There is an interesting article on the front page of today’s Times of India entitled “Bangalore, Inc. feels it needs HAL Airport”. The article quotes several IT “honchos” (god, how I hate this word) and prominent citizen members of the Bangalore City Connect Foundation (BCCF) as saying that business coming to Bangalore will decline as a result of the new airport. (“In the first year of BIA opening, the industry will see a degrowth of between 5% and 10%” -- Mohandas Pai of Infosys). By the way, is “degrowth” a real word?
Got me thinking as a not-so-prominent non-member of the BCCF. Our water, power and sewage infrastructure is already the envy of the developed world; we breathe the purest air there is on the planet; we have the best public transportation system in the world; our roads are so silken smooth that driving on them gives the impression of flying on the magic carpet; our solid waste disposal system is so classy that city administrators from all around the county come to study it; the civic sense of our denizens is so acute that anyone acting in violation of the law (however rare that might be) is pounced on and punished by the rest of us and should we citizens miss any such transgression, we have nothing to fear because we have the best police force that money can buy ( no, no not in the sense you are thinking!!). Our political system is so transparent that we know exactly who is pocketing how much. And if this was not enough, we have the most welcoming business climate in the universe.
Damn, if only we could keep HAL open. Investment would come flying in (although on the wings of ATR-42s and ATR-72s presumably), our skies will continue to get bluer and our trees greener, if that is even possible and so on and so forth.
But then I thought, if HAL stays open there will be no other cause to champion for our worthies like RK Mishra, Kiran Shaw, Mohandas Pai and others and that surely would be a calamity because these are smart, intelligent billionaires (or at least some of them) and we surely do not want to lose their nation-building fervor.
God, what a tough choice.
