Bangalore – 7 – The End

There's a big delay at the airport, flights are late. The reason, I find later, is that two aircrafts graze each other at the congested Bombay airport. This has never happened before. Guess air traffic has also become like road traffic in Bombay. So I walk around Bangalore airport, watching the scene, taking in the expensive shops, the lookable women, few of whom strut about (like that looker-in-red who get the Kingfisher's red blanket, red all over). Ahem! There's a crowd of Dutch tourists (I guess they are Dutch because they don't talk English) who are talking and laughing loudly. I like their laughter. Earlier, when I checked in, the Kingfisher (yes, the tycoon's airline) ground hostess tells me she will enrol me as a member of Kingclub. I say please do. Yes, I would like to be in the club of kings.

Kingfisher hostesses know how to treat passengers. No wonder they are called models in the air. They have an attitude of helping customers and not the blank look the hostesses in other airlines have. So much the better. This is my first time on Kingfisher and I guess service makes a great difference. They go around helping with luggage, fetching blankets, and see that everyone is well fed, which is not the case with Spicejet on which I travelled to Bangalore. Why don't the other airlines see it? Why don't we in the corporate world see it? I guess we are blind that it's service that keeps a customer coming back. The tycoon realises this. That's why he is a tycoon, really.

Though the flight was late, I feel fresh and cared for. I give a feedback form mentioning good things about the airlines and its staff. I ask the pretty hostess who attended me her name and give her a good recommendation. The looker-in-red is met by her equally good-looking boyfriend who hugs her for probably five minutes, as I watch. Some embrace this! Hm. I believe in the goodness of life, that good is good, and bad is bad, I think as I sit beside the phlegmatic driver who drives me home, his face like a mask of Kathakali. No, Kathakali dancers have better expressions. Sorry, wrong choice of words. He doesn't say a word during the entire trip to New Bombay, except grunt when I give him directions. That's bad service! Raj my driver in Bangalore was much better. I miss Raj.

End of the Bangalore series, covered in 7 posts. Hope you liked it. Do comment, puhhleeezeeee!

I will be on a much needed vacation at my ancestral home in Kerala. This blog may be erratic for a few days. But I will make a point to blog from wherever I am as I am lugging my laptop with me. Got to. Meanwhile my travelogue on Kerala, in a very rough form is here. It is undergoing a lot of nerve wracking editing. Do let me have your views if you read it, that is.

Bangalore – 6 – Last Day

Time to summarise and sum up. Time to let go. Another break waits in the form of Kerala to which I am peregrinating the day after. There's a goodness about Bangalore which makes me proud even though I don't live in it. As Rushdie said I identify with the cities I have visited and lived in. These cities include: Bombay, Bangalore, Cochin and Jeddah. My trip comes to an end after two days and what I had come for has been achieved. Another one to my credit. The exhibition went off well. That's my job organising the corporate events of the place I work, a marketing kind of job. Marketing involves making a lot of effort so that that people are aware of our products and sales result. It can get frustrating at times with tight deadlines and lot of last minute preparations. I like it because it feeds me and my family, it's my daily bread. In Indian nobody – that includes writers – can live (Please to be pardoning Freudian slip, I typed love here.) without a day job. Love and Day Job, a great combination.

Time to go back. On the last day I have breakfast in the hotel's restaurant. There's only me in the eatery and the fresh and eager-faced Tamil waiter is very polite and asks a lot about my family and my native state of Kerala. I answer his questions as best as I could. Then a final round of the exhibition and I am off. I meet Vivek and John two people I have befriended over the years. They both are executives in a newspaper in which we advertise quite frequently. I like their guilelessness and sincerity. I was planning to have lunch with Vivek and somehow I was late after being held up in a project of the employer. Vivek assuaged my feelings – not that it was hurt in the first place – with a beautiful Diwali gift. People are nice if you get to know them well.

