I’ve always wanted to write about this city.
I’ve always wanted to write about this city with as much fascination and awe, as people who write about Bombay or sometimes even Delhi.
And today, I’m doing exactly this.
The concept of normal is often underrated.
It’s the everyday that sometimes matters more than the occasional now-and-then. I’ve spent a good ten years of my life (piecewise discontinuous) in this city, growing up to its mannerisms and attitudes--savouring the warmth that people once showered, and shrugging off the distance that somehow seeped in over the years. Some blame the changing attitudes of the city on the Techies who, with their humongous salaries and decadent lifestyles, have left the common Bangalorean behind.
This, is not a rosy picture. In fact, it’s not even one picture. It is a multitude of snapshots--perceptions, cultures, emotions and varying degrees of warmth--frozen in time, that links one then-boy and the now-older-but-somewhat-wiser almost-a-man to various people.
People here relate to songs more than they relate to other people (this might be the scene everywhere, but that’s not the point), what with our watering holes offering every genre of music and every type of drink for the guzzler to drown himself/herself in. We like our definition of a cosmopolitan culture that spans Headbanger’s Balls’, Alternative, Hip-Hop-and-House, Grooving around, Oxygen bars, Fast food, 5-minute Smoke breaks, Conversations over beer (or conceptions over liquor), Rave parties, Sinful Promiscuities and Sunday brunch.
The average Bangalorean is in the process of perfecting the art of substituting these newly-adopted cultures with happiness, and devouring this happiness like wolves feasting on a multiple-course fine cuisine dinner. And we don’t want anyone to question it, because we’re quite comfortable living out our illusions.
I’m one of the many examples of people who have become an anathema, an antithesis to their own ideologies--the kind of people who look in the mirror and do not recognize the person staring back at them. All we are and all we have become are distant sometimes forgotten memories of goodness, blurs of perception phasing out too quickly, and a purple haze of evenings and nights gone awry… and we just don’t know why.
Every time I look into the eyes of a person passing by, there’s just iciness--icicles of coldness freezing my heart, making me as distant, unsympathetic and as frozen as them--and it blasts out of fur coats and façades. Where’s all the warmth gone?
It’s beyond me to discuss why we are this way, or how did we become this way.
I, am a Bangalorean.
I don’t know. But I pretend to.
I don’t care. And I don’t bother to pretend to.
Life on the highway has exposed me to different cultures--some still intact and untouched by cosmopolitan wants and selfish ideologies; sometimes where it’s seeping in and people refuse to let it take over; and some where its influence is felt to some degree.
When I’m riding for hours at a stretch watching latitudes and the longitudes literally whizz by, and I stop for a tea on the highway, I’m overjoyed to receive a rustic but extremely heartening warmth only people of the first and second types of culture that I have described can provide. And that’s possible only out of the city. Nowadays, I’m happy to sacrifice that warmth for a 150 KM ride to get my coffee at a particular Coffee Day on the B’lore-Mysore highway.
I must admit that I’m not bothered about how long it will be before Bangalore becomes another Bombay or Delhi.
This, is not the story of a small town.
This, is the story of a city in metamorphosis that’s losing its warmth, and fast.
But tonight, it’s not the cold wave of people that bothers me. It’s the weather.
There’s an unnatural chill in the air tonight.
