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A bicycle is the cheapest vehicle, occupies very little road space, requires no electrical or chemical power and emits no toxic wastes
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AT YOUR OWN PACE You can ride out in any direction and stop and have picnic — PHOTO: MOHAMMED YOUSUF
Does it make you long for a different world when you hear a thing like, for instance: "Did you know that the Prime Minister of Denmark actually rides a bicycle to work?" If it does, no surprise. A bicycle is the least expensive vehicle to buy, occupies very little road space, requires no electrical or chemical power and emits no toxic wastes.
What's a good argument against bicycles? The most decent argument could be that they make you sweat on your way to work or a social occasion; it is no longer convenient or even safe to ride bicycles with so much traffic on the road, and there are the usual problems in the dark hours.
It moves slowly? That's really funny, given the 20-minute waits at signals and the everyday jams in the city. And if it demands physical labour from the rider, that really should be an argument for bicycles, not against them. Two-wheeler riders cannot have more than usual to complain about hot, cold or wet weather.
So, some civic interest groups, with a focus on the good old bicycles, were saying this week: bring back the bicycle. Not so simple, I think. Most of us know the stories of the hoary days when grandfather rode a bicycle to work until he was superannuated and kept cycling for many years thereafter. Many of us, the Sixties- — and Seventies- — born even, have actually seen our fathers ride a bicycle work. But, to the Eighties-born, that must seem like a fantasy.
If you will allow a personal example, my own parents set up home in Jayanagar 8th Block in 1966. The roads were yet to be asphalted and you could rent bicycles from the neighbourhood shops. It was every kid's dream to own a bicycle — something that seemed like the purchase of a lifetime. It lasted pretty long: we rode to school, to college and for a couple of years before we settled into careers. We knew how to ride "doubles," "scissors," and to tug another along. There were slow-cycle races and some became experts at balancing on a stationary cycle.
In those days, the Seventies and early Eighties, as a friend says, "the 20-km picnic" was possible. "You could ride out in any direction for 20 km and stop and have a picnic. You wouldn't see a soul," he says. And Jayanagar then was about halfway out there. You could see the Vidhana Soudha from the rooftop and Nandi Hills on the horizon to the north, and Savana Durga in the direction of Magadi. We would ride out in groups to the falls at Anekal, Bannerghatta, to Nandi Hills. Nobody thought it was "adventure sports" then.
The cycle stands in schools and colleges have now shrunk to pitiable sheds. Bicycle gangs don't ride out together to movies, restaurants and friends' homes. And new printing technology and hoarding materials have practically destroyed the careers of at least one expert groups of cyclists — eight, 12, even 16 — who would carry the big hoardings to the display site. They made a quite spectacle after the midnight hour, like synchronised swimmers, riding majestically with the massive hoarding balanced on their heads.
Nobody, but the persistent poor, comes to a party, to play, to work on a bicycle. The smart young set cannot believe it when we say we went to rehearsals on a bicycle. "From Jayanagar to Chowdiah Memorial Hall!" Big deal, my father would have said.
We are too fat, too soft, too comfortable to return to all that. It's not going to happen easily, for sure. The civic groups that are bicycle gaga must give us real incentives. The authorities won't buy it, although it is the most rational and responsible solution to seek, if we say we should make the inner city, the area bounded by the inner ring road, free of motorised transport.
Even if we made exceptions for ambulances, fire engines, ministers' convoys, bureaucrat cars and BMTC buses, they won't buy it. They won't even allow us to make one set of roads exclusively for bicycles — M.G. Road/Brigade Road/Museum Road and back. No way.
But we'll ask them for one bicycle plaza, any road, please. We will make it a bicycle hangout, we can eat chat and south Indian fast food and sit on park benches, do open-air fashion shows for bicycle wear, perform street plays, do street music, set up chess boards and make civilised tourists feel at home? We'll say, "Please!" We could plan a Heritage Bicycle Tour" for fit foreigners on Sundays and make the route free of motorised transport.
Only on Sundays. Good tourism, what? We should have rent-a-bicycle outfits where we drop off a bicycle when we are dune biking.
Actor Jagdish Raja says we should give a token to bikers which they can exchange for a bicycle at these outfits and get another token when they return it, at whichever branch.
I'm dreaming.
You can email your feedback to prakash@cfdbangalore.ac.in.
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