For modern-day “lawmakers”, legislation is mostly a side business.
“Business” is their main business.
Many of them list agriculture as their primary source of income but it is land that is their ‘mudde‘ and ‘saaru‘.
“Real Estate” to give its awful name.
With the change of government in Karnataka, it is once again time for real estate agents masquerading as visionaries to eye prime urban property using the levers of power.
First off the block is a philistine MLA belonging to the JDS, who, by a quirk of irony, represents a constituency named after the erstwhile Mysore kingdom’s most progressive and farsighted maharaja: Krishnaraja Wodeyar.
The JDS MLA—whose family’s “business” partnership with a BJP MLA’s family is common knowledge (among conscientious brokers)—wants the 127-year-old Mysore Race Course shifted from its present location, which it has occupied for 98 years.
The ostensible purpose: to build a “world-class” botanical garden on the 139 green acres that the race course (incorporating the golf course) sits on.
Like, a botanical garden can’t come up elsewhere on “government land”?
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It is a perennial drama played out every few years, at clubs across the country, using old/flawed/lapsed agreements, at the end of which only the number of uncouth members on the club’s rolls grows.
And status quo returns to ante.
Surely, horse racing and golfing can be magnets for a different class of tourists just like a “world class” botanical garden?
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Meanwhile, the fabulous race course overlooking Mysore’s most inflexible treadmill, the Chamundi Hill, silently watches the charade of the ants.
If the Hill could be moved, our modern-day maharajas would shift that, too.
It is good idea to shift MRC away from Mysore but the land can be better used for more productive purposes for IT or Education hub
Dr LakshmanRao Chennai
Expected to read about the usual charlatanism of our usually intelligence-challenged rulers. A botanical garden maybe a good idea, for it is more comforting and less dangerous than betting on horses. All the same, we already have the Zoo with a botanical element. That, however, is in sore need of attention. Never saw a more depressed group of animals or a more unkempt botanical park. Dr. Rao’s suggestion is an excellent one.
Sad that the Tourism Minister has set his eyes on the prime historic urban land in Mysore. How far and to what extent the Minister will give fillip to the Tourism industry in the State by grabbing the government land is a big question, surely he and his coterie of friends will make a clean sweep of the urban land property and enhance their own personal assets is a definite outcome.
Hats off to you dear Editor for the culminating bottom-line comment:
If the Hill could be moved, our modern-day maharajas would shift that, too!!!