Aishwaryan

They say that there is always a natural poetic justice amidst ecology and its relation to human beings. See what happened to lakes in Bangalore, a city which is devoid of an ocean, a sea or even a river. Always visible to people travelling by train to Delhi-Mumbai, this lake is changing not according to nature’s will but that of the human’s. The lake now looks as if it is wearing a more tailor-made dress but the compound wall clearly has turned the lake from a functional, operational and usable one into something meant and available only for the sight. If the governance could lay its hand upon the fresh air and greenery in relation to this lake, the administration would have immediately taken it into custody, in the name of ‘development’.

May 6, 2011 8:35 pm

Asha

Whenever we look at lakes around Bangalore, we feel ignorant about its history. The people who have spoken about the Jakkur Lake in your website, the flora and fauna around the lake, the chirping of the birds, the way it existed earlier, the new facelift it is acquiring, all these are eye openers for someone like me. If preserving the lake in its current form is one kind of responsibility, to inform about the same to as many as possible and to make them realize its prominence is equally important. A very nice attempt. As far as I know it is difficult to get information about lakes around Bangalore. I am curious to know more about Jakkur lake and its further progress.

ಬೆಂಗಳೂರಿನ ಕೆರೆಗಳ ಸುತ್ತಮುತ್ತಲು ಇರುವ ಕೆರೆಗಳನ್ನು ನಾವು ನೋಡುವಾಗ ಅದಕ್ಕೆ ಇರುವ ಇತಿಹಾಸ ನಮಗೆ ಗೊತ್ತಿರುವುದೇ ಇಲ್ಲ. ನಿಮ್ಮ ವೆಬ್‍ಸೈಟಿನಲ್ಲಿ ಜಕ್ಕೂರು ಕೆರೆಯ ಬಗ್ಗೆ ಮಾತಾಡಿರುವವರು, ಅದರ ಸುತ್ತಲಿನ ಗಿಡಬಳ್ಳಿಗಳು, ಪಕ್ಷಿಯ ಕಲರವ, ಅದು ಮುಂಚೆ ಇದ್ದ ರೀತಿ, ಈಗ ಅದು ಪಡೆದುಕೊಳ್ಳುತ್ತಿರುವ ಹೊಸ ಮುಖ, ಇವೆಲ್ಲವೂ ಕಣ್ಣುತೆರೆಸುವಂತಿದೆ. ನಗರದಲ್ಲಿರುವ ನಮಗೆ ನೀರೇ ಆಧಾರ. ಆದ್ದರಿಂದ ಇನ್ನೂ ಉಳಿದುಕೊಂಡಿರುವ ಜಕ್ಕೂರು ಕೆರೆಯಂತಹವುಗಳು ನಮಗೆ ಚಿನ್ನವಿದ್ದಂತೆ. ಅದನ್ನು ಉಳಿಸುವುದು ಒಂದು ಕೆಲಸವಾದರೆ, ಅದರ ಬಗ್ಗೆ ವಿವರವನ್ನು ಎಲ್ಲರಿಗೂ ತಿಳಿಸಿಹೇಳುವುದು, ತಿಳಿಯುವಂತೆ ಮಾಡುವುದು ತುಂಬಾ ಮುಖ್ಯ. ಒಳ್ಳೆಯ ಪ್ರಯತ್ನ. ನನಗೆ ಗೊತ್ತಿರುವಂತೆ ಇಂತ ಕೆರೆಯನ್ನು ಕುರಿತ ವೆಬ್‍ಸೈಟ್ ಇಲ್ಲವಾಗಿದ್ದು, ಇನ್ನೂ ಹೆಚ್ಚು ಹೆಚ್ಚು ಮೂಡಿಬರುವಂತಾಗಲಿ.

May 12, 2011 5:40 pm

Ravi

Jakkur lake, being quite close to my home, I see it often. People keep saying that it was once a beautiful lake, I never saw it when it was beautiful. Hopefully efforts like these can bring back the memories of the old lake – the beautiful one.

