Visual Clutter of Mysore

Last week I had been to Bangalore with two friends and both of them were complaining of eye irritation while commuting through the traffic. As for me, I didn't experience it since I wear spectacles (as opined by one of them). Bangalore's traffic is choking the city, no doubt about it, absolutely.

Relatively, Mysore is blessed as there are no highrises and smoke, but as an amateur photographer I get irritated with all kinds of cables (electric, telephone, cable TV, etc) crisscrossing and marring the beauties of many heritage structures in Mysore. In older extensions of the city one can find that, like warp and weft, various cables have knit among themselves posing extreme risks to the neighbourhood. Add to it the modern aesthetic blunders called hoardings.

The emergence of large format digital printing at very low costs has triggered an explosion of mediocre and hideously designed posters and hoardings. Every nook and corner one can find a big hoarding carrying what seems like severed heads of local boys in bottom rows; above these a bigger row of severed heads of politicians and other prominent personalities are depicted. It looks as offerings of severed heads of buffalo and sheep to the Goddess Mariamma.

Town hall is surrounded by heritage structures like Amba Vilas Palace, Chamarajendra Circle (golden canopy circle), Krishnaraja Circle and Clock Tower. For any political rally Town-hall is the most preferred venue and eventually the two circles have to bear the brunt of these rallies in the form of buntings. Inspite of the Mysore City Corporation's rules that these two circles' beauty should not be desecrated by any person or organisation, every now and then one can see that the statues of Chamarajendra Wodeyar and Nalwadi Krishnaraja Wodeyar braving the sea of buntings that surround them.

Such things generously add to the visual clutter which is eating away at the rich and majestic beauty of Mysore.