What do Bengaluru's youth really care about?

Is activism dead in Bengaluru? I thought about this as I waded through knee-deep water in South Bengaluru. Once again, the rains are upon us, and once again, the city is waterlogged.

- Shoba Narayan

Netizens in other cities are gleeful. Bangalore gets half the rain of Mumbai, and has half the population, said one. Yet it suffers from more flooding than Mumbai, every time it rains. What will it take for this city to wake up and get BBMP to do its job?

Am I living in Varthur or Venice, asked dancer Ramaa Bharadwaj on Facebook? We need gondolas to wade through our streets.

Does Bengaluru lack the time or inclination to protest and seek good governance? Is it because we are an IT and tech city that keeps workers so busy that it induces brain fog for everything else?

One citizen, though, has taken action. Dhivya Kiran, 43, from Richmond Town has served a 50-lakh legal notice to BBMP stating that he has suffered "physical agony and emotional trauma," directly because of Bengaluru's potholed and damaged roads. On May 14, his advocate KV Laveen served a legal notice that lists physical and emotional pain directly caused by Bengaluru's roads: jerky stop and go traffic resulting in "severe neck and back pain," that had him make four emergency trips to the hospital and orthopaedic doctors. Well done, I say. Finally.