Bangalore: This city has had enough. Of non-performing governments and the all-grabbing, grubby politician.
Of the alphabet soup that has landed this city in a soup – BDA, BWSSB, Bescom, blahblah. And, of course, the BBMP, which, it has emerged, has pledged all the city's ‘jewels’ to borrow ever more sums of money – not to run the city, but to run it down completely?
It’s not surprising, therefore, that a growing number of the city's public-minded thinkers, entrepreneurs and professionals are stepping into a space that they, for long, avoided like the plague.
It started with low-cost airline pioneer Capt. Gopinath in 2008, then the Lok Satta party’s Ashwin Mahesh and Meenakshi Bharath last year. Now, that trend is gathering traction, of new faces, talents, capabilities – all motivated by a calling ‘to do something for the city, give back to society'.
There’s Infosys co-founder and UIDAI chairman Nandan Nilekani, set to contest Lok Sabha polls on a Congress ticket; the latest to jump in is another former Infoscion, V. Balakrishnan, who has joined AAP. And the grapevine is, Capt. Gopinath and former chief secretary A. Ravindra are set to join AAP, too. There are other prominent people waiting to join the party.
Predictably, the old-style politicians are deriding them as ‘elite upstarts’. Poor fellows, they are unnerved, and unable to see the writing on the wall.
