Askew: A Short Biography of Bangalore

Author: George, T. J. S.

• am struck by man’s unceasing struggle to make order out of chaos and the way he ends up making chaos out of order.

• Behind New York’s geographical logic, however, less edifying features lurked. The city’s urban glory was the handiwork of two men—Fiorello La Guardia, its three-time mayor (1934-1945) and Robert Moses, an official who carried the title of parks commissioner but who wielded supreme power for forty-four years under various mayors.

• A city is a living, throbbing organism with a soul of its own and, it would often seem, a thinking mind. Cities have memories and dreams, they nurture ambition and bemoan failure. Like individuals, cities derive their character from the values associated with them.

• With zero natural resources and not enough people to develop a market for opium, the British decided to turn Hong Kong into an entrepôt and financial centre.

• The cliché about Hong Kong was that it was run by the Jockey Club, the Hong Kong Bank and the governor, in that order.

• It is perhaps woven into the texture of the human mind to build and enjoy, then to overbuild and suffer, then to collapse and complain, and then to become argumentative about what happened.

• Naseeruddin Shah was trying to be nice when he described Bombay as ‘the mother-in-law of all Indian cities’.

• Architect Hafeez Contractor, with a permissible touch of exaggeration, said that Patna had become like Bombay’s Dharavi.

• By building new homes for the arts, by providing architecturally outstanding neighbourhoods, by remodelling blighted areas, modern cities add value to the quality of life threatened by continuous urban overdevelopment. This happens when there are refined

• By building new homes for the arts, by providing architecturally outstanding neighbourhoods, by remodelling blighted areas, modern cities add value to the quality of life threatened by continuous urban overdevelopment.

• With politics and existential pressures dominating life in India, our metropolises grew without compensatory avenues for people to nurture their sensibilities.

• Even as I embraced the glorious city I found in the 1980s, I heard earlier residents grieving over the lost glories of the Bangalore of their times.

• They would tell me how in the 1950s telephone numbers were in easy four-digit configurations, how the city bus services went to outlying areas like Hebbal and Banaswadi only on Sundays, and how an air ticket from Bangalore to Bombay cost 285, return. For special effect, they would add that there was once a gun shop on South Parade, today’s M. G. Road.

• Circumstances influence our minds, helping us to ignore a problem here and adjust to an irritation there. H. G. Wells summed up a whole philosophy in three words when he said: ‘Life begins eternally’.

• Appropriately enough, Whitefield began as a white enclave. The European and Anglo-Indian Association only had to ask and the Mysore government in 1881 allotted 4,000 acres to the east of Bangalore for them to establish a settlement. Eventually, they retained only 542 acres because they could not raise the money to develop the rest.

• Agricultural farms and a few dozen residences constituted the settlement they named after D. S. White, the founder of the original association in Madras. A couple of churches and a school completed Mr White’s field.

• The techie population along with the supporting service multitudes began to choke Whitefield because, as usual, providers of civic amenities refused to notice that something was happening in the area.

• In September 2016 as many as eight schools pooled their resources to install traffic signals at some of Whitefield’s notorious intersections; they had faced a desperate situation with children taking five to six hours to reach home from school.

• The real estate mafia arrived in a frenzied rush, their grip on Sarjapur becoming as Dhritarashtrian as their embrace of Whitefield.

• Bangalore had etched a narrative of growth at its own pace, producing silk and cotton, then branded beer and rum, and then public sector watches, machine tools and telephone accessories. But information technology changed the nature of the narrative, changed even the city’s name from a noun to a verb; Barack Obama publicly objected to American jobs being Bangalored.

• Actually, history and planning had combined to develop Bangalore, unnoticed at the time, into a hub of futuristic growth. Tipu Sultan himself started it. As early as the 1780s his engineers had invented rocketry, terrorizing the British. The colonizers on their part chose Bangalore as the headquarters of the oldest of the three engineering groups of the British Indian Army—the Madras Sappers. It was this centre that developed the Bangalore Torpedo, a mine-clearing weapon used in the First and Second World Wars and still in the armoury of many armies. Diwan Seshadri Iyer began harnessing waterfalls and in 1904 Bangalore became the first Indian city to have streets lighted by electricity.

• Sir M (as Diwan M. Visvesvaraya was popularly known) did the rest with his slogan ‘Industrialize or Perish’. He invited Walchand Hirachand to start Hindustan Aircraft Factory, today’s HAL, in Bangalore. He also persuaded Jamshetji Tata to set up the (Tata, and later Indian) Institute of Science on 371 acres of land contributed by the Maharaja of Mysore.

• The old agreeable Bangalore was now replaced by an aggressive Bangalore where no one had time for his neighbours. Everyone was chasing success as measured by a new consumerist value system. A gladiator culture took over with the spirit of combat as its perennial feature.

• Politicians and land dealers of modern times were born to different kinds of mothers. In about three decades they filled up 2,000 hectares of lakes, and, in the late 2000s alone, felled 50,000 trees.

• To the average Indian, though, there is no difference between Chad and Rwanda, or Tanzania, Congo, Ivory Coast, South Africa and Uganda. They are all Africans, just as to a great many Uttar Pradeshians, Kannadigas, Telugus, Tamils and Malayalees are all ‘Madrassis’.

• ‘Local people are nice,’ he said, ‘compared to North Indians living in Bangalore. They are the real racists.’

• Hyder Ali found time to create Lal Bagh, one of the finest botanical gardens in the country

• The German botanist Gustav Hermann Krumbiegel turned it into a horticultural paradise.

• The commissioner of Mysore, Mark Cubbon, did so much to enrich Bangalore that the 120-acre Cubbon Park is still known after him despite a patriotic attempt to rename

• The commissioner of Mysore, Mark Cubbon, did so much to enrich Bangalore that the 120-acre Cubbon Park is still known after him despite a patriotic attempt to rename it.

• N. Lakshman Rau. As administrator of the City Municipal Corporation, Rau planned and implemented so many schemes for the public good that he came to be known as the architect of modern Bangalore. His lasting gift to his home town was Jayanagar, laid out in 1948 and still described as one of the largest planned neighbourhoods in Asia.

• If the Jayanagar model had been replicated in Whitefield and Sarjapur, in Electronic City, Hebbal and Yelahanka, the story of Bangalore would have been different

• ‘Bangalore is the IT capital, so SMS keeps it going,’ said V. Ravichandar. ‘SMS. Show Me Suitcases.’

• Pai then went full-time, organizing Green Heritage Tours, Military Heritage Tours, a Medieval Bangalore Walk and so on, usually extending to three hours and costing 500 on average, except for specially customized tours.

• Encroachments went on, obviously with official backing, as 18 commercial complexes, 7 apartment buildings, a government school and a dental college and hospital came up in the area alongside what the mafia always provide as a security trick: 178 temples and a church.

• Big companies like ITI, Bharat Electronics and HMT settled into their own well-planned, self-sufficient clusters where the companies assumed responsibility for their employees’ living quarters and schools and shops. IT tore this system apart. They set up fancy headquarters buildings with no thought to the living and commuting needs of their tens of thousands of employees. With that Bangalore lost the chance for orderly development.’

• IT people represented a kind of fashionable rootlessness. And the way the rootless changed the behaviour patterns of Bangalore created in turn identity problems among the locals.

• We do not have a single subject specialist in our administration. No bureaucrat has the humility to say “I don’t know. I need help to find answers”. Instead they assume that they are authorities on every subject.’

• He said the city ‘certainly has gone askew and continues to do so in the sense of “not in line” with what ought to have been planned and implemented. The only possible reservation against the phrase would be its inherent assumption that the leaders had the vision for a “planned line” in the first place. Unfortunately, they never did have that.’

• The only possible reservation against the phrase would be its inherent assumption that the leaders had the vision for a “planned line” in the first place. Unfortunately, they never did have that.’

• Even the British rulers had confessed that while they were committed to ‘preventing the sale of deleterious liquors in the Cantonment…sale of spirits secretly exists through unlawful channels’. Independence made no difference to the remarkable resilience of the liquor business.

• Its ability to avoid inconveniences such as excise duty remained unrivalled, giving it more camouflaged cash than any other industry.

• Vittal Mallya, the low-profile owner of UB, who went on to make whisky, brandy and rum is credited with coining the classic term Indian Made Foreign Liquor, IMFL. Apocryphal or not, Mallya’s IMFL enterprise grew into the largest liquor company in India.

• UB and Khodays together made Bangalore the IMFL capital of India.

• It is of some interest that if Cantonment’s first industry was liquor, its second was cigarettes. Twenty-three years after Bangalore Breweries opened at one end of Cantonment, Imperial Tobacco Company opened at another end, presumably to save the troopers from the tawdry pleasures of the bidi.

• Unlike Chicago and Bombay where prohibition gave birth to criminal syndicates, Bangalore never experienced prohibition and therefore never saw the liquor industry giving rise to organized crime.

• Sreedhar, the Sartre-Kafka fan who can quote from Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa, runs a tabloid called Agni, writes books and produces movies. His My Days in the Underworld: Rise of the Bangalore Mafia (Tranquebar, 2013) gives a blow by blow account of how Kotwal Ramachandra was hacked to death while sleeping.

• The sense of family, started by Kempe Gowda in the old city and sustained by Anglo-Indians in the early days of the Cantonment, continued as modern business clans rose to the forefront.

• Basavangudi—blessed by the presence of Shiva’s mighty bull Basava in a gudi, temple, of his own.

• (The only neighbourhood culturally comparable to Basavangudi was Malleswaram, developed in 1898 around the seventeenth-century Kadu Malleshwara temple.

• R. K. Narayan joined the two precincts to form Malgudi, the small town where his stories took place.)

• When Mahalaxmi Tiffin Room opened in Basavangudi in 1926, its superior khaali dosai became an instant favourite.

• In the 1930s, attracted by the large number of students in the area, a student canteen opened in Gandhi Bazaar with a name directly aimed at them: Vidyarthi Bhavan.

• But smoking was prohibited in VB, so one set of writers moved to the Circle Lunch Home across the street.

• As the sun showed signs of calling it a day, he would close his desk and set out on his expeditions, saying it was PhD time—Precious Hours of Drinking.

• One evening he took me to a small decrepit shop on a busy one-way street in Malleswaram, a box-like joint squeezed into the space between a used-tyre shop on one side and a maternity home on the other, leaving just about six feet as shop front. A board carried the name Veena Stores. This was the place, YNK said, where you got the world’s best idli-vadai.

• Nearby was the Central Tiffin Room, another landmark where YNK had helped me enjoy the speciality, benne dosai, ‘the world’s best’.

• In his Basavangudi itself was Brahmins’ Coffee Bar, bigger than Veena Stores and more crowded, but identical in the use of the footpath as the dining area.

• A native of Udupi, Madhwacharya (1238-1317), founded the Dvaita school of philosophy as distinct from Shankara’s Advaita. He established eight Brahmin mutts with meticulous arrangements for their upkeep. Himself a good cook, Madhwacharya laid emphasis on developing a school of cooking that would strictly adhere to the sattvik tradition.

• Emphasis on Brahmanic values made an impact across South Canara, one of three districts in the British-era Madras Presidency noted for their high Brahmin population, the others being Thanjavur and Ganjam.

• South Canara, one of three districts in the British-era Madras Presidency

• ‘The overall concept was that forty-eight items should be cooked every day as Lord Krishna’s neivedyam. The main segments of this spread were to be five sweets, five payasams, five fried items, five unboiled items (such as salads), five rasa (such as sambar, rasam), five anna (rice), five vyanjana (pickles, papads) and five jeernakara (digestives such as herbal chutneys). These were not to be repeated each day, a stipulation that forced the chief cooks to become innovators and improvisers, constantly in search of new variations.’ What gave the scheme a touch of genius was that all the preparations were meant to please the Lord. This made it incumbent on all concerned to use the best of ingredients, the best of cooking practices and the best principles of hygiene.

• Woodlands, established by Krishna Bhatta, also known as Krishna Rao and Dasaprakash, started by Sitaram Rao in the 1930s, became iconic Madras symbols of fine South Indian dining.

• Then there was MTR. Founded by Yajna Narayana Maiya, who had already built a reputation as a skilled cook, Mavalli Tiffin Room was situated opposite the main gate of Lal Bagh Gardens. With gentlemen like C. V. Raman and Arcot Ramasamy Mudaliar, then Diwan of Mysore, dining at MTR, this establishment became a historical landmark.

• Then there was MTR. Founded by Yajna Narayana Maiya, who had already built a reputation as a skilled cook, Mavalli Tiffin Room was situated opposite the main gate of Lal Bagh Gardens. With gentlemen like C. V. Raman and Arcot Ramasamy Mudaliar, then Diwan of Mysore, dining at MTR, this establishment became a historical landmark. It was so designed that customers had to pass by an open kitchen and see its sanitized spotlessness before seating themselves.

• When rice became scarce during the Second World War the Maiyas experimented with semolina, leading to the invention of rava idli, a hot staple today in South Indian menus the world over.

• ‘If the rains don’t come when they must, vegetables won’t taste as they should,’

• I learned that the Byadagi chilli from Karnataka could not be substituted for Hindupur chilli from Andhra. Wood fire and the gas stove produced different tastes in food. Clay pots provided flavours that stainless steel vessels could not.

• Under Prabhakar’s direction, a friend opened the first Cafe Darshini in Jayanagar in 1983. Roughly modelled on McDonald’s, it had modern kitchen machinery visible from the public area. In front of it was the counter where order-takers handed over the prepared items directly to the customer.

• There was no furniture other than a new device: an elbow-high pole on which rested a small round tabletop. The customer was to put his plate on the tabletop and eat standing. The only staff in the public area was a cleaning boy who would wipe the tabletop clean as soon as a customer left.

• It occurred to me even Prabhakar could not have possibly provided such a generous meal for 10. So I checked with him. His explanation was that the trick lay in volume and in cost cutting. They were selling about 2,000 barjari meals a day. That led to an economy of scale at which 10 yielded a nearly 10 per cent margin of profit. This was the same approach, he said, that made it possible for ISKCON to provide Akshaya Patra meals for 6.

• By 2 Coffee, as the restaurant was called, opened in a small room in Basavangudi. It offered high-quality coffee and just four dishes: idli, vadai, kara bath and kesari bath. The size of the crowds that dropped in surprised Raghu.

• When Indira Gandhi was defeated in the post-Emergency election and the Janata government assumed power, Industries Minister George Fernandes ordered IBM and Coca-Cola to leave India for refusing to increase the Indian presence in their companies

• Plague hit B