Then I have lunch with V in a restaurant which has exhausted all its food. It is managed by a kid who is hardly fifteen. He looks at us with eyes filled with hostility as if he has been forced to sit at the counter and look after the business. They are children with a great awareness as if they are on the brink of something great. "Wait people, see when I arrive," is written so clearly on their faces, I think as I am driven to the airport under a cloud-laden sky dark with the prospect of a sudden downpour.

At the airport I thrust a xxx rupee note in Raj's hand. I don't know if he will accept. But he does, that too with tears in his eyes. His fleet business failed and I know how he must feel driving people around. I wave to him and enter the airport to learn that my flight is late.

More anon, watch this space tomorrow when I go anon, and on, and on....

Bangalore – 5

The sky: cloudy; the temperature: just right, not prickly hot as in Bombay; I see trendy clothes, even burqa-wearing women who even cover their entire face and wear gloves. What contrasts! That too in the most modern of India’s technology cities. I visit Sarjapura Road, the hub of the IT industry and see that tradition hasn’t entirely capitulated to modernism. Real estate industry is booming. There are projects everywhere. I visit Kanakapura Road, a beautiful place which has the making of a salubrious hill station when the as-of-now jutting steel and scaffolding turn into residential colonies.

There are also many living in the old enclaves who haven’t benefited from the boom. They carry an ominous scowl on their faces as they walk. It’s as if they are deeply unhappy about something. It’s an intellectual crisis they are facing, according to me. The happy hippie generation has passed the baton to the more material generation who listen to pirated music on i-pods and other listening devices. They don’t care to buy tapes, CDs and records. For them everything should be free and they pride themselves by the skills they have to infringe copyright, steal intellectual property, and do all this with a sense of heroism. But the music of the seventies has survived. Rock is still rock and pop is still pop. Only rap is new. I mention this in passing because Bangalore was long known to be the capital of Indian rock, metal and pop and my favourite singer Elton John, he of the soulful melodies, bypassed Bombay for Bangalore.

Guess I like to pontificate. That’s why I take too long to write even a small post. There’s more to come.

Bangalore – 4

Yes, after the button-sewing incident I wonder why hotels are such cathartic spaces for me. It's in a hotel I heard that my mother was dying and is in the last stages; it's in a hotel on a very cold day that I felt the futility of human relationships. This room is luxurious. My favourite hobby in a hotel room is to stand at the window and gaze out at the street. I can't imagine how they can give all these plush things for a mere Rs 2000 a night. They have everything I could need including a refrigerator, a television and a tea and coffee maker. The sheets are clean, the toilet is spotless and I wonder if I can afford the luxury. Moreover, the breakfast is free.

I have scant respect for people who keep their hotel-room doors open and shout into their mobile phones at night. Yes, which what my neighbour did. The tyke. At least he should have had the decency to shout, or rant at his wife, or whoever, in his chuddies with his door closed. At night I couldn't sleep because of the racket which echoed in the narrow corridor of the hotel.

In UB City, which I am told by Raj is owned by the great beer and airline tycoon, a coffee shop advertises itself as, "The single origin coffee in the world" or something suchlike. I would be travelling this tycoon's airline back to Bombay, so, wait, more anon, and read on. I wonder what it means. Guess coffee country is nearby and I would love to visit it. My grandfather P.C.Mathew worked in tea and coffee plantations in the Nilgiris (blue hills) of Karnataka and he was quite a character, lovable, I mean.

I am driven around Jayanagar, Cubbon Park and, and, Lalbagh and everywhere I look there is vast greenery, thick trees giving an impression of more in its deep green shadows. Then I remember the moniker Garden City and assume that a city with a nickname like that couldn't but be full of green-swept gardens. If I were a Bangalorean I would go and laze in them all day. And I have this solution to the city's chronic traffic complaint. Ban all cars, buses, and trucks and allow only pedestrians and bicycles in the centre of the city. That will solve all problems. Let there be thousands of cyclists and no polluting cars.

