Going Bangalore way

I was chatting with a visiting old boy who has got an IT job in Bangalore a year ago, lives in a ‘PG’, and has been pressing me, as do so many others, to come over for a short holiday. We were thinking aloud together about where I could go this February – it being almost holiday season for me – when the penny dropped. Why not Bangalore? I rang up a couple of other old boys, and they all cheerily urged me to make up my mind at once, so it was done.

The decision brought back memories of the last time I’d been there. It was another time and place. I had read Kenneth Anderson about Bangalore in the 1950s, when it was a sleepy garden town just beginning to grow, and tigers still prowled in the jungles a hundred miles away. Then I visited it in the autumn of 1992. I was still poor then, as was India, so travelling by air was unthinkable for the likes of me, but my sister, who was working with Indian Airlines, got me heavily discounted tickets (for the first and last time), and I flew off to Bangalore in one of the then-almost brand new Airbus A320s. I have always been slightly crazy about aeroplanes, and being invited over to the cockpit was a big bonus. I don’t think such invitations are extended to passengers in the post 9/11 age.

I was actually going to Pune to visit the family of an old friend, and there was a half-day layover at Bangalore. I didn’t know my way around town, and couldn’t speak a word of Kannada, which, as I believe is still the case, handicaps you pretty seriously there. They wouldn’t exchange a word of Hindi, and I’d rather not comment on the kind of English the man on the street spoke. So anyway, having several hours to kill, I negotiated with an autorickshaw driver to show me around the town a bit, but I remember getting tired pretty quickly, so after a lunch of local cuisine at the equivalent of a dhaba, I parked myself for the afternoon at Lal Bagh, and I remember spending several gently-dreamy hours there among the flowers, rather like Lord Emsworth in his garden at Blandings. In the evening I flew off to Pune.  

The trip back a few days later was much more harrowing. The flight from Pune dropped me off at Bangalore rather late in the evening, I had to catch an early morning flight to Kolkata, and for some weird reason the security staff wouldn’t let me stay in the lounge overnight. Shooed out, I had no choice but to accept the terms of a cutthroat cabbie who drove me to a modest hotel less than half an hour’s drive away for two hundred and fifty rupees – the equivalent of about 2500 today, I should guess – and the hotel reception desk flatly refused to intervene, so I was summarily fleeced. You can guess how I felt when I made the same trip back next morning by auto for all of Rs. 11. But the nightmare was far from ending. The flight to Kolkata was full, so they wouldn’t take on any discounted-ticket holders (which is why I have never used such ‘amenities’ again): they told me to come back the next day only to try my luck. Quite unsure about that, and being under compulsion to get back home and resume classes as promised, I dashed off to the railway station and made the trip to Chennai, followed by a 30-plus hour journey in a dirty, stinking, maddeningly overcrowded second class coach on the Madras Mail which I have been trying very hard to forget these last 27 years, followed by another train trip  to Durgapur, a quick bath and shave and change of clothes to appear halfway human again, then dashing off to the house of the girl where I was supposed to take a class that evening, nearly asleep on my feet, miraculously arriving exactly on time, only to find that the house was locked, because the family had gone away on vacation without telling anybody (in their defence, there were no smartphones nor social media in those days).

Frankly, the ‘south’ so turned me off that, despite travelling far and wide, I gave it a miss till early 2017, when I took my parents on a trip to Pondicherry. It’s been a long time for both me and the country since 1992. Most importantly, my daughter was born, and grew up into a woman with her own life in the intervening period, my father passed away, while I went from vigorous youth to lazy – and considerably better off, God be thanked – middle age. And Bangalore, I hear, has not only become Bengaluru but grown into a noisy, polluted, overcrowded city of pubs and shopping malls and software ‘parks’, or so every long time resident avers. Also, swarming with Bengalis.  NIMHANS is still going strong, as is the IISc, but HAL and HMT are just limping along. I guess I’ll give the city proper a miss, unless it were to visit Tipu's old palace. My would-be hosts had not been born last time I was there, or were tiny tots. The boys have promised to take me travelling beyond city limits; otherwise I’d prefer to chat at home with their parents.  Nishant, Kaustav, Subhadip, Aritra and whoever else might be reading this, I hope I come back with better memories this time round!