[sustran] Start off on the right foot: Walk and reach out

[Vinay Baindur]

http://www.hindustantimes.com/comment/namitabhandare/to-walk-is-to-reach-out/article1-1263457.aspx

*Start off on the right foot: Walk and reach out*

*Namita Bhandare <http://www.hindustantimes.com/Search/search.aspx?q=Namita
Bhandare>*
September 12, 2014



In the middle of a mall-obsessed, real estate-hungry Singapore, I am
rambling through a rainforest. Located within the Botanic Gardens, this
unexpected jungle is, for the four million people who visit it every year,
a temporary refuge, a place to listen to birdsong and the thoughts humming
through your head; a place so tranquil that you can finally hear life minus
its constant whirr of clicks and pings.

For as long as I can remember, I have walked. Before FitBit’s 10,000
humdrum steps, before the marketing cleverness of ‘walking guided tours’,
before smartphone mapping apps and GPS chip shoes, I walked for hours,
sometimes on new routes, often in familiar loops; sometimes with a friend,
often alone. My walk was my time to converse with myself, sometimes on a
serious note, often to just make mental lists.

The great cities of the world are built for walking. Its citizens
congregating in parks and ambling through streets, its tourists sauntering
by shop displays, its residents striding to work. There’s a discovery — the
second-hand bookstore, the family-run bakery, the tree-shaded shrine, the
moss-covered gargoyle — that is bestowed only to those who walk.

In India, walking tends to be more a necessity than a leisure activity. In
the absence of cheap, reliable public transport or basic facilities like
water on tap, people walk for miles to get to work or school or fetch water
or fuel. Walking for exercise is the gift of privilege; only those who can
afford to eat have calories to burn.

For women, many confined to the narrow routine of daily chores at home,
finding freedom and a measure of privacy in public spaces is especially
challenging. A 2010 survey conducted by United Nations Women and the
International Centre for Research on Women found that 95% women and girls
in Delhi felt vulnerable in public spaces, including parks and public
transport. On a recent trip to Mumbai, loafing on the streets outside
Jehangir Art Gallery, I found I had an unexpected bounce to my gait. Then
it hit me. There were no staring, prying eyes. For someone accustomed to
avoiding eye contact in Delhi, it was exhilarating.

As a heaving, aspirational India expands its cities and towns, space for
walking seems to shrink proportionately. It’s a lesson that is being
learned the hard way as nature brutally reasserts its supremacy in
over-built Uttarakhand and, now, Jammu and Kashmir. It’s hard to find
pavements, let alone public parks where citizens of a modern nation can
pound away their excesses. Yet, a stroll in Lodhi Gardens — easily one of
the world’s great public parks — brings walkers into happy companionship; a
nod here, a namaste there, our thread to a common bond of humanity, as we
withdraw ever inwards into our virtual worlds of Facebook friends and
LinkedIn contacts.

Nobody understood the power of being on foot more than Gandhiji, whose
Dandi March remains the defining symbol of defiance; men and women,
barefoot or in chappals bringing the Empire to its knees. Bhutan’s beloved
Queen Mother Ashi Dorji Wangmo Wangchuck is said to have walked every inch
of her mountainous kingdom, trekking for miles as she reaches out to her
people. It’s a connection that most modern helicopter-touring politicians
would envy but one that’s not that hard to make – if they took to the road.

To walk is to reach out — to nature, to ourselves and to each other. Cities
are not an aggregate of hospitals, roads and skyscrapers. When city
planners incorporate parks, cycle tracks and jogging trails in their
blueprints they tell people: We respect you, we want to give you space.
They create a protective green canopy where people can meet or just be
alone. What is the point of talking of children’s rights, if we deny them
playgrounds? Where is respect for parents, if we don’t have enough parks
for them to walk in? What does women’s rights mean if we deny them that
brief respite of private circumambulation?

Smart cities are smart not just because they are technologically wired.
They’re smart because they let their residents amble through, making
connections with themselves and each other.

*namita.bhandare at gmail.com* <namita.bhandare at gmail.com>

* Twitter:@namitabhandare The views expressed by the author are personal*