Many Bangaloreans I know hold vicious views on immigration. Some get vitriolic even when pointed out that they themselves were once émigré. They loathe anyone else coming to their ‘garden city’ to set up home or on the wallaby. Now if they are serious about dissuading others from roosting on perches by their precious fringes they should stop making buildings to accommodate the newcomer, right? But they do this not. Instead they are making buildings in very large numbers – in designs that scale new epitomes in ugliness that has become the hallmark of cities running out of space – like the world is running out of mortar. Or maybe some sort of construction moratorium is on the way. Hell, yeah.
Riding into town on board an air conditioned airport run Vajra bus from the Kempegowda airport surrounded by some very nice Kannadigas I was serenaded for most of the 40 km by rock faces vertically spliced baring a ghoulish white heart in the not-too-distant horizon. The tarns looked as forlorn as recently orphaned children. A heartrending sight. I am sure not very long ago they were mountains proper with whatever little topsoil and grass and little green shrubs. How I wished every guy who looks at a hill and goes ‘hmm there is the cement for a few more Grand Imperial Squares’ would get decapitated by a rock hurled his way from the first deep burrow dynamite. I wouldn’t mind becoming a believer if I were assured of this wish.
Sure enough there are the ‘beautiful forevers’ too trying to cover the knoll carving and grab your gaze with cricketers and movie stars or just good looking folks plugging finished properties or raw materials for the booming industry. All of them sell the good life – golf courses and great views, jogging tracks and fully equipped gymnasiums. Not that I have that kind of money but I guess I’d be better disposed towards considering purchase if I were also assured of uninterrupted water supply in my kitchen and bath and not just in an ‘Olympic size’ swimming pool. One promised over a hundred acres of lush green all around. The catch here is that it is lush and green now; tomorrow it could be another story. Not just saying; it has happened to me.
Serious traffic jams begin once you are 10 km from the city heart of Bangalore (officially changed to ‘Bengaluru’ – consequence of some of the on-going exercises in piffling nationalism). But the bus is a great way to watch people and see their city. At a junction I stared at a pretty transvestite who was begging without much success. Her resilient efforts at coaxing and cajoling motorists to part with money were ignored. She sashayed around motorcycles and other vehicles clapping her hands with the grace of a mujra performer. Our eyes met and she blew me a kiss. Made my day. Actually I blushed.
Despite the traffic on the road I was impressed to see that large tracts of land by the side was fast-disappearing woodland, overseen literally by the Bangalore Development Authority office on the other side of the road. Makes you wonder the kind of people who make it to city planner posts: obviously they do not possess the minimum ploy on display in the tribal hinterlands of Chhattisgarh where forests are encroached from the inside. What you see from the roads are still thick clusters of sal and bija trees but a few metres into them you espy hamlets with wood fire and barking dogs. Or maybe the urban planners live in aesthetic comas: I really would like to meet and greet the person who gave the go ahead to the cup-caked monstrosity that lies adjacent to the Chinnaswamy stadium. A King Kong baby crèche.
If the term ‘smart city’ didn’t originate in Bangalore it is still most apt for the city. Everybody was attached to their mobile devices like natural appendages: if it wasn’t glued to their ears already they drew it out faster than Django could a gun. People around me on the bus, drivers in cars outside, the traffic cop keeping a vigilant eye on the signal from the kerb, the dreadlocked bunter licking sambar off her fingers by the sidewalk canteen, the portly man crossing the road oblivious to cars missing him by a whisker. Everybody talked into their mobile phones and nobody honked. Road rage so endemic of the north was yet to reach the south. ‘Love is in the air’ read an ad for a cabriolet. There was a lot more than love – heat and dust too, with more on the way. A report in The Hindu early February this year reported temperatures three degrees above normal for this time of the year. Attributed to ‘deforestation substituted by building construction.’
The famous Lalbagh Garden was sunny as Sinai. Somebody told me there were trees a little way inside. There are also lots of important plants identified by their scientific names, I was told. How can anyone call a place a garden when there are vast open areas with the sun beating down in all its fury? Beats me. ‘Lal’ means red and ‘bagh’ is garden. Cue. There were some canoodling couples for whom I said a silent prayer that they may not come in the crosshairs of the moral police Bangalore is notorious for. For that matter even that of Asaram Bapu – if they were just funning around with no intent on getting hitched.
A red-eyed maniac was the driver of the auto rickshaw I hired from Ranga Shankara to Singasandra. He told me I’d have to pay Rs 50 over and above the metre as he’d have to come back without fare. As always I accepted this request readily but I never pay a paisa more. If they had any problem, I would tell them at drop off, I would be happy to accompany them to the nearest PCR van. Usually they mutter at me to fuck off and do it themselves too. The last time I saw such expert manoeuvres where lives were saved by an inch here or a centimetre there was in Octopussy. Vijay Amritraj went on to Hollywood greatness.
But since I didn’t believe this one would go that far I did what I could – paid him the fifty rupees extra.
