As the billboards fall in Bengaluru, will citizens reclaim the city and its trees?

It was for a billboard advertising “anti-bacterial underwear” that they cut the trees. The 10 trees, along the highway through the city, were hacked down in April this year.

They were not the first to be cut, nor the last.

A month later, down the same road, they axed over two dozen trees for a billboard advertising a realty project, “Sobha Dream Acres”, which on its website presents make-believe images of residents in their advertised property moving about in tree-lined avenues. Who cut the trees for that billboard? Miscreants did it, said one newspaper. Unknown people.

Last year, it was for a billboard carrying an iPhone advertisement. Seventeen trees poisoned, 13 more with branches chopped off, “so that a billboard of an iPhone advertisement is clearly visible”.

One can now see clearly all that the billboards stand for. As for the trees, the words of William Blake come to mind:

“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity… and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself. As a man is, so he sees.”

Before they were felled, the trees stood along the streets of Bangalore, a city that goes by the name of Bengaluru these days. Bengaluru, capital of the state of Karnataka, a city of over twelve million people and the third most populous city in India, where nearly one percent of the nation’s 1.3-billion-large population is packed into 2,196 square kilometres at a density of 5,700 people to a square kilometre. Bangalore, the garden city, now become Bengaluru, city of traffic snarls, burning lakes, glitzy billboards.

The loss of trees is not new. Between 1973 and 2016, according to one study, the area under paved and concreted surfaces in the city increased over tenfold while vegetation or green spaces declined by nearly nine-tenths. With just around 1.5 million trees remaining, Bengaluru has only one tree for every seven people, although there are even fewer – one tree for every thousand people – in densely populated wards such as Shivaji Nagar and Kempapura Agrahara in the heart of the city. The trees are not enough even to sequester the carbon dioxide breathed out by the city’s citizens. In the run up to the 2018 state elections, in April alone, around forty trees were chopped in various parts of the city. Many more may have gone unnoticed, unreported.

The forces that swept away the trees are many: urbanization, suburban sprawl, road widening, paved parking lots, cement-smothered compounds, built infrastructure, and a warped aesthetic that prefers lawns to trees. And billboard advertising, which thrives on spectacle and grabbing attention, which tolerates nothing that curtails the human gaze.

Cutting trees to make billboards visible is not a new trend either. In 2014, in the heart of the city along the road named for Mahatma Gandhi, apostle of non-violence, 15 trees were axed for a better view of a hoarding, a billboard within a walled compound. It was a “ridiculous and mindless” act, driven by “unbridled greed”, reported one newspaper. It left behind “mutilated stumps, standing lifeless sentinels”.

When will it stop? When will it be the turn for the billboards to fall?

When the trees fell, citizens took to the streets in protest. In April, residents of the RR Nagar locality voiced their protest with placards:

Hug Me, 30 years I have been. Help me re-grow. Here silently cleaning your environment… Speak up for me… be my voice.

In May, at Bellandur and Iblur, other residents lamented that the trees that had been cut had been planted four years ago and were twelve feet tall. They protested on the street with placards declaring the values of trees. One held by a child said simply:

You cut a tree, you kill a life
You save a tree, you save a life
You plant a tree, you plant a life.

It was not just that growing trees had been cut. Lives had been planted: deliberate acts of nurture, looking to a future with promise, for a flourishing that was now no more. The anguish came not just from looking back at the loss of what had been, but from a sense of longing for what they could have become, for the lives never lived. It stemmed from a vision in which street trees are integral to life in the city of the future.

Gardeners are good at the business of waiting, they are in tune with the rhythms of the earth, which are slow. There is no anxiety in this kind of waiting, only anticipation.
~ Anuradha Roy, ‘All the Lives We Never Lived’

In response to the tree cutting, small groups of concerned citizens do what they can. They attempt to revive the hacked trees with the help of conservationists, tree doctors. They coat the stumps with a traditional concoction of coconut oil, Indian wormwood extract, and bees wax to prevent wood rot. They make collars around the roots to add a reviving panchagavya mixture to the soil. They wait and watch for the tree to sprout again.

