Growing inequality

is one of the first few things that comes to my mind whenever I visit Bangalore and someone asks how I find it. I thought it wasn't so bad in places like Udupi and Mangalore I visited recently. With Bangalore I feel the gap between the rich and the poor is widening with every visit. While there are people who can afford to spend crazy amounts of money and live a very luxurious life, there are people who is finding is harder and harder to keep up with the ever growing costs. Sure it's a competitive world and all that however it's not hard to see how the income/wage disparity is leading to unequal distribution of wealth. This inequality is ever growing as only the rich gets more and more opportunities to grow while the poor struggle to make ends meet. I am not sure where this will lead us. Sigh.

Riding in Bangalore

It's amazing how forgiving people (drivers, riders, pedestrians) are and how accommodating they are, at least most of them. I have a better understanding of why it works - everyone gives you that space to make some reasonable move (it can as well be an unreasonable move sometimes) in order to be on the road and continue moving. I started off thinking that I should do more defensive riding to stay safe. I soon realized that it was not so hard to trust people, rather it was more challenging to be as forgiving as them and to be able to provide the same space to them. I am getting used to stopping frequently and riding very slowly even when I have a fairly long stretch of almost empty road :)