Namma Bengaluru... bidding adieu to you...
A relaxed weekend this, after a
long time, with no specific ‘to-dos’ to haunt… ideally would have opened
one of my city-guide-apps to plan an outing with kids, or find a new
place to explore or some event/exhibition around to check on… but did
nothing of that… instead just pulled my car out and drove around same
old, frequented places, to absorb these one last time… this is an
essential part of my ‘wrapping-up’ as we prepare to leave this city… a
city that has been my home for almost 6 years now… but I should admit,
this city never grew over me… I could never get into the character of
this city… it intrinsically is very different than the person I am, yet
it accommodated me… rather I found my comfort areas and stuck to them…
my home and my workplace, my personal car to commute, a few shops and
malls, a handful of streets and markets, and a few explorations to
places of my interest… that’s about it… and so it just took me a couple
of hours today to go around these places to re-live them one last time…
Yet there are bountiful memories of this place that I will carry along… of the awesome weather to start with which I am going to bitterly miss…infact this city brought to light the fact that spring and autumn are not just in text books but do exist in real life too… I was rather encouraged to get out of my cosy bed to enjoy the mild chill of winter mornings and cold breeze of summer mornings… the walks in these mornings left me delightfully energetic…
This energy was however consumed by the horrendous traffic of this city… the distances here are measured by a metric of Time, which also remains unpredictable at all times… I have tried to work around the traffic in very many ways, say by altering the time of commute, or the route being taken, or the mode of transport, infact even changing the destination… none of it worked… the traffic here has always consumed my energy and whole of me sometimes… one cannot predict as there are enough and more reasons for the traffic that one can give… peak hour time to school time to government office time to BPO work time to late night party time… roads are always full of cars and two wheelers… these two wheelers flock the road in abundance as if trapping you from all directions, such that they can actually intimidate a person new to this city… I admit I was… it took a lot of courage to face them, brush across them and drive around them… And then ofcourse the public transport has its own charm or lack of it… the fare is by default quoted in hundreds, irrespective of what meter shows… I have been gutsy enough to take autos inspite of their no-meter-policy and their fixed-destination-whimsy… with some very resentful encounters with autos, never dared to take a state transport buses for commute… they anyways look very uninviting and unappealing to me… and even if I mustered some courage to, I would never know which bus to take… most of them have routes and destinations in local language which I cannot comprehend…
I am as it is, quite bad at languages, even the ones I know, forget learning new ones… but these public transport commutes, weekly visit to local market, daily banter with the maids, information exchange with the cab drivers, school bus ammas, pantry boys in office etc necessitated my learning a few words – howdu, illa, dayavittu, beda etc still come to me with some head scratching… ondu-eradu-muru-nalku-aidu-hattu-ipattu-aivattu-nuru is the counting I learned as was enough to order coffee or pay for errands… these have been taught to me by my daughters who ofcourse have learnt much more… their starting of every line with an ‘ayyo’ is just too sweet to let go now…
Another learning, and the most useful of the lot, has been around food… for me, all the people staying to the south of Vindhyas were south-indians and all they ate was south indian meal – idli-dosa-sambar… ok let me not sound so naïve here.. I knew a little more than that, so lets add uttapam and coconut chutney to that list… but that’s about it… once here, I realized how ignorant I was… Not only have I had very many varieties of idlis and dosas and uttapams, but have binged over all types of rice – (puliogere & Pongal are my picks), variations of sambar (the sweeter variation is to my taste), assortment of chutneys (tomato-peanut works best for me), multifarious versions of the parathas, the biryanis, the appams, the puttus, the sagus, the kuzhambus, the aviyals, the payasams and many many more mouthwatering delicacies… every hill and every plain in the south of vindhyas grills out its own unique delicacy and this is no exaggeration… it is here that I saw 50+ varieties of just murkus… it is here that I saw racks in malls bursting with a hundreds of varieties of ‘powders’ and ‘mixes’… it is here that I saw mangoes that are not haapus and still taste divine... but one thing that remains universal, with no variations, is the filter coffee… it has had me, a no-tea-no-coffee person, engulfed in its aroma and its flavor, making me a big addict, such that it is now difficult to let go… this is going to be a big miss as I move away from this city…
And then there are those quaint little things, nested in the bylanes of this city, called bistros, art-cafes, even boutiques… they house some choicest art and quirkiest artefacts… they are my finds from my explorations, rather out of my craving to find harmony in this otherwise bustling city… these places shout out creativity, but their voice goes unheard in the city commotion… yet I go back to these, again and again, just to soak in the assortment of textures and array of colours… and ofcourse the aroma of coffee they serve… these too will be remembered fondly as I go away from this city…
But above all these misses, what I
owe to this city, is the feeling of ‘non-belonging’ that it introduced
me to… having lived in a city earlier which was mine by birth, where I
grew up, where I saw many accomplishments, everything there ‘belonged’
to me… but last 6 years here, I gradually realized how it feels to be a
non-native… things that didn’t even exist or matter earlier, now are
dis-proportionately important… so when I go to a mall and hear someone
around speak your language, I automatically turn to look their way… I
look for FB / whatsapp groups which bring together non-natives like me… I
look for Sarvajanik Ganesh Mandals during Ganesh Chaturthi and places
which supply Faraal during Diwali… I look for my native language movies
and keep a tab on theatres showing them… I remain confused if I am now
an integral part of this resident city or my heart still throbs to go
back… I remain perplexed if I want to still hold on to my roots or let
myself stem out in the new place… all this confusion and perplexity has
given a new dimension to my life, that of ‘non-belonging’, which I will
carry along to yet another place…
As I move on, I still remain baffled whether to support Mumbai Indians or Royal Challengers Bangalore in the ongoing IPL and this will only aggravate further in next IPL season with Delhi Daredevils getting added to the list, competing for my support!!
