News That Stays News

[ɣəˈzɛləɣɦɛit] February 4, 2013

Gezellig can also be used as an exclamation, which can either carry the meanings described above or be used sarcastically or ironically. [wikipedia]

The first obvious thing about Bangalore was the clean, plate glass, and the small child with mirror shades and a yellow shirt that said “Homework is Over” slipping into the remarkably clean bathroom.  Then, there was the vast, gleaming, plate glass lobby, a hundred meters in length, with a Coffee Day (‘ a lot can happen over coffee’) on one end, and another Coffee Day (‘a lot can happen over coffee’) on the other.  We strode out to the improbably well-labeled public bus terminal, past the #7 to MGR, and onto our shiny, new, air conditioned green #9 to Gandhi Nagar.  The highway before us was improbably smooth, and disorientingly fast.  The role of space-filling two-wheelers in grinding traffic to a halt was as neatly demonstrated by their absence from the airport road, in which freedom a well-maintained bus can make sixty kilometers per hour, as by their presence in the market, which we crossed on foot and where we once spent three minutes immured in a single crystallized intersection.

After taking our lunch with and our leave of B—, we traipsed through a few bookstores into the large and parti coloured Cubbon park.  In the garbage-strewn section, we found a group of small children with a cricked bat, who asked for water.  In the tree-filled southeast entrance, a throng listening to some untranslated vitriol, flowing from the back of a 5-ton truck covered in Kannada flags, and soaking into the earth near a gaggle of musicians, standing by, perhaps, to replace it in due time.  In the green, grassy terraces near the state courthouse, a heavy scattering of seated lovers, packed near to what romantic degeneracy pressure is likely to support in the absence of any public spectacle.  Certainly, one would hope that the Pauli exclusion principle remains operative in this sort of situation…

We emerged, and made our way past a park of 15m tall bamboo, wide as my upper arm and sheltering an unexplained statue of a stegosaurus, to a government museum with an intriguing collection of sculpture and a ‘large breasted Durga’ according to the guide book, and no open doors whatever according to reality.  Foiled, we struck out across the morass of rich people’s shopping opportunities that is one corner of Bangalore, and to the bar and branded-clothing district that is a second.  Time rolled away as we searched for the Hotel Bangalore Gate.  We can afford to stay in pretty nice places, and since we can’t afford not to know where we’re going, we often do (by my standards, anyway).  This one is marked out by a fair-sized archway with a 1m tall illuminated sign which was, for all practical purposes, simply not there when we walked past, wearily misinterpreting a policeman’s directions and wandering with increasing alarm into side streets until at last we realized that we’d either gone the wrong way, or were anyway going to need to find a different hotel.

Nightfall found my friend feverishly napping, and me acrimoniously refusing the State Bank of India security guard’s instructions to leave the air-conditioned ATM premises.  Pro tip: ATMs in India will swallow the cash back up if you don’t take it immediately.  For comic effect, you can try calling the posted phone numbers in search of relief.  A motorcycle ride, two (out of an eventual three) visits to the self-service multi-cuisine corner restaurant, and much conversation with the Concierge later, my bank was (allegedly) aware of the mixup, my friend sound asleep with idly and paracetamol in his stomach, and I with a long-sleeved shirt and a pair of dubious ‘milaan’ black leather shoes in search of a club called ‘Opus’.  My first attempt featured a detour down a series of dark and unlabeled streets in the north of Gandhi Nagar, and persuaded me to hire an autorickshaw for the second.  Repeatedly unable to explain which ‘office’ I wanted, I eventually persuaded an auto driver to just drive straight down Palace road for 2 km.  At the end, he suddenly realized what I was looking for, unwound a few blocks of one way streets blocked willy-nilly with cement dividers, and deposited me in front of an honest-to-goodness Rihanna-blaring club.

How one runs a salsa social on the second floor of such a building, even having witnessed it, I could not explain.  Approaching the building, I was sure I’d got the wrong directions.  Leaving it, I was suitably impressed by a fair sized, pretty skillful contingent, if a bit sad that even here, in a city which has been conspicuously richer than Chennai for some time, every other woman was, to judge from the number of men, presumably staying safe at home to avoid the risks of a solitary return home at 10 PM.  In retrospect, perhaps it’s only that Bangalore is larger, and the salsa crowd that night smaller, and therefore, compared to the small, rich, IT-affiliated and thoroughly westernized Chennai salsa scene, yet more dramatically privileged and unrepresentative of what is ordinary even in an upper-middle-class existence.

So what did Bangalore feel like?  The market, an incredible emulsion of old women tugging sharply on their vegetable sacks to dump a few more potatoes before their customers, and young men pushing 3-meter carts; the whole colloidal mess somehow allowing slightly-more-than-Brownian motion in the direction of travel.  The advertisement on the street for 18-again: poignant if you know this song, until you realize that it’s selling what it describes as a ‘vaginal rejuvenation cream.’  The police academy with its murals of cheetahs, antelopes, and men with AK’s kicking down a door.  The sublime scene, if one could reduce oneself to a camera, of an empty lot a few blocks west of the market, the open space piled with dust and rubble, the three- and four-story buildings in dull and slightly different tones of dusty, moldering cement and plaster, the people standing in windows, looking out, the bright, clean saris drying on clotheslines.  The huddled young men in Gandhi Nagar at night, staring at a smart phone.

So what did Bangalore feel like?  An extended and not wholly unserviceable anaphora, not adding up to much.