposing. But he had persevered, worked long hours after his normal day was done, spoken to people from the collaboration software industry, the imaging community, medical scientists who worked on the cutting edge of neurological research, and had come up with an earth-shattering proposal – that Lotus Notes could be installed into peoples’ brains. Thought, he proposed, would be the user interface of the future. And Notes would be the first product that would showcase this. He also showed that it could be done. Not right then, but in ten years’ time surely.

Email, he stated, was at its core a representation of ideas in text. The very idea of thought to text conversion on one end and text to thought on the other, seemed terribly inefficient. Why couldn’t human beings simply transfer thoughts? If we could create a central thought server, we could simply “think out” the email, and “think about” the person(s) to send the email too, and Bang! Instantaneous email. That had led to the creation of the ThoughtDomino team. They had got working models of his “thought server” vision in five years’ time. Srikanth remembered the first time he had been invited to try out a pre-beta version of ThoughtDomino. He had simply thought “Hello World!”, and thought of the neuroscientist in front of him, and almost instantaneously, the doctor had smiled and repeated quietly, “Hello, World!”. The doctor had “received” his message perfectly! That was when he knew that they could Do It!

Next on the agenda was SameThought, the successor to Sametime. Conversations between two or more individuals could simply be carried out by thinking about them. There was no need to type out sentences, and read them from the screen. SameThought was simply a real-time exchange of thoughts. How superbly elegant! With the ThoughtDomino infrastructure in place already, SameThought was a cinch. The team up at India Research had a working prototype in two years’ time.

Then began the final march towards MindNotes. The release date was fixed internally as Christmas Eve, 2015. The plan was to release MindNotes/ThoughtDomino exactly ten years after Srikanth had first proposed the idea. But 2012 had been a horrible year for the team, one that pushed the release date back by two years. It had involved the MindCalendar component. The idea was that a reminder set in the MindCalendar would trigger a “memory popup”, like a thought that suddenly popped up in the user’s mind. The memory popup worked fine, except that it “overwrote” the thoughts that were in the user’s mind at the instant the reminder popped up. That had resulted in chaos for the test subjects, who were left with random gaps in their memory…. the FDA in the U.S. had stalled the development for months on end. Until the John Hopkins team had come up with a “multi-nerve-path” workaround. This was kind of like multithreading in the brain, where the popup and the existing thought process followed two different nerve paths. MindNotes had galloped full steam towards the path to completion ever since!

Today was Christmas Eve, 2017. The day after Srikanth’s 35th birthday. At 35, he was hailed as a genius, a miracle worker, both in the medical and the technology communities. He was etched into history forever! Now he began his introductory address. Every single one of the audience: the Chairman of IBM, the Prime Minister of India, the IBM top brass, the press, the entire crew of MindNotes/ThoughtDomino – had a copy of MindNotes in their brains. For today’s address, therefore, the spoken word would be unnecessary. He took a deep breath, and thought:

“Ladies and Gentlemen….!”

I’ve probably mentioned the online edition of The Economist sometime back. Well, I’ve become a regular reader since, and I strongly recommend it to all of you. Current affairs, Business, Strategy, Technology and even Politics, all on one site. I’d also recommend the Country-specific sections, for instance, the one on India here.

For a start, here’s what I’m reading right now:

Another year, another scandal – the Parmalat aftermath.
Bogus fears send the Chinese packing – CNOOC’s failed bid for Unocal.
Tiger in front – a comparative study of the Indian and Chinese reform paths.
Together at last – a feature on Indo-US relations.

Finally, check out the City-specific sections – for instance, the one on Mumbai.

Dear readers, I was in Bangalore from the afternoon of the 28th to the
morning of the 30th, of July. I’ve done a bit of travelling over this
time, and here are some of my general observations.

Again, photos of the trip are up on my Flickr Page.

Disclaimer – I was in the city less than 48 hours, this is my first trip
here, I do not intend to justify my observations, and they may be tinged
with any or all of my personal preconceived notions and biases. This
will also be peppered with inevitable comparisons between Bangalore, my
hometown of Mumbai, and my workplace Pune. So there. If you’re still
with me, read on!

The Weather: Ah! The first thing you notice about the city is the
wonderful, wonderful weather! Bangalore is, truly, a no-sweat zone!
Fellow Mumbaikars, let us work on a plan to replicate this weather back
home – Let’s make Mumbai like Shanghai or NYC or Casablanca or Timbuktoo
or whatever catches the Government’s fancy, but let’s give it
Bangalore’s weather!