Yet there are bountiful memories of this place that I will carry along… of the awesome weather to start with which I am going to bitterly miss…infact this city brought to light the fact that spring and autumn are not just in text books but do exist in real life too… I was rather encouraged to get out of my cosy bed to enjoy the mild chill of winter mornings and cold breeze of summer mornings… the walks in these mornings left me delightfully energetic…
This energy was however consumed by the horrendous traffic of this city… the distances here are measured by a metric of Time, which also remains unpredictable at all times… I have tried to work around the traffic in very many ways, say by altering the time of commute, or the route being taken, or the mode of transport, infact even changing the destination… none of it worked… the traffic here has always consumed my energy and whole of me sometimes… one cannot predict as there are enough and more reasons for the traffic that one can give… peak hour time to school time to government office time to BPO work time to late night party time… roads are always full of cars and two wheelers… these two wheelers flock the road in abundance as if trapping you from all directions, such that they can actually intimidate a person new to this city… I admit I was… it took a lot of courage to face them, brush across them and drive around them… And then ofcourse the public transport has its own charm or lack of it… the fare is by default quoted in hundreds, irrespective of what meter shows… I have been gutsy enough to take autos inspite of their no-meter-policy and their fixed-destination-whimsy… with some very resentful encounters with autos, never dared to take a state transport buses for commute… they anyways look very uninviting and unappealing to me… and even if I mustered some courage to, I would never know which bus to take… most of them have routes and destinations in local language which I cannot comprehend…
I am as it is, quite bad at languages, even the ones I know, forget learning new ones… but these public transport commutes, weekly visit to local market, daily banter with the maids, information exchange with the cab drivers, school bus ammas, pantry boys in office etc necessitated my learning a few words – howdu, illa, dayavittu, beda etc still come to me with some head scratching… ondu-eradu-muru-nalku-aidu-hattu-ipattu-aivattu-nuru is the counting I learned as was enough to order coffee or pay for errands… these have been taught to me by my daughters who ofcourse have learnt much more… their starting of every line with an ‘ayyo’ is just too sweet to let go now…
Another learning, and the most useful of the lot, has been around food… for me, all the people staying to the south of Vindhyas were south-indians and all they ate was south indian meal – idli-dosa-sambar… ok let me not sound so naïve here.. I knew a little more than that, so lets add uttapam and coconut chutney to that list… but that’s about it… once here, I realized how ignorant I was… Not only have I had very many varieties of idlis and dosas and uttapams, but have binged over all types of rice – (puliogere & Pongal are my picks), variations of sambar (the sweeter variation is to my taste), assortment of chutneys (tomato-peanut works best for me), multifarious versions of the parathas, the biryanis, the appams, the puttus, the sagus, the kuzhambus, the aviyals, the payasams and many many more mouthwatering delicacies… every hill and every plain in the south of vindhyas grills out its own unique delicacy and this is no exaggeration… it is here that I saw 50+ varieties of just murkus… it is here that I saw racks in malls bursting with a hundreds of varieties of ‘powders’ and ‘mixes’… it is here that I saw mangoes that are not haapus and still taste divine... but one thing that remains universal, with no variations, is the filter coffee… it has had me, a no-tea-no-coffee person, engulfed in its aroma and its flavor, making me a big addict, such that it is now difficult to let go… this is going to be a big miss as I move away from this city…
And then there are those quaint little things, nested in the bylanes of this city, called bistros, art-cafes, even boutiques… they house some choicest art and quirkiest artefacts… they are my finds from my explorations, rather out of my craving to find harmony in this otherwise bustling city… these places shout out creativity, but their voice goes unheard in the city commotion… yet I go back to these, again and again, just to soak in the assortment of textures and array of colours… and ofcourse the aroma of coffee they serve… these too will be remembered fondly as I go away from this city…
As I move on, I still remain baffled whether to support Mumbai Indians or Royal Challengers Bangalore in the ongoing IPL and this will only aggravate further in next IPL season with Delhi Daredevils getting added to the list, competing for my support!!
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