The old Bangalore where life was easy, the air clean and the traffic smooth is gone. What remains is nostalgia, and a struggle for life in new Bangalore writes Bruce Lee Mani.
Ask any old Bangalorean (and I've been here all 29 years of my life now) to write about Bangalore, and you can be pretty sure of what you'll get. This is NOT the place it used to be. No place is, for sure, but over the last decade Bangalore has become something unrecognizable. It's amazing how every other casual conversation in the city is about the nightmare that is traffic.
I used to be a cyclist. There was something deliriously languid about looking up at a canopy of rain trees as you pedalled by, taking a deep lungful of clean cool air. If I looked up and cycled now, I'd be run over before you could say Kempegowda, and that deep breath would probably burn a few holes in each lung.
IT. Just two letters, but they've turned this city into a bristling, overcrowded, polluted, bursting-at-the-seams boomtown. Is there a bright side? Sure, if bright means the harsh neon glow of mushrooming malls and a few more bucks in your bank account (that you can promptly spend at those same malls). I'm sure there are good things that IT has done for the city, but I'm hard pressed to see them amid the hyper-stressful clutter.
But all of this is an old, tired song by now, and one sung by way too many old Bangaloreans, so let's try something else.
Why am I still here? Well, Chennai's too hot and muggy, Mumbai's too manic, Delhi is either too cold or too hot and waaay too aggro, and the smaller towns, well the smaller towns are too Hicksville. All of my work is here. My family is here. And I have nearly three decades of history here that I can still look back on with few regrets.
Clinging on doesn't seem so much like a bad idea. There's always hope – hope that the inept, bungling, corrupt people we vote into power may one day decide to learn the word 'plan' and actually do their jobs for a change. Hope that hybrid-electric cars will replace our gas guzzling ones. Hope that we may all soon work from home. And so on.
Bangalore's still home. And I guess I’ve got enough boiled beans in my blood to grit the old munchers and carry on, sur utta ke. Ask me again ten years from now and we'll see.
Bruce Lee Mani is a musician, writer, and teacher. Guitar player, singer and songwriter for Thermal And A Quarter, he has been an active performer for over 10 years now. He counts himself lucky to be able to work from home and spend as much time as possible playing music. He lives with his wife and one-year-old son in a Bangalore suburb that once allowed him to roller-skate down its main thoroughfare with impunity.
Bruce Lee Mani is a guitarist with a Bangalore-based rock band Thermal And A Quarter.
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