May 13, 2011 6:56 am

Rameshchandra

Every village has a lake or..every lake will have a village. Basically a lake is built as the sign of existence of human presence. lake preserves the underwater resources, keep the environment cool. It also a place for many human activities. It serves as a bridge between nature and human life. Whenever I go to my village first thing I see is the beautiful lake…We can see cultural and social history developed around any lake….. I think it is a good “Idea” to have a web site of lakes……

May 14, 2011 11:16 am

surekha

Thanks for the feedback.
I have been documenting the lake since last three years. The stress is more on deciphering as to how this two hundred years old lake, is metamorphosing from being a natural accessible one into an urban-project. The shift in the lifestyle of people around it from being a farming community using the lake for farming and other profession like pottery and brick-layering, has come a full circle now, after the government acquired their farm-land for the sake of urban and residential developments. It is a site of peculiar internal Diaspora, wherein the change in the form of the lake made the settlement around it undergo an ecological, professional and hence a cultural displacement, while still settled therein. At the same time, there is an altogether different perspective from Bangalore Development Authorities, as to how they are preserving the lake from polluted water and also saving the land from real estate encroachers and also it will be open for public utility. Towards this, new walking pathways, islands for migratory birds and boat-jetty, a separate idol immersion tank (Kalyani) are nearing completion.

I am documenting the changing history of the lake through images, video-interviews, archiving, mapping, photographing and oral-recording of anecdotes of the localites and also the Government authorities like Bangalore Development Authorities and contractors, in relation to the lake. This blog intends to be an interactive one, with an aim to bring in a negotiative appropriation between the artistic preoccupation and the aesthetic application involved around tracking the historicity of this lake.
Looking forward for feedback.

May 15, 2011 5:47 am

ಮಂಸೋರೆ

ನಾಗರೀಕತೆ ಎಂಬುದು ನದಿಯ ದಡಗಳಲ್ಲಿ ಬೆಳೆಯಿತು ಎಂಬುದನ್ನು ಇತಿಹಾಸ ಹೇಳುತ್ತದೆ. ಅದೇ ನೀರಿನ ಹರಿವುಗಳಿಗೆ ಕಟ್ಟೆಯನ್ನು ’ಕಟ್ಟಿ’ ಕೆರೆಗಳನ್ನಾಗಿ ಮಾಡಿ ಹಳ್ಳಿಗಳು ಬೆಳೆದಿರುವುದನ್ನು ನಮ್ಮ ಕಣ್ಣೆದುರಲಿರುವ ’ವಾಸ್ತವ’ ಹೇಳುತ್ತದೆ. ಹಳ್ಳಿಯೊಂದಿಗೆ ’ಬೆಸೆ’ದಿರುವ ’ಈಗಿನ’ ಕೆರೆಗಳು ನೀರಿಲ್ಲದೆ ಸೊರಗಿವೆ. ನಗರದ ಸುತ್ತಮುತ್ತಲು ಇದ್ದಂತಹ ಕೆರೆಯ ದಡದ ಹಳ್ಳಿಗಳು ನಗರಗಳಾಗುವುದರೊಂದಿಗೆ ಕೆರೆಯ ಹೊರ ಹರಿವಿನ ದ್ವಾರಗಳೆಲ್ಲ ಮುಚ್ಚಿ, ಕೆರೆಯ ನೀರನ್ನು ’ಶೇಖರಿಸುವ’ ಮೂಲ ಉದ್ದೇಶವಾದ ವ್ಯವಸಾಯದ ಜಮೀನು ಮಾಲ್ ಗಳು, ಅಪಾರ್ಟ್ಮೆಂಟಗಳಾಗಿ ಪರಿವರ್ತನೆಗೊಂಡ ಮೇಲೆ, ಕೆರೆಯೊಳಗಿನ ನೀರಿಗೆ ’ಕೆಲಸವೇ’ ಇಲ್ಲದಂತಾಗಿ ನಿಂತಲ್ಲೇ ಕೊಳೆಯುತ್ತಿದೆ. ಕೊಳೆತ ನೀರಿಗೆ ತಮ್ಮ ಪಾಲೂ ಇರಲಿ ಎಂಬಂತೆ ನಗರೀಕರು ತಮ್ಮನ್ನು ತ್ಯಜಿಸಿದ ತ್ಯಾಜ್ಯವನ್ನು ಕೆರೆಗೆ ಸೇರಿಸಿರುವುದರಿಂದ, ಕೆರೆಯ ನೀರು ತನ್ನ ಮೂಲ ಅಸ್ತಿತ್ವವನ್ನು ತ್ಯಜಿಸಿ, ಕೆರೆಯಲ್ಲೂ ನೀರಿದೆ, ಕೆರೆಯೊಳಗೆ ಅದು ಅಲಂಕೃತವಾಗಿದೆ ಎಂಬ ಕೃತಕತೆಯ ಪ್ರತಿಮೆಯಾಗಿ ನಗರದ ದೈನಿಂದಿಕ ಜೀವನದ ಆಗು-ಹೋಗುಗಳ ಮೂಕ ಸಾಕ್ಷಿಯಾಗಿದೆ.

