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Ahmedabad:Streets are where neighbor-hoods of cities meet since
time immemo-rial. On Sundays at CG Road TOI-NGSHappy streets is a
movement to re-estab-lish streets as a destination where civic
lifeflourishes. On Sunday, you too should wi t-ness this
phenomenon.
Urban planners are taking note of thisexperiment on CG Road,
which clearlyhinges on the creative energy of the com-munity to
efficiently generate new usesfor placesthat are otherwise
mundaneand lacklustre.
In the last three visits to HappyStreets, I saw how finally the
use of a streetwas gaining more importance over streetdesign and
capital-intensive construction.This can be a big lesson for
AhmedabadMunicipal Corporation (AMC) town de-velopment officers.
All that Happy Streetsshows is that planners should concentrateon
comfortable spaces forpeople to enjoy and with ita revenue model
neces-sary for maintenance andmanagement can also besuggested, says
DhirenShah, an urban plannerfrom Vadodara, who vis-its Ahmedabad on
week-ends.
A senior AMC officialof the town planning de-partment adds,
HappyStreets provides a cre-ative platform to buildmomentum in a
commu-nity. There is so much local talent thatturns up at such
events. Every Sundaymorning we get a surprise. We are plan-ning to
capitalize on this event and inter-
act with people to know what they envi-sion for the city. A
survey can be c onductedon one su ch Sunday.
Chirag Shah, a senior health officialwith AMC says, Theother
day, we had akiosk at HappyStreets where we haddisplayed,
varioustypes of mosquitoes
those that causemalaria, dengue andchikunguniya. Therewere many
who didnot know which typeof mosquitoes causeswhich disease.
Manypeople also broughtalong children to un-derstand this. The
on-
ly way we can fight malaria and dengue isthrough awareness, and
Happy Streetsprovided us a platform to interact with thepublic.
Carnival at whichneighbourhoods meet
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Ahmedabad
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Jan 18 |6am to 9.30am | CG Road:Stadium Crossroads to
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and the result of lack of knowledge.He further said that as Roys
words car-ry weight with several good people, hethought it
necessary to point out theflaws in her arguments against
Gand-hiji.
Big Brother plan
The central government plans totrack the comings and goings of
its
employees, so much so that it willknow when they have gone to
pee, arehaving an extended lunch or whilingaway time at a nearby
tea stall whenthey should be in office. After decidingto make it
compulsory for all centralgovernment offices to have a
biometricsystem from January 26 for marking at-tendance, the Centre
has decided tokeep track of the physical location ofits employees.
Sources said the gov-ernment is planning to give mobilehandsets
embedded with a GPS sys-
tem to officials to keep tabs ontheir movement. These
handsets will enablethe government to
keep track of offi-cials and knowwhether they areworking or
not.The new mobilephones will be giv-
en to the employees after the bio-metric system for marking
attendanceis implemented, said a source.
Chinese lights go phut
Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar weredecked up for Pravasi Bharatiya
Di-
vas celebrations and Vibrant GujaratSummit earlier this month.
All roadsand highways leading to MahatmaMandir in Gandhinagar were
lit up with
colourful Chi-nese lights.Unfortu-nately,these lightsonce
again
failedtolive
up tothe
claimthat
they lastlonger. Half
the Chinese lights installed on Ellis-bridge, Subhash Bridge,
ChimanbhaiPatel Bridge, Nehru Bridge and evenMahatma Mandir stopped
workingmuch before the two high-profileevents concluded. AMC
workers had toreplace the lights thrice on ChimanbhaiPatel Bridge
leading to Ramnagar. Amajority of them failed to last even 24hours!
Soon, AMC had no option but toreplace the Chinese lights by
localbrands in most places.
Guerrilla tactics atVibrant Summit
After the poster blitz and guerillamarketing tactics for the UP
Ris-
ing campaign during the Pravasi Bha-ratiya Divas, senior Uttar
Pradesh IASofficers and two politicians of thenorthern state were
seen asking Guj-arat officials for a place in the VibrantGujarat
Summit. After failing to make itto the summit, the UP politicians
wereseen calling up journalists and askingthem to interview them
about the sum-mit and how Prime Minister NarendraModi was being
unjust to Uttar Pra-desh!
