February 7, 2025
A Love Letter to Messing Up
I hate messing up. I hate being wrong. It’s human nature, I know, but that doesn’t make it any less annoying. For the past two weeks, my team and I have been dutifully stationed behind computer screens, researching public spaces in far-off lands; reading about high tech transport hubs in Indonesia and sleek bus stop benches in Denmark.
Internships are a beautiful exercise in hubris. You take instructions that seem obvious, put your heart into them, present them with pride, and then get told that you’ve completely misunderstood the task. Turns out, transport hubs are out of our budget, and Danish benches are about as useful to Bengaluru as a ski lift. It still stings just as much now, as a soon-to-be graduating senior, as it did when I was a newly minted field intern three years ago.
On our third day, we were sent into the field to study public spaces. This was exciting because it meant we got to leave the computers behind and experience the city, walking through shaded parks, loitering at busy junctions, getting suspicious looks from cops when we peered too closely at kattes, and, in one particularly memorable moment, nearly getting locked inside a temple courtyard while admiring a kalyani.
By the second day in the field, I was feeling confident in my mapping skills. Our mentor had given us coordinates, but no direct addresses, so I’d been cleverly mapping our auto rides to the closest known landmark. A flawless system.
This time, I picked “Krishna Yoga Studio.” I glanced at the Uber address, saw it was on 6th Main Road just like Google Maps said and booked the ride. My team, ever trusting, followed without question. And, as all GCILers with a commute know, the Uber nap is sacred. You close your eyes as you pass the bust at 27th Cross and 9th Main, and then, poof, you wake up at your destination, as if teleported.
Except this time, we woke up at a dead end.
Our first stop of the day was supposed to be a busy “Commercial Street.” Instead, for the first time in days, we heard no honking. No crowds. No sign of commerce. My teammates wandered ahead, blissfully unaware, while I pulled out my map to figure out how to get to our next stop.
I looked at the commercial street location pin. I looked at the little blue dot showing our location. I looked at the outer ring road separating us. We weren’t even in Bengaluru anymore. The blue location dot stared back at me like an unblinking evil eye.
It turns out that mapping yourself to a “Krishna Yoga” is like typing Planet Fitness into uber in the States and clicking the first location that pops up. After my group finished laughing and taking a “photo of shame,” we called another Uber and finally made it to the real Commercial Street.
I tell this story because I wanted something interesting for my blog—and all my other mistakes this week have been significantly less eventful. Mostly just misunderstandings about what an impact assessment framework entails. But now, I always triple-check where I’m going when I call an Uber, both in the address field and on the little map. And I always will. I really learned that lesson.
My superintendent at my first internship frequently told me, “You learn best from your mistakes.” I keep this in mind every afternoon at our check-ins, where we’re still trying to solve the equation of making public space renovations both scalable and affordable.
Not that I’m complaining. Some of my most spectacularly useless bus stop research rabbit holes have taught me more about urban planning than my most technically successful Google searches.
And, against all reason, my group still lets me call our Ubers.
By,
Inessa