Sunday, October 30, 2016

How Many Roads are Named after Women?

Recently I was speaking about City Idols with my father's colleague. She asked me a question that got me thinking: How many roads in Bangalore are named after women? 
Very few... is the answer. I can think of a few in Bangalore -- Kasturba Gandhi Road, a road and a park named after Kittur Rani Chennamma, Mother Teresa Road, and... I am already running out of names.

As I searched further, I found this interesting article: Mapping the Sexism of City Street Names. As you can see from the article, Bangalore has 39% of its streets named after women. This is higher compared to many of the other cities.

But when I look at the map, I am not able to find such a large number of streets named after women. I am reaching out to Aruna Sankaranarayanan of Mapbox in Bangalore, to understand how they have arrived at this conclusion.

If any of you know how we can get more information on this, please email me at: cityidols@gmail.com

Sunday, October 2, 2016

Streets Named after Slum Children in Mumbai!

Almost every big city in India has a Mahatma Gandhi Road. It is certainly important to recognise and remember the Mahatma in every way. But it is equally important to recognise the contributions of local heroes... people from the locality who have made useful contributions to their society.
Door Step School worked with the people in the slums of Bombay and did this amazing thing. This two minute video is inspiring and worth a watch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihoEAFkLOY0

This is very motivating. I hope you like it too.
Please do share it widely.