Headline July 11, 2017/ ''' BANGALORE !WOW! BEWITCHED '''

''' BANGALORE !WOW! BEWITCHED '''

FOR STUDENTS OF INDIA   :   *Breathing Light*   

Your Eye and even Your Eyes on the World Students Society, most lovingly called, !WOW!  is a matter  of great all round merit.

To the uninitiated,    if you all stop just for a moment     and  care to lookup Vishnu,  on the World Students Society, you will delightfully discover,  that great, Vishnu,  is very much amongst the Founders.

 And in context of that, it is now, his renewed double honour and responsibility   *to prepare the students of India*   for the coming elections, next year. 

 Well, Vishnu, clear on that, are you?   

BANGALORE, YES -ONCE THE ICON of a globalized high tech future : Now it's the thirsty sign of a  Global Catastrophe.

Unconsidered by the world at large, as  Zilli now   tells me :  ''Well, there are but, just two types of  Infrastructures  for mankind's, or even a global industry's very survival''.

Nature in all its mercy and glory,  bestows a  natural infrastructure on you, and then tactically, you go on to make one for your ownself. You overlook and neglect and  fail either, in balancing, modernization and replacement, you set in a final process for your extinction.

*As simple as that*. 

In 2009, it is very much worth a  recap : In 2009, for instance,  Bangalore passed a law demanding that buildings capture and reuse rainwater.

But compliance at very best is still spotty.  Only half of the buildings governed by this law follow it.

Inspectors can be bribed; rules bent the way you want them.

As with the tankers,  this law too has melded into the chaotic, jury-rigged, malformed mechanisms by which  Bangalore deals with its water.

Fending off  climate change is, famously, a problem of collective action; so too is mitigating its damage.

Gowda, now, owns  three tanker trucks, two of them holding 1,850 gallons each and the third nearly  4,000 . Purchasing these required  bank loans  of $10,500  to  $27, 000 apiece.

He pays his own water supplier $3 a lead   -$3.75 in the summer, when the electricity  fails several times a day   -and sells them for $7.50. His staff consists of  five salaried drivers.

Maintaining  the trucks is expensive; these laroge volumes of water,  forever shifting within the their containers, wear down the vehicles quickly, Gowda said. 

The trucks are not easy to maneuver on  Bangalore's narrow, crowded roads, and when the scrape against  BMWs  or  Toyotas piloted by rash young drivers- He has to handle the police and pay for the damage.

The margins aren't extraordinary; an urban researcher at the *Massachusetts Institute Of Technology* found that a Tanker will earn a median profit of $350 to $440 a month. 

Clients call  Gowda round the clock. He showed me. on his  Samsung smartphone, the calls he'd received well past midnight-

From companies looking to replenish their tanks before their employees filled in the next morning.    If a driver wasn't available, Gowda drove the truck himself.

''What do people mean, 'Mafia'?  This is a job full of tension.'' he said. The employees in all these  IT  companies,  they shower every morning. I shower only if I find the time.''

Thayappa too had grumbled to me about the arduous character of his work and about the  high expenses associated with it.

Inevitably, these expenses will rise further still,  as wells sink deeper and deeper into the earth,  biting past loam and clay and into rock.

To drill the first  250 feet, one  bore-well  digger told me, costs only 83 cents, but beyond  1,100 feet, each additional foot costs $6.75. 

The taker barons pass these expenses on to their customers, performing, in a backhanded way, the valuable service of sending signals about the real price of water.

It's possible that when the price finally starts hurt too much, customers will accelerate their   rainwater harvesting, campaign to revive their lakes, and follow rest of Vishwanath's advice.

If so, Bangalore could become a model for water-stressed cities. If not, the entire  World Students Society  could watch it wither.

Gowda invited me to ride alongside his  tanker truck drivers through a morning of water deliveries,  so I returned to  Whitefield a few days later and walked up to  Himalaya Water Supply's office on the roof.

Gowda had managed a shower that morning, I could see. His hair was still wet, and he sat on the floor, with only a pink towel around his waist, poring over the his accounts in an exercise book.

When I arrived, he got dressed, we hopped on his motorcycle, and he drove me down the road to set me up with Majunath.

For the next couple of hours, Majunath and I shuttled back and forth between Himalaya's bore well and Huawei.

Each time we returned to Huawei's backgate, the road leading up to it was a little more crowded    -with dawdling Ubers and the cars and motorcycles of employees, but also with tankers trucks from other water-supply firms.

The tankers came in a range of sizes; the smallest, pulled by a tractor and holding perhaps a few hundred gallons,  looked a jerrycan on wheels next to the  4,000 gallon monsters.

Some of them looked new; most were older and had sprung tiny leaks out of rust holes. They formed a long, patient queue,  their exhausts smoking-

Their water running out in drips on to the road. 

With respectful dedication to the Students, Professors and Teachers of the World. See Ya all on  !WOW!   -the World Students Society and..... Twitter- !E-WOW!   -the Ecosystem 2011:

''' Feel The  Light ''' 

Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless