(7 Oct 2013)
During my initial years in
Bangalore, I one morning found a big tree next to R V Dental College in J P
Nagar uprooted due to overnight torrential rains. It pained deep into my heart
to see this happen to such a lovely member of the Garden City, a city with whom
my love affair had just about begun. Many trees and a lot of greenery since
then have fallen prey to the pace of human civilization. We’ve replaced them
with corporate installations, flyovers and underpasses.
We’ve fractured the roads,
dumped garbage dangerously close to some of the most rustically beautiful
lakes, and polluted the air. The chilly evenings now are far too infrequent,
and some of the days could at times make you sweat – something not known to
Bangaloreans! Many households have in the last decade bought themselves fans,
and some have replaced fans with air conditioners. This isn’t the Bangalore I’d
fallen in love with, when I came here to appear for Indian Army’s south
selection board interviews in the pre-final year of my engineering days. I lasted
at the Army camp for all of the five days of the interview schedule. My love
for the city was to last forever.
Bangalore has bangalored me
in ways more than one. It groomed a raw boy into a refined man, it was the
window to the world for me, it gave me a launch pad I could take off from, it
laughed with me and listened to me when I cried, it gifted me friends I could
treasure, it saw me grow through thick and thin, it exposed me to the sun yet
offered balm in the form of experience, it taught me lessons I never knew were
there, it made me emotionally vulnerable yet ensured I grew stronger mentally, it
played with me at its will and I kept enjoying. All this while I was beholding
with joy, the beautiful chapters of my life unfolding and turning over to the
next one. Bangalore has been a reflection of my own successes and failures, of
my achievements and misses, of my laurels and condemnations. It in many ways
has been just like me.
I do not like the traffic,
the roads, the pollution, the dust, the corruption in Bangalore. Yet, there is something
so magnetic, so intense, and so familiar that makes it such a darling. What if even
a ten-minute-rain pushes the traffic off the hook, I could still smell the
watery muddy fragrance while maneuvering in my car. Despite the ever-exploding
population of the city, it has allowed me to create my own little sovereign space
and protect its privacy from external poking. Yes, women today may feel more
vulnerable than earlier, yet it’s a delight to watch all those wonderful ladies
who exert their presence as they wheel away on peppy two-wheelers. M G Road of
course has lost much of its old lustre with the disappearance of some of its
iconic hangout dots, but I see many other areas evolving as the go-to joints
for young Bangaloreans. If a body part of Bangalore is dying every day, another
of its parts is coming alive.
May be this is love, perhaps
blind! But when you’re in love, do you care about the left hand side and the
right hand side equating the brain to the heart?
Live long Bangalore, and keep
bangaloring me.
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