A half kilometre down Raj says, "Hadge Kodi" and I am nonplussed and ask what it means. Turns out it's the name of the area we are passing. There's a song which is playing on the FM radio which has the word "nodi" repeated many times. I ask him what "nodi" in Kannada means and he says he doesn't know how to explain it to me. I ask him what the English meaning is. He shakes his head. I ask him if he knows the Hindi meaning. He shakes his head. Then he is silent for about half an hour and I forget all about it. Then he says, "It means, Patan, in Hindi." Whoa! The guy has been thinking about the word and "Patan" is not a simple Hindi word. It means "fall" as in "fall from grace." It's word which would be used by a highly literate person. Turns out he is a graduate. Well surprises never cease in Bangalore, at least, for me.

Sleep is coming in waves and I am pushing the rest of my impressions of Bangalore to tomorrow. So, goodbye, goodnight, and if we don't meet tomorrow morning, good morning, good afternoon!

Bangalore – 3 – a Band Consisting of Local Instruments

I had first visited Bangalore in the eighties. At that time it was like a small town, a slightly larger version of Cochin or Pune, no, not Pune, Calicut, perhaps. There wasn't this mad rush of vehicles about it. The transport was always toad-shaped ambassadors and Italian fiats. There weren't these dazed looking geniuses from north of the country around. At that time Azim Premji only owned the Western India Vegetable Products Company Ltd. (WIVP, hence anagram Wipro) in Bombay and not Wipro as we know now. And Narayana Murthy was perhaps a worker in Patni.

It's interesting the way I communicate with my driver Raj. He doesn't speak Hindi, English, Malayalam or Tamil. He speaks only Kannada but understands Tamil. I speak a bit of Tamil. So I speak to him in Tamil, which he barely understands and replies to me in Kannada. But we understand each other very well. Like the anti-hero of Aravind Adiga's White Tiger he was a fleet owner. He had five cars which he let out to technical companies. He was taken for a ride by the drivers, quite metaphorically. He ended up bankrupt which is why he is a driver now.

While technology has changed lives of young people called the techies, same can't be said of senior citizens and the poor to which category Raj belongs. Even techies don't get a good deal. Greed doesn't allow man to keep still. There are always lots to be done with as little pay as possible. Why can't life be a little hurried. I mean life has become a struggle for existence whether it be Bangalore or Bombay. Everywhere I go I see giant billboards advertising construction projects. Obviously, construction is doing well because practically everyone needs a house to live. I see the widening of the city's limits to more and more agricultural land and the turning of fallow soil into places of residence. Interesting transition here. I live in New Bombay which was similarly a cluster of small villages, thrust into a modern age of computers and telecommunications. Sudden richness has its disadvantages. The children grow up without realising the hard struggle their forefathers had to endure.

So, philosophy aside, I attend an exhibition on real estate. There's colour here; brilliant colours shine in fluorescent light amid the sweeping views of buildings, housing societies, condominiums and bungalows. There are swimming pools and walkaways in freshly printed advertisements on the walls. In fact, one stall features grass on its ground and the executives wear ethnic shalwar-kameez in traditional fashion. An upcoming film star inaugurates it after the usual delay. There's a band consisting of: an earthen pot struck with nimble fingers, a small hand drum, and a whining instrument played with the mouth which provides the music to the setting.

If I don't stop, I will become unconscious. Sorry about bothering you too much about my state. So good night!

Bangalore - 3

While I love take offs, I find landings a bit of a put-down-er. I am through the swanky airport terminal before long. My luggage arrives before the others, thank God! My driver Raj meets me at the arrival area holding a card for me. Yeah, being a corporate type has its advantages. And its pains.

I am heralded into an Innova, another perk of being a corporate type. I feel like a chicken led to slaughter – remember the truck I was following on the way to the Bombay airport? From there the hotel is a long drive on a good road which progressively worsens into traffic snarls and honking horns. But the air is pleasantly cool and the vehicle is steady. The anticipation is what kills. What kind of a hotel am I going to live in, what would happen next, will the trip – what I have come to accomplish – be successful? Many questions raise its tiresome head during the trip.

Bangalore appears on first appraisal to be under cloud cover, most of the time. That gives a sense of coolness and lack of radiation heat. It’s a good time to be in Bangalore, my previous visits have been colder or hotter. Today it’s pleasant, neither hot nor cold.

