thampan - 19 June, 2010 | Bangalore | Media Reports | Citizen activism

Just read this blog entry  on "Indian Liberals and Colour Pictures" by Amit Verma . Among other things, he talks about how colour pictures were used to transform chennai roads.

Excerpt : (Emphasis mine)

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Cherubal works as a coordinator at Chennai City Connect, and holds the view that politicians and bureaucrats, sometimes caricatured as the villains in the piece by dogmatic liberals, are often on our side, and agree with us about the nature of the problems. But giving them abstract ideas about what to do is pointless, for they don’t have the bandwidth to take them further. The only effective approach is two-pronged: One, show them case studies to demonstrate that our solutions have worked elegantly elsewhere; Two, give them a detailed road-map of how to implement the solution.

.............. Cherubal and his team then walked the streets, measured every inch of space available for themselves, and drew up elegant redesigns and colour charts (’red for footpath’) that showed exactly how the street would look when redesigned, how much space was currently being wasted, and the precise actions that could be undertaken to transform that space, right down to costs and so on. The project was approved, and is now underway. What made it happen? “Colour pictures,” said Raj.

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Raj uses the term ‘colour pictures’ as a metaphor and a proxy: what he actually showed these men in power was “a vision for a better future”. He made it compelling and tangible, with no vague head-in-the-clouds talk about grand ideas. These examples are not examples of liberal ideas per se, but this is exactly the approach that classical liberals in India should take: Eschew the grand talk, get down to brass tacks, bring out the colour pictures.

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These ideas were discussed earlier also on Praja. ( using GIS to improve locality was the name of the post i think).

The whole point of tagging this article to Bangalore was to suggest that perhaps this is the way we should take forward the ideas on Praja to the implementation stage.

Show them the future with bright colour pictures.

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