And they fight. This year, when trees were cut for billboards, citizens lodged complaints with the authorities to pull the billboards down and take action against the advertising agencies. For the trees should not have been cut at all. The anti-corruption ombudsman of the state, the Karnataka Lokayukta, had declared in 2017:

“No one will cause any damage to trees or any branches of trees. It is the duty of the forest wing of BBMP [Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike or the Greater Bengaluru City Corporation] as well as BMTF [Bengaluru Metropolitan Task Force] to take legal action with the assistance of jurisdictional police. If any ad agency or representative of such agencies cause any damage to the trees, BBMP is required to remove the hoardings [billboards] and cancel the permission/licence granted to such agencies.”

The Lokayukta’s order clearly placing tree protection within the mandate of the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike and Bengaluru Metropolitan Task Force was welcomed by the city’s tree conservationists. Yet, there is a long way to go. The Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike presents on its website, under citizen services, only how to apply for and carry out tree cutting, not how to source seedlings of appropriate species from nurseries, how to nurture and protect planted trees, or how to raise and pursue complaints when they are illegally felled. The Bengaluru Metropolitan Task Force’s online complaints portal, meant to register complaints for any destruction of government property, lists only “Property/Building/Site” – there is no mention of “Tree[s]”.

Even when citizens do complain and the billboards are brought down, they mysteriously rise up again a few days later.

Billboard avenue

In June, I travel from the mountains of the Western Ghats to Bengaluru, with Divya Mudappa, my partner, arriving at Bengaluru’s international airport one afternoon. Among other things, we have come to work with Nirupa Rao, an artist and botanical illustrator based in Bengaluru, on a book about some remarkable trees of the Western Ghats – a book that we had dreamed up years ago but which had taken shape only over the last two years. Trees on our minds, we pass through the automated glass doors at the arrival exit that leaves me wondering how one can arrive and exit at once. Shouldn’t the door be labeled “EXIT” on the outside for those going into the airport and “ENTRANCE” on the inside for those arriving? The swanky airport holds many charms, no doubt, but it is just a building, an air-portal, ultimately it is this city, this place, we come to or leave.

At the airport curbside, a few trees give us pause. They are fig trees, a few metres tall, planted and growing in small, constrained spaces in the sweeping expanse of tiled floor under the airport’s high, curving, metallic roof. There’s a pair of Ficus benjamina or weeping fig with small shining leaves modestly hidden under a patina of dust. Three other trees, identified later by Sartaj Ghuman, another artist friend working on the book with us, are Ficus lyrata or fiddle-leaf fig whose leaves are shaped like lyres or the bouts of violins.

We leave the fig trees to their weeping and silent music and take a taxi from the airport, watch the airport’s gardens rush past. Lush lawns, colourful ornamentals, the airport’s retinue of tamed trees and palms transplanted by mechanical crane. Plants from as many countries, perhaps – befitting such an airport – as the airplanes arrive from. And yet, the native plants and trees of this destination, this landscape, this place, are scarce. The gardeners must have grubbed out any wild vegetation with their mechanical arms.

Along the highway leading out of the airport, exotic palm trees and bougainvillea bushes with pink and white flowers are packed tightly into the median. Further south, into the city, the median peters out into strips of straggly, dust-encrusted ornamental plants along and under mile upon mile of overhead roads, above which the airplanes fly into and out of the international airport or nearby airfields. Roads above roads, flyovers above flyovers. Against the highway’s flanks, billboards blaze by day and night, angled to catch every arriving, passing, or departing eye – some flaunt government schemes with portraits of the Great Leader, others advertise homes and phones and the chattels of city life, wants and dreams and personal status. One billboard even advertises a block of apartments as a rainforest. And no trees block the view.