At the hotel, getting ready for a crucial appointment I find that the button of the well-ironed shirt is missing. That too the one on my tummy. I hunt for the sewing kit which I had made a part of my travelling essentials. When I open it, I find that I have been had. The packet that should contain buttons has a few slips of torn paper instead. The needle has rusted. What to do? I have to innovate fast. I have faced such situations before. I search in the inside part of the shirt and find the extra button that is sewn on every shirt. Mercifully it’s still there. I cut it with my moustache trimmer – yeah, I carry all these stuff as part of a kit. I am innovating. Then I painfully sit down to sew the button on my shirt. The rust on the needle wouldn’t let it penetrate the cloth. I have another shirt, but I need that for tomorrow. I press the needle on the corner of a table and stitch laboriously. If I apply too much pressure my finger will be pierced and I don’t like being hurt in a strange location.

That done. I am ready. I go to the office and the day goes all fine. V is my local contact, a Malayali who has made Bangalore his home. He says there’s money in rental income in Bangalore, not buying and selling of flats. His family has four bungalows of which three have been rented out to techies who work in outsourcing units. Everybody is talking about new technology in this technology capital. What else? The scooter-riding individual on the road could be a Master of Computer Application (MCA) who must be coding the customer relationship management system of a U.S. corporation. That geeky fellow could be the team leader (no, not managers anymore but leaders) of a call centre. They look awfully savvy and competent, almost cocky, if I might use the word.

I am sleepy now. So more tomorrow.

Bangalore – 2 – a Sanguine Johnny Bravo and Ethnic Chic by My Side

From the aircraft I gaze into the slowly clearing dawn. There are clouds everywhere when the plane lifts off. But still I can see the rivers and streams snaking down below forming quaint swoops and abrupt almost-circles as if by God's design. There are fields green with paddy or wheat, whatever. There are the settlements of red tiles, the temple, the clump of trees, the still existing trees resplendent in the post-monsoon green. The sky is a brilliant blue as I am flying above the clouds. The far-away horizon is erased by the cloudy haze. I think of the workday commute I would have begun on another day and flinch. There isn't space here but it's peaceful and calm, there there's heat, sweat and impatience. How different it is to be high in the clouds. For the time being I am racing like a "rocket man" in the sky.

The earth is very, very beautiful from above. I have said this before and I am saying it again. It's a beautiful world and do you see how we are destroying it? This year's rains were the worst ever. Most of the country was in floods: Punjab, Delhi, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Kerala. We need to do something, but what? I then think of the slow process in which man evolved from primates into what we are now and how destructiveness and competition is built into us. We don't consider how it would affect the other. No, we just don't. Though we are past that age of being animals we still are. In spite of having very powerful mediums of improvement, we fritter away our time in watching meaningless reality shows, contests and pre-fixed sports on television. We don't read. We think reading is for fools. Our media is corrupt and money minded. Most of our media is owned by politicians who use it as a way of getting back at their enemies, whom they have wittingly or otherwise deceived on their way up. The leaders whom we have trusted and chosen to rule over us are ruled by gangsters and crime lords who are breakers of the law our lawmakers have created. I read somewhere:

"Man will not be better and sympathetic but smarter and just as bigoted."

Well, something to that effect. I don't care to remember the exact words. These are the thoughts going through my mind as I sit beside an elegantly-turned-out woman who is adjusting the many items of traditional dress she is wearing. I wonder if I should make conversation. I do.

"Are you from Bombay?"

"Yes."

"Which part?"

She names one of the posh-est parts of South Bombay. I say I work there. She doesn't respond. End of conversation. Sigh! I can't figure the woman-man equation very well. Really, I don't. I don't know if I come out as bigoted myself. The man on the other seat, wearing a tie just smiles benignly looking into his newspaper, stretching his wide lips above a lantern-shaped jaw. He doesn't make conversation with her or me. He doesn't see the need to. We all sit like zombies in our seats and are fearful of causing a flutter or appearing as crude. Everyone is one their nicest behaviour. About the male co-passenger: he looks like an older version of the cartoon character Johnny Bravo. Gah, almost!