The statement, Lets be the changewe want to see, is widely
attributed
to Mahatma Gandhi. Not only that, it iscommonly believed that
this is the rea-son why the statement was adopted asthe theme for
the just-concluded Pra-vasi Bharatiya Divas celebrations. Thisyears
event marked 100 years of Ma-hatma Gandhi's return from South
Afri-ca. Now it turns out that the statementwas made not by the
Mahatma but byhis grandson, Arun Gandhi, who mod-ified a Bapu quote
for use in oneof his lectures. And this hasbeen clarified by none
elsebut the grandson himself.Two days before the Prava-si Diwas
celebrations inGandhinagar, ArunGandhi was in Ah-medabad on a visit
toSafai Vidyalaya at Sa-
barmati Ashram. He was surprised athow the quote had become so
popular.I had never imagined it would go thisviral, he said. The
only reference thatone can find to the Be the change...quote are in
the interviews of ArunGandhi conducted by Carmella B'Hahnand Michel
W Potts in early 2000. ArunGandhi had then modified a statementby
the Mahatma. Some city-basedGandhi scholars said that the Ba-pu
statementthatcomesclosestto the re-mark onchange and isalso
verifiable,is: If we couldchange our-selves,thetenden-cies in
theworld would alsochange. As a man
changes his ownnature, so does theattitude of the world change
towardshim.... We need not wait to see whatothers do. A Gandhian,
who did notwanted to be quoted, said that whatBapu wanted to say
was that personaland social transformation go hand-in-hand. But he
did not suggest that thatpersonal transformation is enough.Complete
change also involves a stea-dy awareness that one person,
alone,cant change anything. Unjust author-ity can be overthrown
only by greatnumbers of people working togetherwith discipline and
persistence, theGandhian said.
Attacks on Bapupowered by ignorance
During a talk with students at the In-dian Institute of
Technology, Gand-
hinagar, Rajmohan Gandhi (also a Ma-hatma Gandhi grandson)
describedArundhati Roys book, The Doctor andthe Saint, as full of
serious omissionsand flaws. (The book is on Gandhijiand Babasaheb
Ambedkar.) RajmohanGandhi, a former governor of WestBengal, said
Roys attacks on the Ma-hatma in her book were unreasonable
Guess the right Gandhi
Siddhartha
Arun Gandhi
TIMES CITYSUNDAY TIMES OF INDIA, AHMEDABAD | JANUARY18, 2015
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AND NATURES MAGIC | 4
STATES STUNNING LOCATIONS AND SAFETYRECORD DRAW BOLLYWOOD TO
GUJARAT | 4
Ahmedabad:Natwar Gandhi, 72, is one ofthe most prominent
Indian-Americans inthe public sphere. He was chief financialofficer
(CFO) of the federal district, Wash-ington, DC, for 14 years and is
rememberedas the turnaround man who improved thefinancial health
and credit ratings of thedistrict. Last year, he followed his
heartand left the job to be with his love, PannaNaik, a renowned
Gujarati litterateur, andstart a new innings in literature and
poli-cymaking.
A Distinguished Policy Fellow at Geor-
getown University and consultant withWorld Bank for sustainable
cities, Gandhiwas one of the speakers on Smart Citiesat Vibrant
Gujarat.
By building world-class infrastruc-ture particularly roads and
other meansof transport the Chinese pushed nearlyfour-hundred
million people out of villag-es and into urban areas, and then
employ-ed them primarily in the manufacturingsector. It is now
Indias tur n to emphasizeurbanization through smart cities,
saysGandhi.
He says that today, information super-highways work asmodern
roads,connecting lives.We have to takeadvantage of tech-nology to
designand build new ur-ban centres and retro-fit old cities. We
also have to take into con-sideration basic needs such as
sanitation,public education and social infrastruc-ture, adds
Gandhi.
Panna Naik, 80, says that apart from thedrab figures, Gandhi
writes sonnets inGujarati with equal discipline. Naik is oneof the
best known Gujarati litterateurs onUS soil. She has also taught
Gujarati at aUS varsity over three decades. Her earlierpoetry is
collected in her best known bookVideshini addressing the issues of
the
diaspora.Literature should be reflective of the
environs. What is the point of writing thesame stuff that one
could write sitting in say a town in Gujarat? she asks. Apartfrom
the feelings of an immigrant, she hasreflected on the feelings of a
woman.