A clutch of monsoon clouds hangs in the rain-washed sky blue as a bird’s eye. The taxi driver is playing a Hindi film song on an FM channel on the car stereo. Soon, the song ends, a string of advertisements begins. The driver pushes the buttons, changing channels. Advertisements. More advertisements. He leaves it playing on a channel where the endless banality of chatter and advertisements is punctuated by music in constrained chunks. For some reason to do with traffic, the driver takes a short detour off the highway through Doddajala, “big lake”, a village being devoured by the city’s conurbation speeding north along the airport highway. It is pleasing to travel by a smaller road, with views – and time for views – of the landscape, even as we move faster than the vehicles creeping through highway traffic. Amid tessellated fields, houses and shops crowding the road stand neem, Eucalyptus, tamarind, jamun, and Ficus trees – over a wayside temple looms a great banyan, rooted in its place. Passing Doddajala, and back on the highway, Chikkajala, I see no lake big or small – I must have missed them or they have withered like the lakes around the airport or been built over like other lakes in the city.

It strikes me that this landscape would have looked very different in the past, a past that would have had no billboards, certainly, but also fewer buildings and even fewer trees.

From open countryside to tree-lined streets

When Bengaluru was founded in 1537 CE by Kempe Gowda of the Yelahanka Nada Prabhu dynasty, it was already in a landscape peopled for millennia. The city lay at the interface of the hilly malnad landscape to the south and west and the gentler, meadowed maidan terrain to the north and east. As Harini Nagendra notes in her book on the ecological history of Bengaluru, Nature in the City:

“The landscape was shaped by its topography, with agricultural settlements irrigated by wells and lakes in the undulating terrain to the north and east, and pastoral communities in the dense scrub and jungle of the south and west.”

Kempe Gowda expanded the city, creating the Kempambudhi and Dharmambudhi lakes, reinforcing the city’s fort and surrounding pete or markets with a mud wall and moat, bolstered by a ring of thorny shikakai climbers. Over the next two centuries, the city continued to be transformed through the reigns of the Bijapur Sultanate, Hyder Ali, and his son Tipu Sultan, and the establishment of the British colonial administration at the end of the 18th century. As the city grew in population and expanded, slowly swallowing the surrounding villages, the string of rulers and administrators developed new lakes and markets and gardens and roads. Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan’s “Cypress Gardens” established in the 18th century remain as the Lalbagh Botanical Gardens in the city today.

Yet, in the 18th century, Bengaluru city was mostly treeless, embedded in a countryside that was open.

Bengaluru’s reputation as a garden city was not passively gained, it was actively cultivated: all sorts of people – from citizens to satraps – planted trees, nurtured gardens, and protected them to form the city’s tree cover and greenery. As Harini Nagendra notes in her book, multiple influences and aesthetics dictated the transition from open countryside to a city with tree-lined streets, parks, bungalow gardens, and lakes. The English colonial influence, certainly, but also those of earlier rulers, all built upon the abiding, deep, and old relationships that India’s peoples have always had with trees, viewing nature as a source of livelihood, as alive and sacred, at once.

Across Bengaluru, in groves and gardens tended with care to vacant lots running wild, from slums to sacred spaces thronging with people, trees stand testimony to those relationships. To the city’s northeast, in the Nallur grove, great gnarled, aged tamarinds, two to over four centuries old, sprawl their branches amidst the ruins of an old fort. Near temples, alongside railway tracks and stations, and along congested and otherwise treeless city roads, there still stand massive banyan and peepal trees rising from kattes – platforms that serve as places for meetings, markets, shrines, or simply for resting in the shade, present in almost every town and village in the Karnataka countryside.

The neem and champak and jack will continue to reside in the city in the names of places – Margosa Road, Sampige Road, and Halasur (Ulsoor) – whether the trees remain in these places or disappear with more buildings, widened roads or billboards. In their sample survey across 328 home gardens in the city, Harini Nagendra’s research team found people nurturing 91 tree species, from petite henna and spindly coconut to sprawling mango and jack that gave of their shade and sweetness through the summer. In the city’s crowded slums, where each family has just a few square metres of floor space to itself, people still made space for trees around their homes and in common areas where children played, people washed clothes and dishes or socialised with each other, and vendors set up stalls to sell tea and snacks, or flowers.

