Minimum City

“He stood there waiting for her. The Shatabdi to Chennai was to leave in another 10 minutes. Lines of worry had started forming…”.
“He stood there soaking in the rain. He couldn’t believe fate had dealt him this blow. The smell of flowers hanging as garlands from the makeshift shops mixed with the smells from the nearby shops selling spices and powders of different colors, and the smells of the Masala Dosas from Vidyarthi Bhavan formed an odd concoction which numbed his senses as he felt himself sinking to never before depths.”

Strangely, verses or prose such as above have never been a part of literature and probably never will be. Firstly, they are trite, can at best be called amateurish and no one ever writes like this to classify it as literature or anything that gets published. Second reason being no one writes about Bangalore!

Despite being a hep and happening city, Bangalore for some strange reason never seems to figure in art of any form. Of course, there are the odd photographers who’d photograph Vidhan Soudha in spring with the yellow trumpet flowers in full bloom, the odd Peter Colaco who’d write a “My Bangalore” or the movies based on locations like “Majestic” or “Kalasipalya” (which, thank God for little mercies, will never be seen or known outside Karnataka). But how many people outside Bangalore, or even Karnataka, ever read these books or buy these photographs? Are they even available there? Also “My Bangalore” was selling at close to Rs. 400, which was the same as Shantaram when I last checked, and am not sure many would be excited by the price. I, for one, did not buy it.

Mumbai got Maximum City, Shantaram, Midnight’s Children, movies like Slumdog Millionaire, while Delhi has its Dilli 6, RDB (the city is an integral part of the movie), and scores of other books, none of which I can recollect now.

I agree we can’t compare Bangalore with Mumbai or Delhi. Mumbai has its underworld, Bollywood and it is the richest and most populous city in the country which make it significant enough to have people who lead weird lives that can be written about and movies that can be viewed by a global audience. Am not complaining that Mumbai gets a lot of coverage. If anything, it deserves it.

My grouse is mainly that no one wants to write about Bangalore and showcase it for the beauty of it and what it can give and has, that it’s a lot more than just IT companies, good weather and bad traffic.

Unfortunately, Bangalore does seem to be caught in a crack in the wall, where neither outsiders can identify enough with it to go deep into it, and the natives always look to the ancientness in its culturally superior neighbor – Mysore, the romanticism of the Malnad regions or the history of the northern districts. Heck, even Shankar Nag chose Agumbe to shoot Malgudi Days, which ironically has a name coined from two Bangalore localities.

Of course the problem with most writers in Kannada was that they were from other places, and none of them was home-grown. And the population in Bangalore has mostly been people migrating from other places to work in the PSUs, the Govt and other educational institutes. Times definitely are changing and with an increasing number of people well known at a national level, like Ramachandra Guha, Girish Karnad etc settling in Bangalore, I guess there is still hope for a future where we’ll get to see and read more of Malleswaram and Basavangudi apart from a fictional town coined from their names, more of MG Road and Brigade Road than hearing about outsiders complaining about their being the only places worth visiting and more of Gandhinagar and Kalasipalya apart from B-grade action flicks.

Pitter…patter…

The beauty of a past is that you don’t realize its value in present tense.

It is almost like a yearning for something that’s gone and the most frustrating thing is that you know you can jump or cry or bang your head against the wall, but there is no going back to it. Time machines are a concept I never believe in. What if someone who goes back in time gives himself the time machine so that he doesn’t have to spend the time inventing it, using that time to laze around a beach. In which the time machine will cease to have come into existence but is still there. Well, simply put it just doesn’t appeal to me.

It was April 2007 when I had my interview for my current job in MS. The interviewer, a Texan, was telling me how he liked Bangalore over Hyderabad, simply because it rained a lot more in Bangalore. Well, he seems to like rain. What kind of weird people would like rain all the time, thought I! And then over the 5 hours of interviews I got a picture of Seattle. It rains and it rains and it rains some more!

And then I landed here to the rains. It was a wet place, that was for sure. And then conversations with parents started as soon as I managed to get a calling card. And the usual weather question would be answered as “cloudy, it might rain…looks like there is a depression, its going to be rainy”.

Well, normal for Seattle, you’d think, but no, this was the answer I got from my parents. It took me a year of such conversations to realize that Bangalore is quite a rainy place by itself and I must have been used to cloudy and rainy weather by now.

And then, this year there has been much less rain and much good weather, prompting me to worry about all the animals and the ecological effect of less rain. Colleagues who’d be cheerful about the weather would get a “Its never good if it doesn’t rain when it has to!” from me.

And then the rainy mornings would turn up and I found myself unusually cheerful, the smell in the air reminding me of dew filled mornings in the Western Ghats, either in Kerala or when trekking along the ones in Karnataka.