History tells us that civilizations developed on the banks of rivers. The overflow of such rivers were contained with dams and converted into local lakes, the lakes gave way to settlements and villages. This is what the ‘facts’ in front of us inform. The current lakes, interwoven with villages have been sterile due to the lack of water within it. The lakes surrounding villages at the urban outskirts were devoid of a free flow into farming lands. The same water was ‘stored’, farming lands were converted into shopping malls and apartments. The water inside the lakes have become defunct and are playing a major role in polluting itself and everything that it settles upon. The civilians are also contributing to this disaster by dumping their waste and sewage to the lakes. Hence lakes are discarding their actual roles, are fast becoming metaphors of artificiality and have become mute spectators of mundane urban chores.- Mansore

May 16, 2011 6:06 pm

Art History

Interesting ongoing visual-cultural blog. Since this is an ongoing, improvisation, more and more interactive, public interactions should come through in the near future. However,it is very important to make it a project specific to Jakkur-lake. And should not be connected to populistic, “save-lake” kind of slogans, because this is an environmental concern with a difference. The difference is wherein the specific-character of this project lies. This is an artistic intervention, so to say, into a environmental concern and not the other way round. The difference between this and general populistic environmentalist-concern should be this: In the latter case, the surrounding is always seen as a physical, profitable, ill-consumed ‘object’ of rectification. However, an artistic intervention means bringing out the abstract, intimate lived-aspects of such lakes, like its memory, nostalgia, oral history and cultivation. Wish there will be more and more dimensions added to this website, mainly through interactions and generous responses.

May 22, 2011 6:23 pm

Suresh Jayaram

“Everything happened too soon”
The map of Bangalore has been drawn and re-drawn over the decades to promote an identity for an evolving city. Each of these political moves has had a social and cultural impact that unfolded diverse visions that located the city in the trajectory of local, national and global agendas. City planners and technocrats etched a social and cultural context in a changing city.
With the advent of public sector companies and institutions during the Nehruvian era, the face of the city changed yet again. The vision of Bangalore as a garden city began to be sacrificed for the development of industry.
Bangalore, once envisioned to balance nature and urban development, was soon wrought with basic planning problems. The influx of a work force from around the country and newfound wealth generated the need for large-scale housing and other infrastructure. Most long-term plans for the city were compromised, leading to chequered development, and illegal occupation of reserved land and filling up of lakes for civic infrastructure became rampant. Lack of respect for heritage, nature and culture became common, and left the city scarred. The Urban Arts Commission, set up to monitor the aesthetics of the growing city, had little authority. The institution was seen as redundant and was axed so that the urban landscape could be thrown open to unscrupulous elements intent on fashioning the city in keeping with the greedy needs of the new elite.
The pressure on civic bodies such as BMP (Bangalore Mahanagara Palike) – now known as BBMP (Bruhat Bangalore Mahanagara Palike) – was enormous. The city was bursting at the seams: it was the scene of endless traffic problems, congestion, water clogging, bad roads and poor civic amenities. The avenue trees soon fell to road widening projects, flyovers and the Metro. The planned green avenues and traffic islands gave way to underpasses and magic boxes.
Krumbiegel’s pioneering foray into the globalisation of nature began to be inexorably damaged by the ambitions of another industry that, metaphorically, flattened the earth. Landscape was replaced by real estate. City aesthetics were sacrificed in the name of development and urbanisation. The city’s cherished label of “Garden City” was soon torn down by mindless an unchecked construction.
Recreating the utopian vision