In the last decades of the 20th century, as the city mushroomed, trees were planted by government authorities, too, chiefly the Forest Department or the Forest Cell of the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike. One forest officer, SG Neginhal, is credited with spearheading the planting of 1.5 million trees in Bengaluru in the 1980s, in areas like Indiranagar and Koramangala that are now expensive residential and commercial spaces embedded in the city. The Karnataka Preservation of Trees Act, enacted in 1976 and amended in subsequent years, created a framework for regulating the planting and felling of trees overseen by the appointed “Tree Officers”. Along sidewalks and parks, around government buildings and lakes, sprung up numerous trees that grace the city even today, both native species such as mango and neem and jamun, and exotic ones such as the Madagascan gulmohur, African tulip, Australian silver oak and Acacia wattles, and the Tabebuia, jacaranda, and mahogany of tropical America.

The trees waft coolness over surroundings baking in urban heat. In the afternoon, ambient temperatures in tree shade are a good five degrees Celsius cooler than over shadeless road, and 20 degrees Celsius cooler than the blistering tarmac. The value of shade itself is inestimable for people on foot or on two-wheelers, street vendors and residents. The trees trap dust and freshen the air. They shelter birds and squirrels and monkeys and butterflies and bats, and provide fruits and flowers and firewood and fodder. They bring an uplifting aesthetic amidst glass and metal and tar and concrete. Rooted in place, they share their goodness as the world passes by.

Bengaluru once occupied a landscape with few trees. But without its trees, the city would be unimaginable today, and unliveable in the years ahead. The trees that remain stand, yet, as contingent markers of place, aesthetics, utility, and history.

Books, coffee and trees

Our book is nearly done. We had settled on the title, Pillars of Life, taken from an essay Divya had written years ago, when the book was still a seed of an idea in her mind. We tack on a subtitle, Magnificent Trees of the Western Ghats. The rest of the text is ready, the beautiful artwork – painstaking botanical illustrations by Nirupa and evocative sketches by Sartaj – has been digitally scanned and corrected for colours. An attractive layout has been chosen. Only the page for the dedication is blank, but Divya comes up with one that we instantly know is apt:

“To the trees – the original landscape historians.”

In Bengaluru, street trees tell their own history of the city. Between our friend’s home in Judicial Layout, where we are staying, and Canara Bank Layout near Sahakara Nagar, where our organisation, the Nature Conservation Foundation, has its small office, the landscape around the University of Agricultural Sciences is a transformed one. From open and thinly populated a few decades ago, it is now a crowded suburb burgeoning with homes and apartments and shops, new ones cropping up every month. Along the roads, the trees that grow – pongam and mahogany, beach almond and kadam – are thick as a thigh to stout as a waist with canopies reaching only a few metres, dwarfed by the apartment buildings.

In older parts of Bengaluru, as in Malleswaram, Indira Nagar, Sanjay Nagar and Halasur, and along wider roads, stand commensurately older trees: especially, rain trees of giant girth splaying their stout limbs over the roads, filtering out sunlight by day, letting in what starlight and moonlight they can through their folded leaves by night, obscuring even the multi-storey buildings that huddle along the roads.

One afternoon, I head downtown to MG Road and Church Street, in search of books, coffee, and trees. Named after Mahatma Gandhi, MG Road had few trees even in the past and is now a throbbing highway of concrete, tarmac, and traffic with overhead metro to boot. The few trees one can see are hidden on the northern side behind the metro, constrained within the bounds of the Cariappa Memorial Park.

At Church Street, I pause to consider my urban priorities: books first, coffee, or trees? Coffee, of course, at the Indian Coffee House, then trees, then books, then coffee again with books-in-hand. Easy.

