As Karnataka welcomes Ugadi - the Kannada New Year - Bijoy Venugopal, a Bangalorean takes a nostalgic trip down the memory lane and recounts what Bangalore used to be and what it has become now.
On a day like this, Bangalore is painfully sweet. Like a fish nipping at my heel in a current, it touches me through a flood of memory in a place I cannot reach. Today is Ugadi, the harvest festival that ushers in the New Year for Kannadigas. A state holiday.
Not for me, though.
I am on my way to work in Electronics City, the IT industrial suburb where most of Bangalore's nouveau riche busy themselves adding miles (and milestones) to the information superhighway. Most offices are closed today, so the roads are uncharacteristically clear. The traffic lights are dead, the cops are nowhere in sight. It is unusually cool for March — perhaps it is the absence of heat-spewing vehicles.
Across the road from the bus stop, I can see mauve jacaranda in furious bloom, vying with the frosty pink of cassia. There is a quiet echo of the old moniker 'Garden City' in that picture. Almost dreamlike. I am smiling.
But days like this are passé.
Viewed from the air, the Garden City is today an expanding maze of concrete. The islands of verdure are gone. The 800-odd lakes that dotted the landscape have shrivelled, devoured by construction projects. From 10,000 feet, it's easy to see that Delhi is greener.
Retail is in — malls have sprung up everywhere. Even the old booze shop down the road has transformed into a 'liquor boutique'.
IT-speak is ubiquitous — newspaper adverts and pamphlets are rife with 'leverage', 'deliverables' and suchlike monstrosities that technology has delivered unto us.
For a city that was ardent about Kannada, the local language seems to have taken a backseat. Auto drivers instinctively speak in broken Hindi, a response to the wave of new immigrants from the northern states.
The locals resentfully believe 'northies' have grabbed both land and resources and corrupted the fashion sense of the city's teenagers.
I am a prodigal who has returned to Bangalore after five years of being away - first in California, then in Mumbai.
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I thought I would never return. But when I did, it was to a city that had changed its garb when I was looking the other way.
The old familiar landmarks had given way to malls.
I don't even know the reference points in the conversations of the new Bangaloreans. It's true - I'm an alien in my hometown, struggling for familiarity all over again.
And where has the Bangalore of my childhood gone?
The Bangalore of roadside groundnut vendors and itinerant hawkers of vegetables, of Sankranti sugarcane, of Dr Rajkumar songs blaring out of loudspeakers latched onto auto-rickshaws, and sweet Ugadi kheer made from freshly picked rice.
Or that R K Narayan touch to evenings on M G Road, waiting for the evening's headlines to be pasted outside the Deccan Herald office. Or sneezing your way out of Select bookstore with an armful of literary fodder, blessed with a smile from the genial Mr Murthy.
There was something about this city that has now gone out of our lives, to a sepia-toned place in the past.
Today feels something like that, though not nearly the same.
Bijoy Venugopal is a closet writer and illustrator, doing time in an IT company to pay off his loans. He has grown up in Bangalore for most of his 31 years. In his own time, he writes for the website of a rock band called Thermal And A Quarter. He is an avid birdwatcher and a poet and intends to bring both passions into a book someday. He lives with his wife in an upcoming locality of Bangalore where "the water is hard and the new immigrants speak Hindi."
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