Rickshawallas: Perhaps the only breed of rickshawalls without any
knowledge of the city they ply their rickshaws in. Residency Road? Don’t
know saaar. Taj Hotel? Where is that saaar. Aga Abbas Ali Road? Ulsoor
Road? Blank look. IIM college? From the look on his face, I might as
well have asked him to take me to Dadar TT. And to get to IBM’s Embassy
Golf Links office on the IndiraNagar – Koramangala Ring road, I was
warned not to mention IBM – but if you ask a rickshawalla to take you to
“Dell ka office”, or “Microsoft ka office” or “Sasken ka office”, which
are near the EGL office, you can see their face light up like a happy
sunrise. Similarly, on Airport road, you ask them for “Golden Towers” or
“Golden Enclave”, where IBM has its offices too, and you might have more
success if you asked them in Pushtu. But you say “Intel ke office ke
aage” – and the mention of the word “Intel” brings so much recognition,
it might as well be a native Kannada word. In fact, I get the feeling
they know the road to the office of every single competitor of IBM.

Rickshaw meters: Something which the asinine Goverments of Mumbai and
Pune haven’t been able to do at least for all the years I’ve been
travelling via a rickshaw – the reading on the meter is the actual price
you pay. So the meters start from Rs. 10.00, and increase in increments
of 50p. How simple is that! No mental acrobatics required at the end of
a trip like {reading} x 4 + 2, or {reading} x 6 + 1, or whatever
formula’s in vogue in Pune this season.

A lot of rickshaws in Bangalore now have digital meters – nice red
7-segment LCD displays. They display the rickshaw charge, the distance
travelled, the waiting time! And because they’re LCDs, you can read off
them even in total darkness. In fact, you can even read the LCD display
on the rickshaws two lanes away. Talk about high-tech! Of course, I was
told by one of my acquaintances in Bangalore about how the digital
meters are even easier to tamper with! Indians are easily the most
innovative race, but all of that innovativeness is directed towards
subvertive rather than constructive purposes. Sigh! But digital meters
are a great idea! Talk about high-tech. Now if only they could replace
ordinary rickshawallas with digital ones that actually know directions…

Traffic – Jams v/s Signals: No kidding – Bangalore does have a serious
traffic problem. It took me over 40 minutes to cover the 10.6 kms from
the IndiraNagar-Koramangala ring road to IIM Bangalore on Bannerghatta
road. And this in a rickshaw whose driver was ready to take the shortest
route by plunging his 3-wheeled steed into impossibly narrow but
thankfully empty gullies. (Yes, I confirmed this was indeed the shortest
route). But you spend far too much time at traffic signals. I waited
twice in quick succession at traffic signals where the counter counted
down an agonising 178 seconds from red to green. But that is one crucial
difference between Bangalore and Pune – you are stuck in traffic in both
cities, but in Bangalore that will be more often than not at a signal;
in Pune it’s in a traffic jam.

Roads: Roads in Bangalore are wider on an average than the ones in Pune.
They’re also likely to be cleaner. And they have one feature which we
Mumbaikars have all but forgotten over the past two generations –
footpaths! Remember in old, sepia-tinted photographs of the city’s
roads, you could see two small but distinct lanes at both banks of the
road, where people actually walked? Yes, they were called footpaths.
They are still there, my fellow citizens, but the vada-pav-walla, the
nimbu-paani-walla, the kacchi-dabeli-waala, the CD-waala, the
bhaaji-waala, the municipality’s community kachre-ka-dabba, the
bus-stop, the one-piece plastic sulabh shouchalay, among others, have
taken them over. Bangalore-ians, preserve your footpaths! You’re lucky
to still have them!

Bungalows: Someone I met in Bangalore pointed out a most interesting
observation – the large percentage of single- and two-storeyed bungalows
in the city. Apparently, people down South have not yet gotten used to
the Apartment mentality, so even a middle-class family will vie for a
bungalow before settling for an apartment. Hmm. In Mumbai, no trip out
of the house will be complete without the customary thundering
down/lumbering up multiple flights of stairs, or the ritualistic wait
for the lift to arrive at your floor. Simply walking off the road into
your garden and house will be unnerving for the average Mumbaikar. In
Bangalore, you share a garden wall with your neighbour; in Mumbai, you
share your bedroom wall!

So that, dear readers, is a description of some of the interesting stuff
I’ve observed in Bangalore! I hope I can make it there more often, so I
can refine these opinions a little more!