The Indian Coffee House and Gangaram’s bookstore were old haunts of mine when they stood on MG Road, until both were forced to shut shop and move. Fortunately, the transplanted café and bookstore still survive in Church Street. The café retains its modest streetside ambiance, white-caparisoned waiters, and eclectic snacks. In price and flavour, its distinctive coffee, made from a strong decoction and served in plain white cups and saucers, beats the brews concocted in the swank café-turned-lounges with plush seats down the road. The Indian Coffee House’s existence remains tenuous, though, as its takeover by other café chains seems imminent. The Gangaram’s bookstore, too, survives with others down the same street: Bookworm, Blossom, and Goobe’s. I say survives, because two other famous Bengaluru bookstores that used to be nearby, the venerable Premier Book Shop and the Strand Book Stall, have already shut shop – their spaces swallowed by other commercial imperatives. Not transplanted. Axed, like the trees on MG Road in 2014 that stood in the view line of a billboard.

With crisp new books – Anuradha Roy’s All the Lives We Never Lived and Richard Mabey’s The Cabaret of Plants: Forty Thousand Years of Plant Life and the Human Imagination – purchased from the bookstores in my backpack, I step out back onto Church Street. I didn’t expect to find many trees as the road stretches within what is perhaps the most expensive and built-up area in Bengaluru’s central business district. Pleasantly enough, a few trees still grace the street.

Opposite Blossom Book House in the compound of Falnir House – an old building standing like a marker of vanished time – stood large mango and jack trees. Along the street, a few trees spilled out of compounds and small spaces by the sidewalk: Araucaria, tamarind, peepal, and monkeypod. I stand under their branches in a light breeze for a while. The soft susurrus of tamarind leaves and the gentle patter of quaking peepal leaves against each other are barely audible in the noise of passing vehicles and the chugging of an electric generator at a construction site nearby. Further down, a cluster fig slants from the sidewalk near Coco Grove hotel and someone has parked a bicycle beside it. Opposite the Highgates Hotel stand peepal, false ashoka, camel’s foot, and rain tree, in which a pair of common mynas chuckle and a lone rose-ringed parakeet screeches. Further down, near Koshy’s, looms a large mahogany, holding brown pods like arboreal eggs packed with seeds waiting with wings.

“You don’t have to stare at every single tree, you know?” Divya chides me as we drive back to Judicial Layout after she and a friend pick me up from Church Street as evening falls over the city.

I smile. I was obsessing over every tree. Teak trees covered in a creamy fuzz of inflorescences; Indian cork trees putting out bunches of white pendant blooms; the African tulip holding aloft clusters of large, crimson flowers. Trees with brush-strokes of colour in their leaves: the yellowing leaves of pongam and jack, the moon flash below silver oak leaves in the wind, the senescent leaves of beach almond in scarlet and burnt umber falling, returning to the earth. And the roadside Markhamia whose branches held long, twisted, hanging pods and sprigs of yellow flowers like little trumpets playing a music now drowned by traffic noise; the Tabebuia flowers bunched in soft pink against dark green leaves, forming a contrasting backdrop to the metallic colours of the vehicles strung along the highway; the wayward fig trees stretching their trunks and limbs out over the road through gaps left considerately in compound walls; the fruit-laden Jamaican cherry trees that flicker with flowerpeckers by day, bustle with bats by night. And every standing, swaying, sighing neem and mango and whatnot. I really did not need to stare at every tree.

Yet, what if the next time I came to the city that tree was not there?

People for trees

The city is changing. Fast. Harini Nagendra writes:

“In the twenty-first century, the city has entered a technologically driven era where topography is subservient to real estate. Across the city, marshy wetlands are filled and granite hillocks are razed to the ground for construction... The clearing of trees and desiccation of lakes has impacted the microclimate of the city, leading to urban heat islands that trap heat and exacerbate pollution. Bengaluru’s survival and resilience in the decades to come will depend on the future of nature in diverse spaces of the city.”

In a 2010 research paper, with tree cutting rampant and the multitude of benefits that trees bring to the city being whittled away, Nagendra and her co-worker Divya Gopal sounded a warning:

“Narrow roads, usually in congested residential neighbourhoods, have fewer trees, smaller sized tree species, and a lower species diversity compared to wide roads. Since wide roads are being felled of trees across the city for road widening, this implies that Bangalore’s street tree population is being selectively denuded of its largest trees. Older trees have a more diverse distribution with several large sized species, while young trees come from a less diverse species set, largely dominated by small statured species with narrow canopies, which have a lower capacity to absorb atmospheric pollutants, mitigate urban heat island effects, stabilise soil, prevent groundwater runoff, and sequester carbon. This has serious implications for the city’s environmental and ecological health.”

