PUNE: When Pune happened to Dharmesh Arora , the president and CEO of auto component maker Schaeffler India , he was not planning to move to the city. Now, he is glad it happened that way.He was all set in Michigan with a large automaker there. About six years ago, the opportunity to move back to his home country came calling.“We had lived overseas for 15 years. The options were the usual cities, you know, Mumbai, Bangalore, Delhi etc. Pune was not on the top of the list of choices, but this opportunity came by to move back to India. Having come here, I can only say that given a choice again to live in India, it would not be any other place, other than Pune,” he told TOI on a rainy July morning.It is the rain that Arora thinks is one of the “loveliest parts” of living in Pune, which he opines is a “so well-endowed a city that it will be unfortunate if it is not the best city to live in, in India”.The culture, the spiritual inclinations of people here that reflect in their “simple lives”, the weather and “the places around Pune” have made the city a very attractive proposition for Arora and his family.When he moved back to India, the education for his daughter was a very important consideration. “Having studied overseas all her life, we were thinking what kind of education we would get. Fortunately, again Pune has some of the best institutes,” he says.This is not his first stint with the city. In late ’80s and early ’90s, Arora would come to Pune as a young executive of Maruti, visit the Automotive Research Association of India and drive around the cars for getting them tested.“At that time, when I used to drive around, it used to be a breeze here. There were very few cars ... Things have changed. There are lot many cars and there are lot many two-wheelers. There are a tremendous number of two-wheelers on the road now, which shows that we have not done enough when it comes to public transportation. The only choice that people have is to travel by their own vehicles, which is adding to the problem,” he says.Arora now travels about 51km from his residence in Sopan Baug to his factory in Talegaon. The commute for him is not a “bad experience” and spending about 90 minutes on road one way for that distance, he thinks, “is not as bad as some of the other cities in the country”.What bothers him the most is the “rapidly deteriorating situation” among road users and the abuse of the rights of other road users.“People are becoming less considerate to fellow road users and that is demonstrated by wrong-side driving, jumping red lights. When you confront the actual offenders, they are pretty brazen to you. That should be stopped firmly and consistently. Zero tolerance is the best policy to get this done … Very little pedestrian footpath space is left. If even that is taken over by two- and four-wheelers, it is absolutely unacceptable. It is better solved now than left for later,” he observes.Another area that concerns him is that “the public spaces in the city are dwindling in most areas”.“You do not have to a lot of things to do within the city. You have to either go out on a one- or two-hour drive or only things are flocking to urban creations like malls or restaurants,” he says.Notwithstanding these, Pune became special for Arora because it also helped him connect with a long-lost hobby as he became more tied to his professional commitments.“I was inclined to sketching, but in the past 20 years of my professional life, I probably lost it. When I came back here, I met some people into sketching. They have formed a group …. I have known so many architectural places that I would have not otherwise known,” he recounts.When asked if he found any place of architectural significance that was built after 1947, which was worth sketching, he sets off on a thinking trail.After a 30-second pause, he says, “The amount of time I spent thinking about it gives you an answer. No, we did not sketch any monuments built post-Independence.”

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