Gold mines
When you fix a broken wall in your house, you will think about the cables running inside them. The electric wiring, sanitation, television cables etc.
Your contractor will normally work out the details and ensure all those concealed cables and pipes are intact after the wall is built.
You never build a wall and then all of a sudden figure out that you need to lay in a pipe to carry your telephone line.
Pretty much things are known and fixed in the beginning and you don’t do anything with the wall further.
But one thing that I have come to wonder over decades of watching the BBMP (Bangalore’s City Admin body) is how they build walls only to be broken for laying cables. Here instead of walls, they are roads.
Repeatedly, again and again. In the name of introducing some new technology like fiber to home or if no one has invented anything new, upgrade the water pipes or sanitary connections.
With every dig, the road has to be laid again.
With every laying, a dig is around the corner.
You don’t need to go and dig a mine for gold.
The gold is right outside your house for these Government agencies and their bosses.
Now extend this to the footpaths, parks, buildings, services all created to give us the beautiful life we wanted.
We have diamond mines, gold mines, copper mines, silver mines and so on.
After all, it generates wealth for a lot to buy fancy cars and real estate and temp jobs for some really poor people.
Ultimately the most noblest of politics today is all about who gets to own these mines.
You ask for a road with cables in it and instead you get mines.
Our troubles are their fortunes.