Day 30-36: Bangalore, Revisited
I had a feeling that the pace of these entries would be
adversely affected by my visit to Bangalore, so it comes to no surprise that
I’m writing about almost all of a week at once. There are a few reasons why I
can’t really write these daily, but mostly it comes down to the fact that what
I’m doing in Bangalore is uninteresting to any outsider who doesn’t like to
read about someone lazing around in a house or read about someone meeting their
cousins when these people are foreign to the outsider. Bangalore is not a
sightseeing destination for me (thank God, because there isn’t too much to
see), but a family one. As I’ll get to later, if not for my Aunts, Uncles and
cousins that are inside the city grounds, I probably would never come to
Bangalore again. This isn’t to say the city is boring, but it definitely isn’t
a top destination in India.
We arrived on the first day by Air Asia. Once again, Air
Asia put the ‘budget’ in ‘budget airline’, as they didn’t provide anyone with
Immigration Cards because they ‘ran out’, although I don’t think you can say
something ‘ran out’ when you had none to begin with. This created a whole mess
in Bangalore airport, as the Immigration people had to search far and wide to
find enough papers for all of us. This leads us to my first issue with
Bangalore: it’s airport. This isn’t a knock on Bangalore airport as much on
India and what people see as progress in this country. Bangalore Airport itself
has a really nice looking terminal building, with high glass facades and an
impressive roof to house it all. The amount that it is better than the old
Bangalore airport is nearly comical. That said, Bangloreans viewed it is as
some world-class airport, a point of pride. The only way it was a point of
pride is that it was built on time (no joke, a real feat). It is still too
small for the city, and this size issue is definitely curbing the amount of
international airlines that fly into BLIA. Also, the real mess is the road to
the airport. The airport itself is built well outside the heart of the city,
making it an easier drive than the earlier one, but the road there is basically
India in a nutshell: half-finished highways, with the halves that are finished
being placed at random, creating a mini-race course of a road back into the
city. The project is supposed to get done, but even locals have scant hope of
it happening any time soon. We finally reached my Uncle’s apartment around 7:30
(flight landed at 5:00), ready to crash there for the night. I have no
complaints with my Uncle’s apartment, partly because it is perfectly fine and
partly because I would like a place to stay on future trips to Bangalore.
I’m not going to go day-by-day here because the days were
mostly monotonous and also because my thoughts on Bangalore is more overall
large takeaways. Let’s start with the positives: Bangalore, if you have enough
money, is a fine city, with a good night scene – including a white-hot
micro-brewery circuit – good restaurants at many price levels, with nice malls
and shopping. The largest issue is that Bangalore is good in these areas, but
the lower, less impressive but more integral things, are totally lost, like the
sidewalks, or whatever those concrete slabs covering the gutters are called. It
is really embarrassing that Bangalore still has these ‘sidewalks’ and there is
no sign that the city cares about this, let alone actively rectifying it. Then
there is the abject waste that inhabits the city, with garbage littering
streets. Now, this is a sad staple of many third world countries, and definitely
parts of rural Vietnam and Cambodia had the same problem. The issue here,
though, is that India is richer than those countries, and Bangalore is not some
rural roadside village, but a bustling city. The only real way to stop this
littering problem is for the people to take it on themselves, but when this is
the same city that writes “don’t urinate” on the walls (for good reason), you
realize that that isn’t an easy solution.
The worst part is that again these scars cover up a solid
city at its best. The malls are in the same neighborhood as those in Bombay, or
even Thailand and certainly Malaysia. The medium-priced restaurants are clean,
air-conditioned and wouldn’t be out-of-place in New York. If you could close
your eyes anytime you were outdoors and be shuttled from place to place,
Bangalore would be a fine city. What I think this comes down to is Bangalore,
in a way, had to rise to the occasion of all the expectations of a city that
was the benefit of so much outside investment, and it did in the large-scale,
with clubs, restaurants, malls, hotels, but didn’t in the little things, the
infrastructure.
**** Quick side-bar. When writing my issues with Bangalore,
it reminded me of the last time I did such thing. Another reason why I’m not
doing this day-to-day is because I have already detailed an extended period of
time in Bangalore, in my three-part (and yes, there were supposed to be four
parts) story of ‘A Wedding In Bangalore’ ****
As this week was Holy Week, Thursday and Friday were filled
with the normal Holy Week festivities. On Holy Thursday (or as it is
exclusively known as in India, Maundy Thursday), my Mom, Aunt and me went to an
‘open mass’. Sadly, this wasn’t the raucous party like the ‘open mass’ for
Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve was in 2010. That was filled with non-Catholics
boozing away as we strained to listen to the mass on the loudspeakers. This was
more of a real mass, just outdoors. Opposite St. Patrick’s Church in Bangalore
(the site of that midnight mass, as well as both my Uncle and Aunt’s (who
moonlights as my 2nd cousin) and my Cousin’s weedding), in a large
open ground, sat I would estimate 800 of us ready to hear the mass. Nothing
really stands out from the mass, as it was like any other Holy Thursday mass
except outside with booming speakers. The one real highlight was the work of a
solid choir, singing all of the hymns and songs loudly and well (a quick note:
church music in India is far more lively). I was deathly afraid of the prospect
of having to sit outdoors without the aid of fans or air conditioning, for 1.5
hours, but the mass is celebrated at dusk and by the midpoint it was dark and
cool.
