I grew up in pune and had very fond memories of my city as a very cozy and nourishing environment for growing up. City which was famous for its culture and love for art and music and everything that really matters to live the life fully.
I visited Pune couple of years back. When I came to visit pune I had things in my mind like to look for the place where we can settle down. I was not exactly happy to see the way in which Pune is growing. Wealth is growing no doubt but its loosing its coziness it used to have. Traffic is just awful. It’s getting unsafe every single day. I don’t want to go on and tell the pitfalls of the economic growth here. The only thing I wonder is can we have the same coziness we used to have and make it more charming and fresh with some changes to the city and make it more livable for everyone to enjoy their lives and not just become money earning machines.
I think we can.
We just need to put some things together and come out and rebuild our own city. In my last 10 years out of India, I have visited some of the beautiful cities mainly in Europe and America. Both these countries are technologically and wealth wise advanced. Still they haven't lost the charm of their towns Even in the middle of NY city there is well kept central park. If we go to smaller towns the country life is still kept alive. Here are some of my initial thoughts of what we can do to make our city shine on the map.
We have very good talent in our city. So I would like to call all the architects in the city to come together and put their thoughts on paper to give it an out line of what we can do about this.
The theme will be classic modern as we don’t want to go away from the modern lifestyle but also don’t want to trade in our culture. This is not only for architects, but anyone who has creative mind and want to contribute. This will be ongoing project. We will start with one part and develop it and then go to next one and next one. Internet can keep us all connected for the developments.
We can all decide to give at least 1 hour in a week for our city. We can include every one in this process because this is everyone's city. Adults, kids, seniors just everyone.
Sometime back I have a seen video clip of seniors cleaningup parvati hill when they come for morning walk. All the youths were just passing by as if they just don’t care and that bothered me as how selfish every one of us has become. We are just thinking about ourselves but we never think as a community. We used to think as a community just 60 years back, before freedom! But once we got the freedom did we loose the vision of being together?
While growing up, community plays a vital role in shaping our personalities just like our own family. Is this what we want for our future generations? Is this what they should inherit??
We should have more and more greenery in the city. What can we do to plant trees in the city? There is an initiative called Project Green Hands taken by Isha foundation in Tamilnadu to plant trees to cover up most of the deserted area in Tamilnadu. This will help make the air quality better and will reduce most of the ailments as the air we breathe has become toxic because of the pollution and no trees around to breathe our Carbon dioxide which we breathe out. We can get some inspirations from them on how we can make city green. They literally collect seeds create their own nurseries and plant tress and take care of those trees. This is all done by very very dedicated volunteers. They also made a Guinness record. This will reduce the carbon footprint of our city.
I also read about the effort Sakal is taking on waste management, where common people from pune contribute their ideas about how they use waste to create fertilizer for plants. I find it very inspirational and socially responsible act.
Can we also encourage use of Bicycles where ever possible? Nowadays almost everyone can afford car, but isn't it great if we use Bicycles for short distances as it does not pollute the air and not to mention keeps us fit. Honestly pune roads are not built for cars so instead of jamming the traffic and increasing the time to reach home for everyone, isn't it a good idea to use bicycle wherever possible. What can we do about this?
These are just some ideas i thought of. Challenges are too many and we will try to tackle them one by one. I am sure everyone can come up with some bright ideas and ways we can try to achieve this. I know one thing for sure, if we try and work on this, it will give us a satisfaction which no money in the world can buy. Our lifes will become more meaningful.
So get the balls rolling....
