Bengaluru’s infrastructure woes strike a musical chord

After exhausting all options, a Bengaluru commuter has now turned to artificial intelligence (AI) to generate a song titled Tax Me to request the government to build decent road infrastructure in the city.

The song about Bengaluru’s road infrastructure takes a tongue-in-cheek swipe at the city’s traffic, potholes, flooding, construction, and the endless digging of its roads. The song demands a basic for a city that the Chief Minister D.K. Shivakumar says is being viewed internationally: a road that can simply be driven on.

Daily experience to song

Punit Vara, a 34-year-old techie residing near Choodasandra, who uploaded the song on YouTube, said that the song, including its lyrics, was completely AI-generated. It features Doddamara Road, which falls under the Anekal Assembly constituency, represented by A. Shivanna.

“For the past nine months, I drove my pregnant wife on Doddamara Road, which is in a pathetic condition, for regular doctor visits. I had to be extra careful, and it was highly dangerous, which prompted me to come up with this song,” he said. “Besides, I also drive on this road everday,” he added. Mr. Vara said he used his daily experiences of travelling on the road as prompts for generative AI, which came up with the lyrics. He later used another AI model to generate the song using the lyrics, he said.

Mr. Vara terms the song a satire anthem dedicated to every techie, parent, auto driver and commuter surviving Bengaluru’s “moonscape streets” every single day.

Potholes, traffic, construction

For many Bengalureans, the morning commute begins with a familiar ritual, which starts with checking the map, looking at the estimated travel time, and then adding a generous margin for the traffic that the maps could not possibly have accounted for. Now, that daily frustration has found a soundtrack.

“Pothole number 27,” a lyric in the song, takes a dig at the pathetic condition of Doddamara Road in the southeastern outskirts of Bengaluru, which is not very different from the other city roads. 

“I pay my income tax. I pay my GST,” the song says, before listing the many other charges that accompany everyday life. The complaint, the song says, is not about wanting “gold-plated roads” or a perfect city. It is about basic infrastructure, including roads without potholes, sidewalks that can be walked on, buses that actually arrive, and streets that do not disappear under water during the monsoon.

Capturing the experience of navigating city’s roads with multiple projects on, the song says: “Metro above me. Digging below, flyover beside me. Nobody knows where to go.” The line captures the geography of a city, where construction seems endless.