To continue about Tuesday - simply said, it was badass. Mallesh, who works at ESG, set me up with a friend of his, Raju, who is a rickshaw driver in Bangalore and has worked closely with ESG for a long time. He set Tuesday aside to take me all over the city to various sites of Metro construction. We left pretty early on Tuesday morning - Chaitra, my host sister, also came along to help with me translations. The first place we visited was Baiyapanhalli, which is basically where the Metro will begin. From there we proceeded on to CMH Road (one of the most affected areas of Metro construction), then drove along the length of M.G. Road (which is the commercial hub of the city and attracts most of the tourists and young people in the city - it also has great shopping and is pretty posh). We also went along Magadi Road, which has been the area hardest hit by Metro construction and road widening - hundreds of people have lost businesses and homes to make way for construction. Next we stopped along Vijayanagar Main Road, R.V. Road and Nanda Road. In each place we stopped for 20 minutes or more so that I could get a good look around, take pictures and talk to as many people as possible.
I actually ended up with a lot of great interviews with a wide range of people - Raju and Chaitra were awesome about helping me translate and talk to the non-english speaking part of the population. It was really interesting to hear all of the different perspectives surrounding the Metro. I was actually really surprised at how many people seemed to support it and all of the different reasons they felt the way they did. The most compelling conversations I had were those with shop owners along CMH Road and Magadi Road. So many of them had suffered tremendously because of construction, losing 50-60% of their business and profits (even more in some cases). In most locations, the roads were all torn up and construction materials were all over, it was incredibly noisy and the streets were even more difficult to navigate than they usually are in India. One shop owner told me that business was at the lowest ever and that he was afraid of losing his small sweet shop, but when I asked him how he felt about the Metro he said that overall, he was glad that it was here; "it is necessary for development" He said that things were bad now but that he thought that once construction was over, the road and the are would be better and business would pick back up. This was a sentiment repeated by almost everyone I spoke to who were in similar circumstances as this man -- it seemed like they thought the Metro would bring business and help to improve the area. Several other people said that time was a huge issue and that they expected the Metro to maybe help ease traffic a bit. Other people thought that that was a joke and that by the time the Metro was actually finished, traffic would be 4-5x worse than when construction started so the Metro wouldn't make a difference anyhow.
A lot of the people I spoke with also mentioned the Delhi metro, how efficient and clean it was and how they hoped the Bangalore Metro would be the same. One woman kept going on and on about how the Delhi Metro was clean and hygienic and free of all the usual problems with transportation in India. The physical appearance of the Delhi Metro was mentioned often, as were comparisons to what they hoped the Bangalore Metro would look like. There's actually a prototype of one of the cars set to go on public display sometime in the next few weeks near M.G. Road. It's under cover right now, but I read in the paper that the government is going to build a little photo area around it so people can get their picture taken in front of it. I'm really hoping I'll still be around when they finally get around to this so I can see it for myself - not to mention talk to all the other people who go to see it.
Basically the day was a huge success and I went home finally feeling like I was getting somewhere. It took forever to transcribe all my notes and observations and interviews, but I ended up with like, 12 pages of great stuff and about 100 pictures! The past few days I've mostly just been hanging out at ESG, working on my internship stuff and networking like crazy. I've been emailing everyone I can think of and I have a couple of interviews set up for the weekend and next week. I'm also planning on spending most of Sunday at Lalbagh, the last and most famous garden of Bangalore, which has a Metro station running along its south end and cutting through a corner of it. I'll probably wander around there for a few hours and see who I can talk to about what's been happening there. I'm also planning to go to Majestic, which is easily the busiest area of Bangalore, and the location they're building the central station for the Metro.
I can't believe I've already been here a week - it's gone by so fast! It's weird, but time in general seems to be going much faster here. Everything happens so quickly, I go to sleep barely knowing where the day went! I knew my time here would go fast, but this is ridiculous. I keep alternating between feeling really good about what I've done so far and really really anxious about everything I have left to do. I guess the upside to everything though is that I get to eat a lot of really, really good food. And I've been meeting a lot of people and making new friends and seeing old friends and generally enjoying myself, which I think is a part of research that people don't really do, or at least they don't mention it. I'm trying to balance things but I've found that usually everything gets pretty mixed and jumbled anyways - I end up making friends with the people I'm interviewing and I end up interviewing my friends and the people I meet through them just when we're out having fun. Even the work I'm doing for ESG is interesting - I've gotten to learn about a lot of the environmental movements that have been happening here in India and the different issues surrounding them. I'm so excited to see what the next few weeks have in store!
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