Although the city boasts of 1,200 neighbourhood parks today, they occupy less than 0.1% of the city’s area, and many are gated with restricted access, depriving sections of the community that need them most. Of the wooded groves and urban commons, the gunda thopes, that were once scattered about the city, most have disappeared, too. It is only along roads that many people have daily, public access to trees, but tree cutting is not sparing them either.

Bengaluru’s citizens are not taking all this sitting down. Groups organise and lead campaigns to protect trees. They hold festivals to celebrate trees. They try to map trees in the city. And they protest. In 2016, over 10,000 citizens took to the streets to oppose a state government project to build a six-lane, 6.72-km-long, steel flyover in the city at a cost of around Rs 1,800 crore. The project, touted as one that would improve connectivity to the airport, would have entailed the cutting of 812 trees, according to the proposal, although a field survey by citizens showed 2,244 trees would face the chainsaw. Facing sustained protests by thousands of citizens on the streets, an online petition signed by 35,000 people, over 100,000 missed calls made to a designated number, written petitions to bureaucrats and administrators, and a string of critical media reports, the government scrapped the project in 2017.

Bengaluru is not alone. In June, more than 1,500 people in the nation’s capital, New Delhi, poured into the streets to protest a planned cutting of over 14,000 trees for a housing redevelopment project. Pradip Krishen, author of Trees of Delhi, who was to write the foreword to our book, was caught up in the protests that erupted and wrote to us saying he could only send the foreword later. After citizens approached the Delhi High Court and the National Green Tribunal, both courts stayed the felling of trees, although the former has since modified its order to restrict tree felling in only seven redevelopment projects. Citizen petitions to the Central Information Commission, under India’s Right to Information Act, wrested disclosures by the state government on its website, placing on record the number of trees already cut or slated to be cut by builders, contractors, and state agencies. For a city suffering the worst air quality of any major city in the world, the figures are sobering. Between 2005 and 2017, over 112,000 trees were cut in Delhi, mostly for the Metro, roads and other construction projects. One tree cut, for every hour of day or night, for 13 years. And that is just the official record.

These urban victories secured from the courts signify a surging public awareness on the values of trees in cities. They also serve as a synecdoche for a new environmentalism: one that melds the personal actions of individuals, the community efforts of groups, and the political activism of an empowered citizenry. The gardener planting a tree by slum-home or apartment-block or watering sidewalk trees demonstrates individual commitment. The communities, from apartment residents’ associations to civil society organisations, which lead street protests, petitions, and activist campaigns, signal the strength of the collective. And the coming together of individuals and groups to trigger political action – upholding the tenets of law, seeking justice from the courts, and demanding accountability and transparency from the government – heralds what an informed and empowered citizenry can achieve. The motivational roots of individual and community efforts toward nature conservation extend back into India’s old traditions and examples abound from India’s forests and rural areas. It is in their manner of joining forces and their form of political engagement that one sees a glimpse of something new. A contemporary and effective environmentalism that can be inclusive and diverse, aspirational and inspiring, that builds and deepens connections from person to person, people to place, and humans to the rest of nature even in the midst of our most crowded cities.

“For as long as they are alive, trees remain where they are. This is one of life’s few certainties. The roots of trees go deep and take many directions, we cannot foresee their subterranean spread any more than we can predict how a child will grow. Beneath the earth, trees live their secret lives, at times going deeper into the ground than up into the sky, entwined below with other trees which appear in no way connected above the ground.”
Anuradha Roy, All the Lives We Never Lived

Bengaluru’s billboards case is, however, still in court.

Down with the billboards

“I think that I shall never see
A billboard lovely as a tree.
Perhaps, unless the billboards fall,
I’ll never see a tree at all.”