I have found that womens issues areuniversal. For an Indian
woman on foreignsoil, the issues they face back home aremultiplied.
On one hand they experiencefreedom outside home and at work,
where-as back home they are expected to play the
same role. EvenAmerican women, atthe core, share simi-lar
experiences asIndian women, she
says.She says technol-
ogy has helped reachthe diaspora in a way not possible
earlier.Her blog has attracted visitors from acrossthe globe,
wherever Gujaratis live. She isnot very hopeful about the future of
Guja-rati as a language among Gujarati kidsabroad. Assimilation is
one of the painfulparts of a melting pot society like Ameri-ca. The
first and second generation keptthe language, and by extension the
culture,alive. But our kids are more mainstreamand only share an
emotional connect withtheir forefathers homeland, she says.
Washingtons accountant and muse
Natwar Gandhi, former CFO of Washington DC,with wife Panna
Nayak
TOIBharat Yagnik & Parth Shastri TNN
Ahmedabad: One is nevertoo young to make his or herown will.
Everybody whohas property or assets shouldmake will at the
earliest,opined experts at a seminaron How to make a will heldin
the city on Saturday.
K H Kaji, a senior lawyerand an expert on the subjectsaid that
there was consider-able confusion even amongeducated persons on why
tomake a will. Every personwho has assets and propertyand a family
should make awill whether young or old. Itis incorrect to believe
that
one should make a will onlywhen he or she is old , Kajitold the
gathering. The semi-nar was organized by Jain In-ternational Trade
Organisa-tion (JITO), Ahmedabadchapter. Make will as earlyas
possible. It is a simple doc-ument that does not requireknowledge
or use of any kindof legal language. By makingawill one can avoid
all kind ofissues related to inheritanceof properties, assets and
un-wanted dispute between thefamily members, said Dhi-resh Shah a
tax advocatedand expert on wills. TNN
Make a will early, say experts
Ahmedabad:January 18 islegendary singer and actor KLSaigals 68th
death anniver-sary. City-based cartoonistTushar Tapodhan has a
relicattached to the superstar.
My father, Narayan Ta-podhan was a movie buffand collected a
film par-aphernalia. In his collectionis a ticket for Saigals
movieKarodpati which released
in 1936, the same year inwhich his first super-hit andmost
famous film Devdaswas released. The New Thea-ters Company had
printedspecial tickets for the occa-sion, in the form of a
fakecurrency note a Rs 1 crore de-
nomination with a caption If you want to become ka-rodpati, come
to KrishnaCinema to meet Saigal. Themovie, also starring Sanyaland
Rajkumari, was a hit,he says.
1936 movie ticket soldKarodpati dream
Tushar Tapodhan with a ticket tothe K L Saigal movie
TIMESNEWSNETWORK
TIMESNEWSNETWORK
Ahmedabad: They came, saw andconquered aptly describes the
aware-ness drive by the Indian Air Force(IAF) at GMDC Ground on
Saturday,as the defenders of the skies en-thralled spectators with
their skillsand display of their weaponry. Theevent, in two parts,
was visited bymore than 10,000 people includingschool children and
aviation enthusi-asts.
While the most applause was re-served for air warriors who
displayedimpeccable timing during a synchro-nized weapons drill,
the Garud Forceswho descended from an Mi-17 helicop-ter for a
slithering operation also got
a resounding response. The static dis-play had aircraft models,
missiles andother equipment used by the IAF, in-cluding
ammunition.
Many visitors participated in ac-tivities such as parasailing
and pow-ered hang-gliding at the venue. Visi-tors also learned of
the IAFs historyand roles it played in major warsfought by Indian
forces.
The primary aim was to make thepublic aware about the multiple
rolesIAF plays and provide information toyouth interested in
donning thewings. We are happy with the re-sponse and hope to
engage in similaractivities in the future, an organizersaid. Many
IAF personnel also visitedthe event with their families.
Adrenaline takes off at IAF showDisplay Of Weaponry, Skills
Enthrall
Amdavadis At GMDC Ground
Pics: TOI
