Now that its summer vacation, everyone is posting about the city. And summer vacation is afterall about wish-lists, nostalgia and planning to have a nice time.

Ajay at TvmRising does an incisive analysis of the Singapore model and lays out a way forward for urban development in Trivandrum using its strategic location like Singapore.

In the 1950s and 60s, Singapore and Malaysia would have been hard to distinguish from the Trivandrum of those days. In fact, in many ways - like having a modern bus transport system, sewerage system and so on, Trivandrum would have ranked a little above them. Hardly a few decades later, Singapore and Kuala Lumpur have left our pretty, little city far behind.

Mathew at Wetspark has a wishlist for infrastructure in the city,

It is sad that we might have mentioned the word Vizhinjam more often in blogs than in any government documents or the dusty libraries of Ministry of Shipping…If there is no chance of that coming up sooner or later the whole post is a junk fairy tale. From what I have learned about the prospects of the port it would have been developed at meteoric pace by most other countries.

And Jiby muses on the subtle aspect that makes up a city, people and their institutions

The collaboration of interest groups works at all levels in Kerala - everybody be it the communist, the congressman, the trader, the worker, the church, the media, the intellectual - everyone who is a part of the current system and deriving benefits from it, is never motivated to change anything

The aspirations and woes of Trivandrum consonate across ‘Tier2′ cities in India. Tvm is home - so while I agree that we need to grow as a city, I’m not sure how much. When “namma bengalurean” says he can’t make sense of his city anymore I hear him and gets confused.