Ogden Nash, Song of the Open Road, 1933 (in The Face is Familiar, 1941)

The billboards are falling. It is early September and Bengaluru is transformed. Back again for a conference, I can hardly believe my eyes. I am astonished at the hundreds of empty metal frames and structures along roads and highways, each of which earlier had garish vinyl flex advertisements stretched across them. Once again, the courts had stepped in.

On August 1, the Karnataka High Court ordered the city’s municipal corporation, the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike, to remove all hoardings (billboards), banners, and buntings across the city by the same afternoon and to make the city completely free of advertisement flex hoardings by August 14. The court chastised the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike:

“What policy you make is your prerogative but Bengaluru must be free of flexes and you must see to it... You should close [BBMP] down if you cannot work properly.”

Forced into overdrive, the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike removed over 5,000 billboards in three hours. Within a week, over 21,140 billboards were removed and the corporation announced a ban on all advertisements and billboards in public spaces for one year. By the end of the month, it drafted a new policy and bylaws on “Outdoor Signage and Public Messaging” that limited advertising to notified locations, government schemes, and sponsors’ advertisements on public utilities like bike-share and car-share facilities. In September, the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike also began to remove the empty frames and structures along roads, atop buildings, within compounds, and elsewhere.

At the Nature in Focus conference, a gathering of nature photographers, filmmakers, and conservationists, Divya and Nirupa have a session on our book, Pillars of Life, that was published in July. Nirupa speaks about what it took for her to depict the beautiful rainforest trees – botanical illustrations made with accuracy, blending science and art, detailing bark and branch and every leaf. Later, participants compliment us on the artistic work, on the evocative yet brief text. Their kind words are gratifying, yet we hope the book will evoke greater appreciation and wonder towards grand trees, whether they stand by roadsides or in rainforest fragments, along city streets or winding hill roads. The conference photo exhibition showcases dozens of spectacular images, yet trees, if they appear at all, are only backdrops to animal portraits or lost in landscapes. Nirupa took up to a week to paint a single tree, but the trees themselves took a century or more to draw themselves from earth to sky: isn’t every tree a piece of art, too?

Bengaluru, sans billboards, seems poised at a cusp of a civic renewal. In late June, the Forest Department announced an initiative to connect citizens to local plant nurseries to enable citizen-powered urban greening. Project Hasiru (Green Project), now online, enables citizens to reserve tree saplings, purchase at a subsidy up to 500 saplings of native, naturalised, and non-native species, and pick them up from any of seven city nurseries to plant in their gardens and neighbourhoods. A mobile phone app for tech-savvy Bengaluru citizens is also under development.

Will the billboards rise again like earlier, or will citizens reclaim the city and its trees for themselves? And yet, advertisements are still omnipresent. Spanning the cover pages of newspapers, filling radio and television channels, crowding the pages of magazines, blipping into our phones, squirming into our email inboxes, flashing on our browsers, plastered across airports and railway stations and bus stands, and occupying place after public place where they have no business to be. With the fall of the billboards, perhaps the day will come, too, when all commercial advertisements will be constrained within print and online catalogues, shopping malls and complexes, yellow pages and directories, where people who need them can find them and they don’t arrive unannounced and unsolicited to stare you in the face.

With the vinyl flex gone or hanging in shreds, Bengaluru’s billboards frame views of buildings and trees and open skies. Flyovers of pelican and cormorant flocks in formation sweep through the sky to nearby lakes. As black kites and crows perch on the billboards’ metal bars, clouds drift through the billboards, as do mynas and sparrows and parakeets flying to the trees behind. Now, rain trees and eucalyptus, mango and jack, shades of lime and jade and emerald, flicker into view. A few branches even poke their way through the emptiness of the billboard.

As the billboards fall, the people and the trees rise into the world and open their arms.

This article first appeared on View from Elephant Hills. It is inspired by two very different books by two very different authors, one nonfiction and one fiction: Harini Nagendra’s Nature in the City and Anuradha Roy’s All the Lives We Never Lived. The author’s Twitter handle is @coyot_es.