Bangalore again.
Bangalore, colloquially known as the AC city. The city of a perennial cool breeze, cloudy skies and a very fine weather. The city where you will never complain that its sweaty, or wet, or freezing. The city where everyday the weather is delightful. The city where every day is like the next. Invariably.
Bangalore, the software hub of the country. The city of an Indianized version of an American dream. The city packed cinema halls and IT professionals with serious money to burn. And auto-rickshaw-wallahs and shopkeepers with an eye for that money.
Bangalore, the city of traffic jams. The city where the long transit hours have meant a family life torn out of context, or an office life forced into absurd timescales. The city that has learnt to live with one-way roads that curve like snakes, and yet bear such clinical names as “18th cross”.
And yet, Bangalore, the city of change.
I am here in Bangalore again, the city that was the beginning and the end of so many changes. I look outside from behind glass walls at the Gulmohur, and notice that it doesn’t have any more flowers. I look around me and notice that there are no longer many friends around me. The table I sat at in the summers, surrounded by so many people a colleague, also a Professor, called it a fish market, is now empty. Terribly so, in fact. Isolated, host to a blank computer screen already in disuse, it stands like a ghost, reminding me of what was, and what isn’t any more.
What was, and what isn’t any more, and what could have been but wasn’t. Wild swamps of buried memories suddenly come to life in this eternally unchanging city, and yet the city that played host to a revolution in my life. A relationship that sprang up way too quickly, and still refuses to die. A sequence of friendships that were never quite there, and that showed up cracks in my life and heart. An attempt to be something I can probably never be. A blossoming of hopes followed by a poignant autumn, a relentless winter and a cautious spring. An eternity of life lived between the summer at Bangalore and the winter at Bangalore, and yet the city is still the same. It’s almost as if the blizzards of change have ravaged my heart and soul, and yet have left the city around me mockingly untouched. The city looks back at me through these same glass walls, through this gulmohur and these clouds, and sniggers ruthlessly. Oh it’s you again, it says, and laughs, as I close my eyes and let the flood of a million memories drown me in their wake.
Bangalore, the AC city, India’s silicon valley, darling of the capitalists and software industries. Bangalore, the city that is too much with my memory, that I want to stay away .
