A Letter to Mr. Brunner of BIAL

Dear Mr. Brunner,

As a Bengaluru niwasi (I know you are Swiss but you might as well start learning about the local culture since your lack of understanding of it is the root cause of all that I am writing to you about), I am troubled by what I see as a blatant attempt at social engineering and behavior modification that you and BIAL are engaged in our fair city. I see a conspiracy afoot that you clearly are a part of (who knows, may be the CIA is in it too) to put is in a straitjacket, limit our ability to think; in short, turn us into robots like most of you westerners. You have made every attempt to diminish our ability to deal with chaos (after all it is this very quality that made us world-class thinkers as one of our favorite sons Rajat Gupta once famously said) and thus prevent our march towards world domination.

Let me explain. I visited BIAL this morning and on this trip I made a mental note of several items that I will present to you as exhibits to buttress my case.

Exhibit A -- The link road between NH7 and the airport: This morning as I started cruising on NH7 past our world-class Hebbal flyover towards BIAL, my mind was alert to any curve that the highway might throw at me – a school bus making a U-turn from the extreme left lane at a traffic signal, animals and humans jaywalking across the high-speed highway, BMTC buses stopping in the middle lane to pick up/drop off passengers, the works. And then I see the highway opening up and bingo, there is this large green sign indicating the exit for the airport. My instincts tell me to ignore it but I gingerly take the exit and I am on this multi-lane interchange and it is clear as far as eyes can see. My senses are dulled, mind no longer alert, I am on autopilot. Soon there are signs everywhere – exit for this, exit for that; and directions to find the parking lots. I find this disconcerting – hmmm, why exactly does Mr. Brunner want to think for me.

Exhibit B – The parking lot: The parking slots are clearly marked and so is the (uni-directional) traffic flow around the lot. I park my car and survey the lot. You say 2000 cars can be parked here. I am thinking, you Swiss simpletons, you can only make space for 2000 cars? Let me and my Bengaluru friends go to work. We can easily turn this into a 4000-car lot. You see we have mastered a technique we call “dynamic allocation of traffic lanes”. We can turn a 2-lane bi-directional road into a multi-lane, multi-directional free for all in seconds when the situation demands, which is usually always. We can turn main thoroughfares into parking lots and vice versa. If we can do this successfully, the parking lot capacity doubling is a piece of cake. Why didn’t you study the Benguluru parking habits at our beloved HAL airport? More importantly, why are you and BIAL denying us the opportunity to exercise our little gray cells?

Exhibit C: The terminal: Admittedly, I only saw the arrivals section but that was enough for me. There are signs for everything, where to line up for taxis, where to get information, where to get food and drinks. Mr. Brunner, what do you take us for – a bunch of idiots? At the old HAL airport, we mastered the art of fishing out our assigned pre-paid cab from a sea of white Maruti Omnis in seconds. We don’t need to be spoon-fed about finding a mere cab. Again, Mr. Brunner why this attempt to dumb down the population of namma Bengaluru? I say to you, as did Reagan to Gorby years ago, “tear down these signs” and liberate our minds.

On a side note, there are demands being made for you to provide toilet facilities for visitors that cannot afford to pay to get into the terminal. Some of us are also nostalgic about our beloved HAL airport. So, I say just provide a long wall in one corner of the parking lot where we Bengaluru males can do our spitting and whatever else we Bengalurians do when we see walls (for some reason Bengaluru women do not seem to have these urges). But in deference to our religious sentiments, please do not paint any religious symbols on the wall for some of us do care about such things.

Exihibit D: The new fangled taxi cabs. I just don’t get it. You say I should stand in a line and when it is my turn at the top of the line, a cab will pull up, the cabbie will load my stuff in the trunk, reset the meter and off we go to my destination. You say we should pay the fare indicated on the meter when I arrive. No, that is not the way we do business in Bengaluru. Here is how it works. I approach an autowalla, ask him where HE wants to go. He looks me over and tries to guess where I might want to go and mentions a place that is far away from there. I do not give up; I offer him incentives to drop me somewhere on the way to his destination while figuring out further connections I could make to get to my destination. You see it is a game (in the west you gave it a name --“Game Theory” and claimed a Nobel prize) that we have been playing it for years and we do not need you to come and colonize our minds.

Exhibit E: This is perhaps the most egregious of the lot. BIAL is charged with being a bad influence on the poor innocent folks at BMTC and BBMP. BMTC has got into this annoying habit of parking at the bus bays that you have provided for them at the airport rather than their preferred method of random parking thus taking the joy out of finding one of their buses. Finally and perhaps most shockingly, BBMP seems to have been swept up by this wave of “internationalism” as well. On my drive back from the airport this afternoon, I actually saw road crews meticulously embed “cats eyes” on the lane markers on NH-7. What next? Enforcement of lane driving by the Bengaluru police? Is there no limit to these transgressions?

Mr. Brunner, I am 58-year old man trying to forestall the onset of dementia by keeping my brain actively engaged. BIAL clearly is hazardous to my mental health and that of many of my fellow citizens. If the trend that BIAL has set catches on, who knows Bengaluru might end up becoming another antiseptically clean Singapore and there was a good reason I chose not to live there when I had an opportunity years ago.

Your Sincerely,