The Hindu Business Line : Falling prey to `urban regeneration'

Morning walks in May down Linking Road to the LIC Colony and beyond are something this writer will never tire of. Every tree is tipped with flowers and every bird has a song on its beaks.

The bright red flowers of the Gulmohur (Delonix regia) looking out of fresh green leaves, the lemon yellow offerings of the coral wood tree (Adenathera pavonina), the sparkling yellow of the copper pod (peltophorum ferrugineum), the aromatic offerings of the temple tree (Plumeria acutifolia) and many others like the rain tree and the silk cotton tree, prevent brisk strides.

Mostly one tends to wait and stare at the effort of the old trees to brush the skies while squirrels, warblers and the magpie robins do a run around.

The other day, one spent about 15 minutes under a copper pod as two squirrels scrambled up and down chasing each other's tail.

The same morning, near the pond at the Ganesh temple, one watched a little cormorant, a white-breasted kingfisher and a pond heron trawling the waters for food. That day one forgot to mark one's attendance with Lord Ganesh. That was a lucky morning and one wondered at the bird activity amid rushing BEST buses and lorries on the main road.

Back home, sipping coffee, one sat over a slim volume of Chinese poetry, Three Chinese Poets, translated by Vikram Seth.

The Chinese poet Wang Wei writes: "Late in my life I only care for quiet./A million pressing tasks, I let them go./I look at myself; I have no long range plans./To go back to the forest is all I know./ Pine breeze: I ease my belt. Hill moon: I strum/My lute. You ask — but I can say no more/About success or failure than the song/The fisherman sings, which comes to the deep shore." This may not last.

The Greater Mumbai Municipal Corporation has pulled down many trees including my dear, old jamun tree in the middle of Linking Road.

The work of "widening and improvement" as claimed by the Corporation will spread grey cement on green grass and Linking Road will run past Dahisar to fall into the Western Expressway. A traveller in a Tata Indica or a Maruti Gypsy from Bandra can then make it to Dahisar in a swoosh of a second. In the same swoop of a second, Borivili will not be anymore.

In the LIC Colony, a builder has started razing down old villas taped with gardens to put up 30-storey apartments and the current booking price varies between Rs 4,000 and Rs 4,500 per sq. ft. Some 13 years ago, when one booked a flat in Borivili the going rate was Rs 800 per sq.ft. Last week, one read a piece in the Guardian titled "A life worth living."

The Guardian is one newspaper I will always miss reading. One got into the habit early in life perusing, weekly, airmail editions of the newspaper. Its editorial team has always had a heart and head for the human condition.

It is, perhaps, the only paper which dared to place on its Internet edition a running story (with pix) of a crow family (or is it raven?) building a nest to lay eggs just outside its offices. Indian media has no such enabling and soothing virtues.

The finely crafted Guardain piece is on Jane Jacobs, a journalist, who died in Toronto, aged 89.

Till that moment one did not know anything about Jane Jacobs, the author of the book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, published in 1961. The automobile had torn the hearts of US cities and Jane insisted on a correction.

The Guardian writer, with some passion and asperity says: "This might seem simple enough to generations brought up in a bright new world of fashionable, and highly profitable, "urban regeneration", yet things were very different both in the US, Britain and much of the rest of the developing world in the 1950s and 1960s.

"Then, the car was king, queen and all princes. It was assumed that the professional classes would want to move out en masse, by fast new roads, from grimy old city centres. These would remain as machines for working in, and making money, and if they were to remain homes for anyone at all, then it would only be the poor and desperate who would stay on. Historical buildings made way for banal new air-conditioned office-blocks. Whole streets of traditional housing and long settled communities were demolished and uprooted to make way for urban freeways. You had to be mad, or crazily rich, to want to live in a modern city centre."

For many she was a "mere" journalist but are not Indian planners doing what the white man did 50 years ago and now regrets.

The essayist charmingly admits: "Her thinking was based on many years of non-academic architectural and urban study and criticism, but perhaps most importantly by her observations of daily life from the windows of her New York home above a candy store on Hudson Street."

Today, in Borivili ordinary hawkers are banned from entering housing societies.

The fun of haggling over prices of stainless steel utensils, which the hawker used to bring loaded on his head is no more. Kids cannot play gilli-danda or marbles as there is no stretch of mud or sand. But then there are cars, cushions and computers.

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Falling prey to `urban regeneration'

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