More anon. Have patience.

William Dalrymple on Western Pride and Arrogance

Here's Dalrymple on Western Pride and Arrogance:

"We have much to be proud of in the West; but it is in the arrogant and forceful assertion of the superiority of western values that we have consistently undermined not only all that is most precious in our civilisation, but also our own foreign policies and standing in the world. Another value, much admired in both East and West, might be a simple solution here: a little old-fashioned humility."

Must admit he makes some sense. Now, westerners, how about giving us credit for teaching you mathematics and giving you tea, spices and coffee?

Bangalore – 1 – High in the Sky Where I Would Have Turned into an Icicle

At Bombay airport I watch from the waiting area as an aircraft just takes off into the thick fog and melts away, deep into the atmosphere, leaving no trace behind. Airtravel has always had a fascination for me. I have been travelling a modest bit, been to five countries (go ahead, laugh) but airtravel always hold a great charm for me. I always sit in the window seat and look at the land below and the passing lights of small towns and villages in the night. Today there's a haze over the airport, indeed the whole city is in a haze. The sun glints on the wings and there's a beautiful rainbow over the thick fluffy clouds to the right of the aircraft where I am seated. Some statistics from the captain:

Speed: 824 kmph
Altitude: 9000 metres above sea level
Temperature: -34 degree.

Can you imagine? While I was being taken to the airport at 4:30 a.m. the taxi fell behind a chicken truck and I can't explain the sadness here of chicken cooped in their coop. But they seemed awake and unconcerned, shifting this way and that for comfort. The driver was cruising at 80 kmph and I felt jittery. I don't know what would happen. I am chicken. Airborne I was travelling at ten time its speed and I felt nothing. Reason: no passing scenery. Had there been some landmarks passing by I would have got the feeling of the speed. 824 would make a huge blur outside my window. And the bigger shocker is that at that temperature and speed I would have become an icicle or an ice gola (round thing) and would have splintered and been dismembered. He...he....

But here I am writing my indefatigable description of cities. I have written one about Delhi here, so here are my impressions of Bangalore right here in many parts.

So, Complain I Will

The dilemma I wrote about has been brought to an abrupt end. Well, sort of. I have decided that all right-thinking citizens should speak up when a slum or an unauthorised structure is found in their vicinity. Yes, I will write a complaint letter whether or not it gets due consideration. Pushpa and Tejas wrote to tell me that I should. Thanks friends. However, my friends and neighbours tell me, "they have come to do some temporary laying of pipes, they will go away. Why break your head [think about it, in Bombay patois]?"

I say, "what if they don't." And usually – I know – they don't.

"How do you know they will go away?"

"I have seen so many that haven't gone away."

Good assumptions this. And this is my backyard, where I have to walk everyday, have been proud of breathing the pure air. I know the temptation is to stay and not go away and the authorities will not lift a finger because they can't. They don't. Also because they gradually become a source of votes. Look at any part of Bombay and you would find such structures, ugly, formless, without foundation, plastic-made, held by twigs where people live, defecate, make children, and fight. The time to fight a breach of law is when it is made the first time. No, not later. Go to the bridge leading to Reay Road Station on harbour railway line and it's so full of slums that they have made two- and three-storeys from such ugly dilapidation.

Now, coming to the question of exploited labourers. My walking companion tells me that they have been brought as virtual bonded labourers, given grains and oil and are asked to fend for themselves. They are poor, they are exploited, they are dispossessed. Well, we live in a democracy, there are rules like minimum wages, contracts, worker insurance, medical benefits. Why aren't they aware of all these before they signed to come to Bombay with the contractor? Because they are illiterate. Again, illiteracy because of whose fault. Primary education is free and compulsory.

Anyway why should I encourage the contractor who brought them to do this again with the people he has brought? He should employ good employment practises, not me suffer for his digressions and profit seeking. If I don't stop him, he will never be stopped. He will be more organised. The whole thing has become so politicised and corrupt that people don't speak up and when they do they afraid for their lives.