Why I walk

It was a shitty weekend at the end of one of those weeks where, when it rains, it pours: one thing after another went wrong at home, and then my dad fell sick. I was firefighting, mentally exhausted and a little low. And being the socially awkward, emotionally unadjusted person that I am, whenever things go bad, whenever I feel bad, my first impulse is to get up and walk.

There’s something magical about walking. It makes things seem all right. You put one foot in front of the other, and before you realise it you’ve stopped holding on to your thoughts, and your mind wanders off to all sorts of places, and you relax a little. Most of the time, anyway.

That’s what I was doing that night. But a fair distance in, I started getting scared. Whenever I had a conscious moment, I noticed the pavement, and it was bad. Wobbly slabs, missing slabs, broken slabs, and outright gaps on stretches with no streetlights, where, if your eyesight is poor, it’s very easy to step into a ditch and break a leg or two. Near where I live there are long stretches with no fucking pavement at all, so I walk on the road, where my time on earth is one drunk driver, or one idiot on a two-wheeler going the wrong way, away from ending.

I felt like shit. All I wanted was a place to walk, and that was the one thing this shithole of a city couldn’t give me. That night is why this site exists.

I’ve always been a walker

Walking is one of the very few places where I feel at home. I’ve walked when I’ve been happy and I’ve walked when I’ve been sad. It gives you space to be yourself, and it has a spiritual, philosophical side that exposes the limits of the spoken and written word.

I first understood the hold it has on me when I read Henry David Thoreau’s essay Walking. It’s evocative and profoundly beautiful, and it’s etched on my brain. If you haven’t read it, consider yourself prodded.

My earliest memories are of walking. My granny carrying food on her head to the labourers on a farm, and taking me along on her rounds selling flowers in her village. My aunts and sisters carrying huge loads of firewood, and grass for the cows, and me walking back with them from the fields after a hard day’s toil. Well, they were toiling. I was sitting and chilling.

Later there was a phase in my life that was, if I may put it so, volatile. The streets were the only place I could make sense of everything going awry. It was a coping mechanism of the best kind. It still is. It’s the only way I know to process the debris you inevitably accumulate in the act of living.

A nation of walkers

We’re a nation of walkers. No telling of India is complete without Gandhi walking with his stick, or millions of people walking in peaceful protest against our white oppressors. Walking is also the most democratic thing there is. Rich or poor, Brahmin or Shudra, businessman or civil servant, happy or sad, it’s the same for everyone.

And we’re a poor country. Millions of people walk to work every morning to put food on the table. The tragedy of our cities is that the people who work their asses off can’t get there safely. Forget the villages; they have different problems. In our cities, you cannot walk. Think about the sheer absurdity of that.

The people who need it most

Watch a footpath at six in the morning, or at six in the evening, and you’ll see who it really belongs to. Older people. Retired men doing their rounds of the park, women in sarees and sneakers, little knots of friends stopped in the middle of the pavement, arguing about cricket and politics. They chat up strangers as they walk past. For a lot of them, the walk is the social life.

My dad is like this. Every morning, no matter what the rest of his day looks like, he wakes up, goes for a walk, mostly in a park, then hangs out with his friends over coffee. Only then does his day begin.

The old family structures are coming apart and we’re all becoming atomic units. There is a loneliness crisis, and it hits older people far harder than the young. For many of them, walking is the only physical activity they can still do. Take away the footpath and you take away their exercise, their friends, and their reason to step out of the house.

And the road is where they die. Of the Indians over sixty killed on the roads in 2024, 42% were on foot. Among older women it was 57%. (The numbers are here.)

A city hostile to walkers

Bangalore has become hostile to walkers. To go for a walk here is to roll the dice on death, and I mean that literally.

About a hundred pedestrians are killed on India’s roads every day: 36,526 in 2024 by the government’s own count, one in every five road deaths, mostly hit by two-wheelers, then cars, then trucks. Researchers at IIT Delhi think the official figures undercount us, and that the real share is closer to a third. (I pulled these numbers together in How safe is it to walk on India’s roads?)

I’ve heard stories about a mythical creature called the footpath. Like the unicorn and Bigfoot, everyone talks about it, but in the quarter of a century I’ve spent on this planet, I’ve yet to see one.

I often joke that where there’s a gap, there’s an Indian. A footpath here is a place to park your bike, to set up shop, a shortcut for your two-wheeler or, often enough, your car. It’s where your dog takes a shit. It’s where you throw your garbage: rotten vegetables, diapers, the bones from that full plate of tandoori chicken you just demolished. The footpath is just hanging there, not doing anything, right? It’s fine.