Friday was a different matter, as my Mom, Uncle & Aunt
(it seems so weird calling them Uncle & Aunt here because none of us
cousins refer to them as Uncle or Aunt ever) and three little cousins. This
time it was a small, closed church – about as different a Good Friday mass as
could be from the usual formal service at my hometown parish. The church was
cooled by fans, but the fans might as well have been decorative, since they
really didn’t work. Good Friday is supposed to be one of the most holy days of
the year for Catholics, and it was the first time I kept the ‘no-meat on Friday
during Lent’ rule during this Lenten season), but I did something most unholy
on Good Friday, which brings us to the 2nd Bangalore development:
drinking and having a good time.
When you can escape from the litter, the traffic, the lack
of sidewalks, the bumpy roads, and the moody auto-drivers (which I’ll get to later),
Bangalore does become the city that people my age want: a place to have a good
time. Now, unless you know people in Bangalore, the amount of ‘good-time’ you
can have is curbed by government regulations forbidding the sale of alcohol
after 11:00 (some places push it to 11:30, others up to 10:30), so most of the
late-night partying takes place in houses. Luckily for me, I have cousins of
the right age to hang out with. So, the first experience was a bar session with
my cousin (the bride of the ‘Wedding in Bangalore’) her father and her cousin –
my 2nd cousin on her other side, who doubles as a member of our
Mangalorean Community in New Jersey, which was a fun night that turned a little
strange as we got a little deeper into our spirits and the conversation veered
towards odd and somewhat awkward spaces. The other night out in my first week
in Bangalore was nothing like that.
As soon as I arrived at my cousin (same one, the bride) and
her husband’s new apartment, I was first given a tour despite me entering in
medias res to the party itself (not totally my fault, as I was led to believe
it was a small gathering, rather than a medium sized one). Her apartment is
quite nice, tastefully designed as they redid most of the interior of the
apartment when they bought it. What was better was seeing just how proud she
was at having her own apartment, a place that she can give tours of and own.
Anyway, getting past those emotional things, I quickly reintroduced myself to
their friends, a group of 5 (which grew to about 10 by the end of the night). I
was quite stunned to realize how many of them remembered me from my cameos at
my cousins wedding and my even briefer cameo during my time in Bangalore two
summers ago. They’re all a collection of interesting and entertaining
individuals who knew how to have a good time. We ordered in food, and after
12:00, when it was officially Saturday, I dug into some Biryani, which tasted
quite well to my admittedly inebriated senses. I returned back to my Uncle’s
apartment at 3:00 AM (I had a key), and laid awake trying to sober up before
sleeping, a method that was met with mixed results the next morning.
The next day allowed me to experience two more facets of
life in Bangalore. The first is the benefit of having maids and cooks. When I
left my cousins apartment the previous night, I remembered telling her one
thing “have fun cleaning up”, as my Mom and me were invited guests to a lunch
at her place the next afternoon. I was quite stunned to see when I reached her
apartment that it seemed as if there was nothing close to a moderately-sized
house party the previous night. She let me in on the secret as she told me that
“the maid cleaned it all up.” Oh, to live in a place with maids! That night, my
Mom, Uncle and Aunt and I went to Punjabi by Nature, a restaurant that also
housed Beer Garden, one of Bangalore’s micro-breweries. The food there was
decent, but I wasn’t really going for the food anyway. They had four house
beers, a White Wheat Beer, a House Ale, a Dark Stout and a Dark Lager. They
were standard and all tasted perfectly acceptable, but with slightly heightened
expectations, slightly underwhelming. I’m still committed to trying out the
others, but hopefully they are better, but even if they aren’t, the idea of
having micro-brewed beer in Bangalore is great in itself. On the way home, my
Uncle drove a slightly circuitous route to avoid the cops that run DUI checks.
Now, this sounds outrageous, but it is less outrageous than when Bangalore was
a city where a cop could be paid off with 500 ruppees to look the other way on
a DUI bust.
Holy Week (aka my 1st week in Bangalore) ended
with Easter Sunday, which featured a mass in St. Patrick’s proper, a spacious
building with slightly better fans and a lot of memories. Easter Lunch was at
my Aunt’s a family gathering that brought back even more older memories.
Finally, the week ended with a dinner party at my Mom’s cousin’s place. Now,
this cousin is on my Mom’s Dad’s side, a classing Manglorean family where the
oldest child had kids older than the youngest child. Therefore, my Mom has
roughly 45 cousins on that side of her family, some with kids (my 2nd
cousins) that are her age. This particular cousin wasn’t one of those older
ones, as he’s in the one family on that side whose kids and grandkids (my Mom’s
cousins and my 2nd cousins) are roughly the same age as they are in
mine. That didn’t mean I was any better off, as I still knew no one, and each
person my Uncle introduced me to represented only another genetic mind-game to
connect us. Thankfully, I was rescued by my cousin’s really good friend,
Aneesha, someone who I had met almost too many times during my visits to
Bangalore (just kidding). She also claimed to know no one, although I realized
soon that this was either a lie or a damning description of the people we spent
the rest of the night with, people who I quickly found out were my 2nd
cousins (and her 2nd cousins on their other side). Bangalore is all
about family to me, so it makes sense that I finish my first week in Bangalore
meeting members of my most extended of my four families.
Coming Up Next: The Restaurants, The IPL, and more drinking
and family time! (and yes, I’ll get to my hatred of the auto driver).
