Bengaluru’s pavements are a CrossFit course of broken tiles, construction debris and garbage — and Arun Pai, 57, won’t stop walking until he has cleared these obstructions. His video tutorial on dismantling sofas abandoned on the street got him a mention on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Mann Ki Baat podcast. Recently, Pai, founder of the popular Bangalore Walks and the city’s self-appointed ‘footpath mayor’, felt like the universe was finally listening.Last month, after the Supreme Court declared that walking on footpaths is a fundamental right, Karnataka appointed a Bengaluru Development Minister, Krishna Byre Gowda, who promptly unlocked ₹70 crore to fix 2,000 km of footpaths. Pai, an until recently low-key man who has partnered with the government to improve walkability for two years, felt a burst of optimism, though it must be said that ousted street vendors are staging citywide protests in response to the ‘Safe Footpath’ campaign.It was in 2005 that Pai decided to quit his corporate job and dive full-time into conducting walking tours of Bengaluru, just as the city was morphing from a sleepy paradise into a startup magnet. He has spent the last two decades following the mantra of kaam chaalu, mooh bandh (keep working, keep quiet). The more Pai walked, the more he saw how Bengaluru could potentially be like any clean, walkable European city. He decided to combine civic action with storytelling.