Saturday, April 6, 2013

RTW Trip: Day 30-36 (3/25-3/31) - Bangalore



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).

About Me

I am a man who will go by the moniker dmstorm22, or StormyD, but not really StormyD. I'll talk about sports, mainly football, sometimes TV, sometimes other random things, sometimes even bring out some lists (a lot, lot, lot of lists). Enjoy.