Things have degenerated so far that what passes for a pavement in Bangalore is long stretches of empty space strewn with beer bottles, broken glass and garbage, and the pure, unadulterated, naturally occurring fragrance of a hundred people taking a piss at that exact one spot, because the Vastu is just right. Such is the perfect balance of yin and yang there that, according to the ancients, a piss taken on that spot is one of the finest pissing experiences known to man, better than anything you’d get at home, even on one of those Japanese toilets that squirt water up your bum. And where the pavement does exist, it’s so wobbly and uneven that every walk is a test of your orthopaedic abilities, if that’s even a thing.

At the end of the day, salaried or running something of our own, most of us want the same thing: a little calm. For introverts like me, a walk is how we sort through the good and the bad of the day. In a city that takes that away, how do you become a fuller person?

Why I started this

Sheer anger and frustration, mostly.

I live in HSR Layout, and that’s where I walk the most. I can’t walk a fifty-metre stretch without running into missing tiles, gaps between slabs, broken slabs, and garbage of every kind: construction rubble, broken glass, rusted iron rods. Somebody is peeing, or the stench of a thousand earlier pisses comes wafting over. Whole stretches have been taken over by stalls, food trucks and parked bikes, or the footpath just ends, abruptly, and I’m back on the road. It’s irritating. I’m annoyed.

Complaining is the only thing I can do, and this site is my way of complaining. Do I expect anything to change? Absolutely not. I’m Indian, and more importantly, I’m a Bangalorean. I know better than to expect better. In fact, I think expecting change in this country is dangerous. Hope is dangerous, because hope kills you, and what’s left of you is jaded. So I’ve stopped hoping.

My bar is so low that, starting from zero expectations, any surprise feels like progress at the rate I’d expect in a European country. If a single stretch gets fixed, great. I’ll be the first to applaud. Until then, I pay my taxes. I vote. And expecting a pavement to fucking work is still too much to ask.

What I’m asking for

In June 2026, the Supreme Court said that walking on a safe footpath is my fundamental right. Great. Now I can read the judgment on my phone as I walk, step into an open drain, and enjoy my fundamental right all the way down. (What the judgment says, and what it doesn’t.)

I don’t give a shit which party is in power. They’re all the same people. They were skinny when they got elected. Then the eating began, day and night, and the corrupt proceeds, money that could have fixed the footpath you just tripped on, had to go somewhere: a belly in front and an ass behind, dangling and swinging, swallowing so much cloth that they’re single-handedly driving textile inflation. That isn’t diabetes. It’s resistance to doing the job. Meanwhile they inaugurate the same road three times, hang their faces on flex banners over footpaths they never fixed, and travel in convoys so they never have to set foot on one. The only thing in this city that ever gets resurfaced is their bank balance. They are walking shit stains on the conscience of democracy.

And before anyone reaches for a lawyer: this applies to every party and every side, and I haven’t named a single one of you. If you sue me, you’re admitting the description fits. Go right fucking ahead.

Think I’m being unfair? Read up on the IT raids in Bangalore and the cash they keep finding, or on the “legally disclosed” assets of the people we elect. There are good people in the system. But the bench is weak.

But it’s easy to blame the politicians, the bureaucrats and the civil servants. It’s easy to make BBMP jokes. It takes two to tango. We elected them. We keep falling for the same sweet stories, electing the same fucking morons, and expecting things to be different. If that isn’t the definition of insanity, I don’t know what is. And we don’t demand anything, or do anything in our own small, incremental way to make the place better.

Even today, I see people littering on the pavement. People walk out of a hotel and drop the bill and the water bottle on the street. Not a day goes by when I don’t see somebody spitting on the footpath, be it the fresh, artistic splatters of Rajnigandha or plain old unflavoured, very unartistic spit. We let stalls and parked bikes take over our footpaths without raising a voice. We let people ride on them, and we do nothing.

The longer we let this go on, the further the slide goes, and the normalisation of deviance takes over. Yesterday’s shitty behaviour becomes today’s normal, and things spiral from there. Before you know it, Kigali, a city that banned plastic bags years ago and turns out on the last Saturday of every month to clean its own streets, looks like a utopia next to us. Someone on Twitter shared that Succession clip of Logan Roy telling a room full of people they are not serious people. That’s us. By keeping quiet, we’re aiding and abetting all of it.

I’m not a politician, and I’m not rich enough to fix the streets near me. The only thing I can do is bitch and moan, so that’s what I intend to do. I don’t want to keep quiet anymore.

So here’s my bitching and moaning, with receipts. Every broken slab, open drain and dead-end footpath I walk past goes on the record, with a photo, a date and a pin on the map, and it stays there, fixed or not. If you walk in this city too, add yours.

I just want to fucking walk. I want a safe stretch of a few kilometres where I can walk without breaking a leg, losing a couple of teeth, or being stopped by broken glass and needles. Without inhaling the Chanel No. 5 of Indian piss, banging my head into a rusty pole, or walking into somebody’s living room because the footpath runs through it.

That’s all I’m asking for.