The information technology boom in Bangalore in the 1990s was definitely the most potent catalyst for changing city-planning norms. The vision of Bangalore as another Singapore and the city gaining fame as the “IT capital” and the “Silicon Valley of India” proved decisive. The unprecedented economic growth of Bangalore created a global identity that in turn led to the birth of Brand Bangalore. This accelerated change was welcomed with open arms by industry and government and fired a new dynamic in city planning while opening up the cosmopolitan cityscape to be peopled by young software professionals and entrepreneurs.
Builders started to make promises about preserving the city’s green cover in their posh gated communities and villas that aped the Bangalore of the past. More and more corporates began to lay lawns on their premises. Golf courses began to increasingly replace farmland. The corporate horticulturist invested in farmland and grew hybrid roses and ornamental plants for the world market, while instant gardens were transplanted, overnight, by landscape architects. The rich flaunted their private gardens; and the last few colonial bungalow-gardens were flaunted as being lovingly preserved by their nostalgic owners. Nature and culture walks became popular, and serious attempts began to be made to debate how best to nurture the city’s environment.
The tag of “City Beautiful” was bestowed on Bangalore for systematically cultivating nature. However, the identity of the Garden City was difficult to retain because the concrete urban sprawl was suffocating the sylvan old city – and the utopian vision had to be constantly recreated by the city to reclaim this loss.
Today, the waves of in-migration and the fear of losing native identity on the part of Kannada fans and sons of the soil have led to the city’s identity being recast in the form of – the innumerable – Kempegowda sculptures that adorn the cityscape. At the same time, the spectacular opening up of cyberspace has also created vistas of a new technological landscape.
This then is the hard reality confronting Bangaloreans, who are looking back in nostalgia at the old Garden City and looking ahead with mixed feelings of apprehension and hope to a high-tech metro.
Envisioning a new legacy

Today, we are witnessing protests by citizens who are anguished about the depleting green cover and diminishing green belt. But environmental laws are continuing to be bent to accommodate these shifts. More and more flyovers are slashing across our skyline in a bid to connect people and their destinations. The Metro is aggressively pushing its way through the city and hasty attempts are on to “paint” the city green. Alas, in the loud chanting of the globalisation mantra, the voices resisting these changes are going unheard.
If we are to save the city, we need to our act together, and we need to do it now. We need a comprehensive development plan that will sustain our environment and heritage and take care of growing needs without damaging the identity of the city. We need to take lessons from history and from the enlightened pioneers and planners who were so selfless and passionate about our city.
It is never too late to strike up a private/public partnership to chalk out our collective future – a safe future in which there will be an inclusive agenda, a well-structured development of the city, a curbing of greed, and a punishment for those whose myopic actions, taken for short-term gain, threaten the city’s long-term well-being. We owe it to the children of Bangalore to leave them an environment in which both natural and architectural heritage are well looked after.
Suresh Jayaram

June 3, 2011 5:21 am

Shankar.sringeri

Well documented.
Worthy, laudable effort.
Keep it UP.
May god give you Health, Wealth and Strength to Pursue …….
Worth emulating..

June 7, 2011 7:06 am

anuradha nalapat

Surekha walks her talk. Her commitment, passion and sincerity towards the projects/causes or her experiences, whatever it is that she undertakes, is evident.

June 8, 2011 9:55 am

P. Radhika

The Jakkur-Lake project very nicely encapsulates a larger process of change in Bangalore. It is very interesting that you locate the intervention at the
urban rural margin-it is as though in the move of Bangalore becoming Greater
Bangalore and assimilating (or is it engulfing?)the rural into the urban,
an ecosystem consisting of Jakkur Lake & its surrounding village
Sampigehalli faces a threat of becoming transformed into an urban phantasma where the only ‘birds’ flying will be from the Jakkur aerodrome.

Interestingly, the project does not romanticise the lake as pristine untouched nature; it talks about the settlement’s dependence on the lake for its everyday life-from its domestic functions to its livelihood-that would have brought in changes in the ecosystem and might have at times been harsh.
However, since the lake is a life-thread for the settlement, it has to looked after. And perhaps the debt manifests itself through the ritual offerings to the Nagappa and the Goddess idols (now broken and fallen) that you have captured.

What the future holds with a model of ‘development’ that emphasises a sanitised idea of ‘beautification’ is to be seen. But the story that the project is trying to tell I hope does not soon become a tale of the past but shapes a way to envision a future…

June 10, 2011 7:16 am

Anjana

When will man ‘realize’ his true self as being an infinitesimal part of this universe, or perhaps universes?? This ‘taking control’ attribute of man only exhibits his ignorance, his arrogance and his naivete, all spelling doom.

June 18, 2011 11:16 am

Aliyeh Rizvi

[...] question of lakes, habitats, livelihoods and survival is one that artist Surekha has been addressing for over three years in her project `Focussing on the Urban Rural Margins [...]
http://aturquoisecloud.wordpress.com/2011/06/16/bar-1-lake-tales/

June 24, 2011 5:58 pm