Musings from The Garden City

Hi Folks, here I am again, back in action after a break of a couple of months.

In December 2004 I made a career move from Patni Computer Systems and into IBM. And so I came from the economic capital of the country- Mumbai - to the IT capital of the country - Bangalore.

It has been a couple of months now since that move and I have been in Bangalore during this period. I have come to like many things about this city and dislike some too.

To start with, this beautiful city is known as the Garden City, thanks to the greenery you will find here. There are innumerable gardens in and around this city dating from the days of Haider Ali. The city is pretty well planned and neatly laid out and is spreading far and wide continuously. It embraces modern buildings coupled with old time architecture and the blend is quite a treat to one’s eyes. You can pick up interesting facts about the history and fascinations of Bangalore at these internet sites.

http://www.bangaloreguide.com/About/history.asp
http://www.indiaexpress.com/bangalore/eureka/history.html

Come the IT boom and all the major IT companies of the world setting up shop here big-time, the city has taken quite a beating and continues to buck under pressure still. I see before me a beautiful city being split at its seams in terms of what it can withstand and support. The un-ending traffic of two-wheelers alone is enough to suffocate the city. The carbon monoxide pollution caused by the traffic and the omnipresent dust (thanks to the rutted roads and the heavy construction of sky-rises everywhere, is spoiling the wonderful climate that this city enjoys. A quiet and peaceful, almost lazy city has suddenly been transformed into a boiling cauldron of ethnic and cultural diversity in a span of just over five years!

Speaking about traffic, I must warn the visitor to Bangalore that on the road, any space you can insert your bike into is yours, if the other guy doesn’t go there first. If he beats you to it, you have the right to horn in any obscene fashion to give vent to your feelings. And of course you can overtake on the right or the left, push the other guy off the road to get ahead and then throw a few expletives at him for not falling off his bike and sit on the horn at a signal as soon as the countdown to green reaches the 10 second mark. Those white and yellow lines on the road are for decoration purposes only (they look good in aerial shots for movies) and have nothing to do with driving rules. When there is no space on the road, please go ahead and use the footpath beside; the pedestrians will jump into the adjacent ditch to let you pass, lest they be run over by you. Of course you wouldn’t do anything that treacherous, but it is better they don’t realize it. When you take a corner, choose the shortest way to get into the side street. Take a left turn at the left extreme of the road and a right on the right extreme of the road. On the occasional you crash into the guy coming from the other side of the bend, you have an opportunity to actually use all the expletives you have learnt and the public will have a field day by crowding all over the place and totally obstructing traffic in every direction while the poor guy you hit lies bleeding on the road on his mangled bike. As they say it’s all in a day’s work!

In Bangalore, you can find a conglomeration of people from all over the country and overseas. Diverse languages are spoken, the primary being English, Hindi, Tamil and a bit of Telugu with Kannada, the local language, being used only by the locals, who are easily out-numbered by the population flowing in from other states thanks to the number of IT jobs available. Living here, you can easily identify with the mosaic of cultures that India is with a generous smattering of the West thrown in.

Food is a subject I can go on and on about and there is much to talk about food here in Bangalore. For someone who has spent a lot of money on total trash in Mumbai, I am treated to some really nice fare each time I eat out. Bangalore offers a wonderful variety of North and South Indian food at astonishingly low prices at decent eateries at almost every street corner that I wonder what an inane fool I must have been to have spent Rs.25 per dosai in Mumbai with that awful so-called sambar, when I can get a better dosi here for only Rs.10! But I have to say that the sambar is not up to the mark in most places here too. I guess, for really authentic sambar, one must go to a city in Tamil Nadu.

The city’s public transport system is quite confusing at the best of times. Routes on the city buses are written only in Kannada script. Sometimes even the route number is in the Kannada script! If you look carefully, as you are wont to do in a new city, you will notice that there are different route numbers written on the front route board, the rear route board and the side of the bus. Which route the bus is plying on at that moment is anybody’s guess! To add to the misery of the already confused commuter, there are several types of buses that ply the roads here with different fare systems. The common type is the one familiar to any Indian, with front and rear doors and a driver and a conductor with a whistle that he often blows next to your ear leaving it ringing for a while. Some have an entry/exit only at the front and there is no conductor to service passengers. The driver collects money and gives you a ticket as you enter. Nothing wrong with the system except that the poor driver has nothing better than a tin can or a cardboard box to take his collections into and this he puts on top of the engine cover. With a huge torrent of people pouring through the door at any stop, who can blame the hapless driver for stopping the bus in the middle of the road, or at an intersection to collect fares? Some other buses have pneumatically operated double doors at the center of its left side that are operated by the driver from his control panel. Buses may stop at designated bus stops or in the middle of a swirl of traffic, whichever is easier. Commuters are requested to co-operate and board and get off in the most appropriate place, thank you. If the conductor is not too keen on giving you a ticket, you may pay him only a portion of the full fare and he will accept is gleefully. Tickets checkers? Who, pray are they?

IT has brought a lot of expendable money to the city’s very young crowd. A walk on Mahatma Gandhi Road (you obviously have heard of MG Road? Well, it is actually named after the father of our nation) would be enough elucidation of this point. Where there is money to be spent the giant corporate vultures land in numbers. A splash-a-dash of color and a carnival atmosphere get thrown in and you gape at it all in wonder! Huge crowds of youngsters earning far more a month than the collected earnings of their parents in a year and not knowing what to do with it all throng Café Coffee Day, Barrista, MacDonald’s, Pizza Hut and the like. Brand is the mantra here. I wonder how many people behind me on the street are smirking at the label on my bottom that tells them the pair of jeans I wear is, well, not from what they might find a favorable style house! If I dwell too much on the topic I am sure to develop a complex, but such is the change that is happening to Bangalore. The number of pubs in this city amazes me. They definitely out-number the gardens and Bangalore can earn a new sobriquet after all – The Pub City!

Having shared with you information that range from the normal to the have-to-live-with-it categories, it is time I scare you with something totally outrageous and despicable. With large numbers of “IT people” living and working here and more coming in every passing day, real estate is booming. Prices are sky-high already and aiming higher still. Taking the maximum advantage of this phenomenon are house owners willing to rent out an apartment or a portion of their house as Paying Guest accommodation. The willingness of people to pay high rents for small apartments has given rise to a large number of incredibly small apartments built as extensions over existing structures. The avarice of the landlords has been fuelled to such an extent that they do not shy away from demanding a hideously high sum for a rat-hole of living space. On top of this, there seems to be an undercurrent of understanding between the landlords and brokers that it is very difficult to cement a deal with the landlord of an apartment, which apartment you could easily settle for through a broker in that area. The catch is that the broker earns a piece of the pie for himself in the deal, which is usually one month’s agreed rental value, for taking you to the house you have spotted on your own!

These are my first observations and experiences from this city.