Bangalore - Of Life at the Road, Flyovers and Rachna.

After almost three and a half years I got a chance to go to Bangalore. During the journey, I was asleep till we landed in Bombay. From Bombay we took off at about 5.00 PM and as I looked outside the window, I witnessed a spectacular panorama. The rays of the Sun playing hide and seek with clouds, the vast expanse of the blue and azure sky, the reflection of the Sun in the blue ocean waters and the changing colors of the clouds from white to silver and then to golden, as we moved further. It was as if I was in heaven. How much I wished I had my camera with me? When we reached Bangalore at about 6.30 PM the Sun was set. I had witnessed a most beautiful sunset as we had flown over Arabian Sea.
A car was there to pick me up at the Bangalore airport. As we moved on to the highway, I asked the driver how much time it would take to reach the hotel. ‘One and a half hours Madam’, he replied in a thick South Indian Accent. ‘Put on some music’, I asked him. ‘No FM Madam and no CDs’. This was Dr. Murthy’s Car. I asked Dr. Murthy later how he managed to travel so much without even having some music in the car. He replied that he generally dozed off, or he attended to his phone calls. That is Bangalore for you. People spend a considerable time of their day on road, and there are various things to do, reading newspaper, chatting, catching up with friends, making important phone calls, thinking(may be mundane day to day issues or some serious thinking), listening to music or simply getting off to sleep.
During my four day stay in Bangalore whenever I was on road I could not resist looking inside cars and buses to find out what people were doing. I found an Infosys Official Bus, full of people and more than half of them asleep. ‘A nap in the bus’ and its potential to keep you going- Looks like an apt article title in a Bangalorian Lifestyle magazine!. I saw couples into deep arguments inside cars, I saw young strategists doing some lateral thinking inside buses, I saw tired working women thinking about house hold chores, I saw students engaged in lively banter and I saw people chuckling and laughing over official jokes……or so I imagined.
The next day at the Hotel it took them an hour to bring me my breakfast order, a Grilled Sandwich and Orange Juice and that too, after having made two calls to room service. When it finally arrived I enquired why it took so much of time. ‘Madam grill karne me time lagta hai’ was the answer I got. Next day I ordered a Dosa and it arrived in ten minutes. Lesson – If you want to reach for your class in time – Have a South Indian Breakfast.
On Wednesday, we fixed up a visit to Bharathi’s house. I looked forward to meet her. I also looked forward to meet her daughter Rachna. Heard so much about her since the time she was very young. We met after a long time and were really happy to see each other. At her home, I met her mother in law and her parents. Rachna had gone out to play. Bharathi and I were chatting about old colleagues and common friends, when she said, “This lady has arrived”. I suddenly heard an uproar in an otherwise very quiet Bharathi’s household and in came Rachna - jumping, laughing, shouting and completely self-possessed. Bharathi took a backseat as she came and I had to spend the entire evening talking to her, listening to her stories, her songs, watching her drawing books, her paintings, her dance, and her cartoons and so on.
It was a delightful evening for me and Rachna made sure that I was kept a company all through. It was delightful talking to Bharathi’s Mother-in-law and also her father. Aunty has eighty years of wisdom behind her and yet is so simple and endearing. Uncle, retired as a professor of English, told me about his times in academics, which I found extremely interesting to listen to. Bharathi took me to see his Library as well. I could spot Rachna’s wall paintings also in the house and admired them. She turned magnanimous at this gesture of mine and gifted me some nine ten of her paintings to hang them in my house. I had a delicious dinner, an authentic Tamil cuisine, served graciously and affectionately by Bharathi’s Mom and Mom-in-law. Lucky Bharathi! To have two Moms around her to pamper her. When it was time to leave, Rachna refused to say a Good Bye to me and started crying. I felt bad and quickly slipped into the car for I feared that I would feel like crying too. Children have such a great ability to connect. Why do we lose this skill when we grow up?
Next day in the evening I decided to visit the Forum Mall. But before I could enter into the Mall, an Art Gallery caught my attention. It was a gallery of Vases, Pots, Sculptures and Decanters. I loved the display and the light arrangement inside the gallery, enhancing the beauty of each piece. It was a huge collection- Pots and Vases in terracotta, wood, crystal, metal, glass and papier’-mache’. I roamed around, admiring the texture, painting and the carving on pots. I particularly liked some floral designs done in red and white. The collection of crystals was huge and also interesting to look at. While one part of my brain took note of the design, colour and the artistic detail, the other part of my brain assessed the number of footfalls in a day at a place like that and the amount of possible daily and monthly sales, estimated possible markup to be around 50% on cost and finally concluded that perhaps a gallery like that at a prime location in Jaipur, would not be a profitable venture. Do I suffer from a split personality disorder?
There was a huge book shop at Forum Mall but before I could discover it, I had wasted enough time at the Art Gallery and the Westside store. I could barely take a round of the book shop housed in two floors and could not explore much.
Colleagues told me that Bannerghatta National Park was just five kilometers away from the campus and one could possibly see the tiger there. I was tempted to go, primarily to see how tigers and other animals managed to live peacefully in a jungle, just 5 kms away from civilization, away from the biggest IT hub in Asia. Who is more fortunate, I wondered? The Tiger in Bannerghatta jungle or the IT geek in Bangalore jungle!
We drove across a ten Kilometer flyover every day to reach campus in Electronic City. The flyover made on the BOT model. To me it was a symbol of a Twenty First Century Indian urban life, reinforcing one’s belief in India Shining. I saw Reva, the electronic car on the roads of Bangalore. Bangalore is so full of young people everywhere – in malls, on the road. I heard the stories of M.G.Road getting barren as a result of cutting down of the trees. This is true for the whole of Bangalore. You do not see too many trees around. Also the city is undergoing a climatic change, getting hotter day by day.
And finally, the journey back, the breakfast at the airport, as we started off early in the morning at seven to catch a 10.15 flight. Bangalore’s airport is like a Railway Station, so much crowded. It is slightly cleaner than the latter though. So when the aircraft took off, and as I watched the city from the window, I thought that in spite of its inadequacies, Bangalore still had a charm of its own. I would love to go back to the city again.