The rains here are different from the ones in Bangalore. They lack the fury or the power. Its mostly a steady drizzle for a long time, rather than the massive downpours along with all the works fairly common in Bangalore.

But the sights of two wheelers hurrying to the nearest tree and parking under them, or autos with their flaps, or the uniform splashes when the rain finally hits the ground with its fury, they can never be recreated anywhere. Even the noise is missing from the rains as it goes about its business with absolute silence.

The smells are the same. There is always the grass that gives out its smell when it gets wet.
The smell of impending rain is the same. But the smell of dry soil getting wet is oddly missing here. I guess the soil is always wet here. Or probably I’ll have to wait till summer to turn up when it gets drier.

[Have no idea how to finish this, so will leave it as it is. Will update with a better finishing if it comes to mind]

30-1

On second thoughts…let’s not talk about it.

Btw, the blog turns 4 years today!

Snow!

With a rainy/snowy weekend preventing cricket and killing any interest of going out and doing stuff of any kind…am breaking a precedent by posting within two days of my previous one.

Am close to finishing ‘Snow’, by Orhan Pamuk. It was slow reading, with some plodding at many places. Set over just 3 days and with 400 pages the author gets a lot of time on his hand and the book tends to move like an Adoor Gopalakrishnan movie. But no, like with the latter there were no complaints. This is one book that is best enjoyed at a slow pace. And the weather definitely helps. With snow forming a constant white background, masking most cheer in the story, it helped that there was a reasonable amount of snow around seattle.

The protagonist’s character is so well etched that you realize that he is not the protagonist slowly as he just seems to change loyalties and move from one end to another, with no one trusting him enough or letting him go either, knowing that he had his uses, like a pawn on in a bigger game, but with his own hidden agenda which he realizes is not hidden at all.

Interesting questions like how secular is secularism, and how democratic is democracy are raised. The beauty being you are left to judge on your own in the end. Well, actually, haven’t reached the end yet. Still a few pages more to go.

But yes, definitely a good read, but I guess a lot will also depend on your state of mind and your way of thought. You either end up rooting for Ka or just hoping he fails, for the most part. But knowing his nature, of running away from happiness, you kinda can guess the ending I guess.

Anyway, definitely a good read, although not for people who generally tend to run through books and prefer to do that. This one demands time!

Moving on…

There were plans. Of buying a brand new TV for home. Of replacing the 10-year old monitor. And then there was also the lack of time as I was drawing closer to the end of my vacation in Bangalore. And then, there was the news of the layoffs. It came in TOI so I wasn’t too bothered. But still I looked it up on Google and sure enough people were talking about it. I shelved most plans and returned to Seattle with a strong feeling in the gut that Jan wasn’t going to be an easy month.

And then on the D-day I lost two colleagues from my team. It wasn’t easy and it hurt me to see that two colleagues with whom I had been working so closely over the past one year would no longer be there from the next day. It was hard. It should’ve shaken me out of my comfort zone, but instead it fostered the growing fatalism in me. I took it hard, but then over the days that followed, as I saw people going about their work and lives, I realized that life and work just went on without all those who were gone. It scared me that that will exactly be the scene when I moved on from my team. Its even scarier that this is how its going to be in life too. People will mourn you and then move on as if you never existed and you’ll only be there in photographs and memories.

Then, as if on cue there was a reorg and a change of manager. It raised hopes of a second India trip to attend Shankar’s wedding. And the planning for it began, before I realized the precarious nature of the situation and decided to drop it and stay put.

Cricket,one of my biggest passions, began for the year despite single digit temperatures. We had lost a couple of our best players as they had moved on to other places or returned home. I felt the loss as there were new faces to be introduced and gotten used to in the team, new levels of comfort established. I missed the old team. And then within a couple of weeks there was a team. There was a mild comfort. Again, it worried me how much someone’d miss us when we left. Of course they were key players and performance wise we’ll definitely feel the pinch.

The last couple of months has seen a lot happening personally than the whole of last year put together. And yes, it has been slower. I have felt it move a lot slower than before as I have been going through each experience, of each loss, painfully and excruciatingly.

There is this Damocles’ dagger hanging over my head all the time, but strangely I feel at peace. Have never felt more at peace in fact. The restlessness that I felt over the last year is gone. Maybe it is the growing fatalism that I have fatalistically stopped fighting letting it do a complete take over. A sense of jo hoga so hoga. I don’t know how good it is. But the past tells me that a sense of comfort zone never works out well. There is always something to shake me out of it. Even when I decided to stand still, life has found its ways of reminding me that things around me change, and am just a part of it, and will need to go along. Will need to move on…