Month: June 2019

Today I explored a part of Bangalore I have visited frequently and heard of often, but haven’t had the good fortune to fully enjoy as much as I would’ve liked to: Cubbon Park.

Also, please consider watching this series:

 

I’ve done nothing but enjoy my house today. Honestly.

And I mean that in the most literal way. I have slept on my bed, on my couch, on my beanbag. I have played my piano, played some guitar, and read books.

I climbed up my bunkbed, opened some cupboards, skipped on the roof.

Switched on the AC. Switched off the AC and opened all my windows.

Slept some more.

Rewatched the Harry Potter movies.

Today isn’t an excellent day to blog about, but a day that gives me some hope because I have discovered this piece of music & nostalgia once more:

Election results have shown us that the party which forms the current Government will continue to remain on the Government side of things. Which to me tells me that we need a reassessment of the Opposition and a lot more grassroots campaigns than we currently have. If AOC can do it, we can. And we should. Maybe it’s time to think about that as a path I legitimately want to take. Or to think about models of viable political participation which can make a real difference to the people around me – at the very least.

I was at a relative’s house and got fairly bashed by my mother (who enjoyed the day tremendously). What I enjoyed though was traveling with her on the metro and managing to reach from one end of Bangalore to another end of the city (aka my house) in about an hour and 30 minutes. Which is fantastic.

We shall talk of more pleasant days to come in the future, I hope. I’m also avoiding or trying to avoid partisan media and twitter for a while. Let’s see how that pans out for me.

I visited my alma mater in an auto rickshaw today. Yep.

The lack of transport from my house is becoming a more apparent problem as days pass by so here I am. A 25km auto ride. Honestly, who needs those all-body massage chairs when these kind of rides exist? All you need is a high frequency of the auto rides and you’ll be golden. (not literally of course)

This was my first visit back to school in two and a half years. I spent a really good 5 years at the place, and in my first years of college, I visited every time I was back in Bangalore. I was in touch with what was happening around the school, I kept in touch with my faculty, and I ensured that I attempted to be a proactive alumni – as best as I could with a base outside of the city. But as the years went by and my internships took me to other parts of the country, the visits became few and far between, and moreover, a lot of the people I wanted to visit in school stopped being there. It didn’t make any sense to me to be going back. Soon the last batch of juniors I had an actual connection with, graduated – so it didn’t feel like we’d have any purpose traveling all the way there. And well, we planned meet-ups with our faculty outside of school, and those plans always worked just fine. We got all the nostalgic feels we needed in those short doses you need them in.

So this time my friend and I thought it was worth going back – because of the time-gap, and because we had heard a lot had changed. The only way to measure that was by visiting. And thus the trek began.

Sitting in the auto, a wave of nostalgia swept across me as I saw foam flying across and out of Varthur Lake. That was the very same thing that had entered our buses when we were children: the pollutants from industries close by, and the very same smell that disrupted my slumber for 3 minutes as we crossed the bridge each day. Every day before we left school I said a silent prayer for there to be no traffic on the bridge specifically, because every extra minute we spent stuck there meant an extra minute my siesta was disturbed by – and that wasn’t a cost I was comfortable with.

The security guard stopped us at the gate – because it was so uncanny to let an auto into campus, but he smiled and let me in as soon as I said I was an alumni who wanted to visit. After that, once my friend arrived, the nostalgia really kicked in.

Cosmetically, a lot has changed. There are fewer open spaces than I remembered, and there are a lot more people. Children somehow look smaller than I thought they would, and a lot of my faculty have aged (time is a wondrous thing). My time at school now adorns the walls – telling stories of batches gone by and the legacy they’ve left, and the present set of kids don’t know anything about who we are and what this space means to us. But as my friend and I took steps around school, all we could recount was the memories we had at each individual location – whether it was peeing in a particular washroom, or throwing water at people outside classes, finding weird stuff in lockers, or even hiding tennis balls in CPUs. Every place in school was special for some reason, and seeing others having the opportunity to make their own set of memories at those very same spots, was wondrous.

What was fantastic was spending time with the people who taught us – and what’s left of that lot, in the same place they taught us at. Meeting up outside of school doesn’t give you that effect.

