mayjoseph, Founder and Artistic Director, Harmattan Theater

Taking the metro is an experience that shapes modern ideas about metropolitan living.  The arrival of “NAMMA METRO” or “our metro” to the city of Bangalore as a lived experience has opened up a pandora’s box of modernities contradictions.  Taking the Bangalore Metro alongside many excited metro travelers, I too was swept by a wave of excitement, a thrill at seeing the city of my youth from angles I never imagined, sudden vistas of neighborhoods I only knew from scurrying along on my bike through windy lanes.  The city unfolds as a low lying picture with the dragon tail of a metro line sweeping through formerly sleepy, quaint neighborhoods with beautiful villas and tastefully designed homes, now replaced by commercial high-rises of nondescript architecture.

The Bangalore Metro has destroyed the city’s most beautiful avenues, slicing through the city like one of Robert Moses’s Molochian axes.  It is a travesty of modernity to see a behemoth rise so cavernous, and heavy set, at the heart of what once was a very walkable core of the city.  Now, the grotesque feet of the elevated metro make the pedestrian fearful, nervous, alienated.  It is also a symbol of enormous pride, of nationalism, of regional success.  Only the pedestrian bemoans the modern monstrosity.  The pedestrian must now reinvent the space of the metro as a habitable terrain- reclaim its dead entrails and transform the interstitial gaps between traffic into a livable experience.  Until then, one mourns and gasps at the site of the Bangalore Metro, winding through the city’s skyline, like a bad 1970’s nightmare of modernity.  There is no where to hide, except under the shadow of the gigantic concrete serpent.