Bangalore and I

Being Bangalore

Harish Bijoor

Bangalore means a lot to me. If I am asked to name one thing that excites me about Bangalore, that’s a difficult one. To me Bangalore is a ‘bisibele baath’! And I love Bisibele bath! My favorite vegetarian dish. It is so much like Bangalore. An amalgam of this and that.  A mixture of cultures, a mixture of people from all over India. A mixture of nationalities, with us housing the single largest population of expatriates in India. A mixture of tastes, a mixture of textures even. A veritable delight to the city palate at large.

Do I love this city? I do. I owe everything to it. My education, my life, my career, my friends, my relationships and most importantly my entire being. There is a state of mind called ‘Being Bangalore’. And I think I embody all of this, as many of us in this city do. ‘Swalpa adjust maadi’. And we do a lot of it.  I have done a lot of it as well.

My earliest memories of Bangalore as a kid are that of walking in good old Lalbagh, playing around, getting hungry and then being taken by my parents to good old MTR, where I would gourmandize on rava idlis, and those small little ‘gindlas’ (katoris) of pure ghee that added a taste of its own to the idli at large.

If I think later, my favorite place was the State Central Library in Cubbon Park. That stately little red building. To me this symbolized the one space of all reading and learning. I don’t know why, but I spent thousands of man-hours here. Reading the magazines and newspapers within its confines, and reading books within its confines as well.  Those days one could not afford to buy all the magazines and newspapers one wanted to read, and so, this was my daily haunt, visited religiously every day whenever I got the time (and there was so much of it in abundance then). I would cycle there every day from my home on Victoria Road on my reliable old blue BSA cycle and get back in time to be very hungry at home. Moving around took so little time, that one had all the time to focus on the real thing.  Reading and eating in my case. Two passions that I still hold on to.

And then there is my college. St. Joseph’s Arts & Science. I remember being more out of class than in. I was into every extra-curricular activity there was to handle.  I was in so many of them that I had little time for the curricular activities altogether. My favorite memory was that of an inter-collegiate magazine a few of us started called “Scribe”. We had St. Joseph’s Arts and Science, St. Joseph’s Commerce, Christ College, and of course the more exciting Mount Carmel College and Jyoti Nivas College onto it. We had representatives from each of these colleges on the Editorial Board, and all of us poured passion into it. Passion and time. This was the earliest business and consumer-touch venture that helped all of us hone our early and latent instincts for business and writing and communicating alike.

I can go on and on. Memories are such. “Being Bangalore” has been an experience to cherish and preserve.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

harishbijoor@hotmail.com

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------