And well, the joy of meeting the administrative staff you interacted with everyday and the people who made the school tick: the mess head, the IT head, the lab technicians. Those were the best times.

Most of all, what hit my friend and I today was how much we missed the third idiot who was stuck with us – who formed a little trio collective of our own. Who is now sitting in a timezone far away and sending us photos of beaches as we prepare for exams.

Apart from the trip to school I met up with a friend over ghee roast: the coastal Gods’ gift to mankind.

Today’s been another fun day.

The mothership has landed which means that my days of heightened responsibility and incredible debauchery (such as eating a tub of ice-cream) will now be few and far between.

It’s always nice to see your parents after a couple of months. Home now feels more occupied which is lovely, and literally having a day to spend with someone in the house makes me think back about all those days of doing nothing in Grades 7 through to 12 that I had the good fortune of enjoying. I have, in characteristic fashion, decided not to get out of the couch today, and I have promptly been sent to the gym. So things are looking up for me – and perhaps the fitness agenda can take shape (as can I), slowly. But surely.

I did also cook up a fine meal – which means that my mother was able to sit in the kitchen and give me instructions without taking control of things from me – which I consider an achievement. And it tasted lovely.

Today’s been another nice day.

I misspelt forty while writing the title of this post – spelling it as “fourty”, because of course, that is how my brain remembers the number.

Today’s been a fantabulous day that I’ve spent out of my home for the most part. I caught up with a good friend of mine from school for lunch – where we ate starters at one place, and went out for pizza at another place for main course. And then I met up with another close friend for dinner. In the interim, I sat at a coffee shop and spent my time thinking. Apart from exploring the length and breadth of MG Road, and figuring out the cosmetic changes to the place from when I last interned there.

Bangalore fascinates me because of how miniscule the changes are from visit to visit. It’s really hard to pinpoint them, because they’re progressive changes – and then all of a sudden, in one of my visits, the entire landscape of a place shifts. Like with the old Opera House which Samsung now operates the coolest showroom I’ve ever seen out of. The facade around it was there for a very long time, and you could see incremental changes from the outside, but you never really knew what was up and what it was honestly going to shape up like. The bigger concern was whether they’d retain elements of the old Opera House when they built this thing. When I saw it for the first time, I was pretty shook, so to speak – because it was beautiful. The vibe was very nice.

Meeting with friends on this trip has happened a lot – and my social commitments are things I don’t shake off in Bangalore. But I feel like internships helped with that because I was only booked in the evening and I had to be home for dinner on as many days as possible (for the comfort of home food) – so I did 20 plans in 30 days or such. Now with my full day free, I’m averaging 2-3 plans a day, which I think is ridiculously wild. But such is life and I am now a raging party animal in Bangalore. I’ll cut down on it when my mum comes, I’m sure.

I haven’t posted anything on the blog for the past two weeks because the 2nd of June was a surprise event I was helping prepare for. I did maintain the blog on a Word file though, so here’s a rewind catch-up for everyone who is interested.

Growing up I found it impossible to believe people who said and claimed that the place I lived wasn’t in Bangalore. I hardly met these kind of folks, mostly because everyone who studied at my school was on this side of town – but when I did, a strong sense of pride crept into me – and I defended my part of the city with all the gusto and energy I could muster. You see, the exclusion of where I stay from traditional city limits was very condescending, because it assumed that one part of the city was superior to other parts of the city.

Today, I must admit, though – that I felt like a lot of people were right. I am well outside of Bangalore’s traditional city limits. Where it hurts the most at the moment is my heart – because I’ve had to go through the painful experience of admitting that, but the connectivity here is abysmal at the moment. I’ve just had my plans for the day, which was to meet up with an old friend of mine, tank and burn in front of my eyes because I was unable to secure any modes of transportation for a good one hour. No private buses, no public buses, no autos, no cabs, nothing, nada, zilch.

Today is a sad day.

But, as always, in this summer of surprises, we shall attempt to convert everything to a positive. And as with today’s plans tanking, I have found a great opportunity to eat mango ice-cream and watch all the Harry Potter movies again. Aside from that I’ve cooked tomato rice and I’ve made paneer makhani for dinner.

All is well once more.