Nightlife in Bangalore (Again

Bangalore is not the first locale to spring to mind when Partying in Asia is discussed. Okay, ladyboy-bars in Bangkok and full moon parties on Koh San Mui and Wanchai late-nights in Hong Kong and the endless flashing lights of Tokyo, this is a given, in these places you may get trashed and have your pants removed, be roofied, have a great time, tell all your mates. Whatever.

But Bangalore?

You must realize that Bangalore, to its great personal surprise, has come into money. Real money.

Bangalore fashioned itself the Silicon Valley of India somewhere in the nineties, and it is perhaps the primary benifacary of the gobs of money coming India's way, after the IT revolution. You know Bangalore even if you don't think you do. Bangalore is where you tech support calls get fielded when your computer farts out or your blow-dryer explodes, Bangalore is where that man suspiciously named "Mark" tells you in broken English that it is human error and they are not liable. Bangalore is where Westerners go to vent their frustration, the mental punching bag of the developed world, why-in-the-fuck-did-you-sell-me-this-thing. Half of Bangalore lives on Western time, and occupies the same time zones that we do, sleeping during the day and spending the night with their cheap plastic ear pieces in hand, listening to us swear at them about our irritated and incontinent vacumn cleaners. There is even literature surrounding the Call Center slaves - see the poorly written but culturally interesting "One Night at the Call Center" as an example.

The call center boys and girls are, of course, only the middle men, the pieces on the board. There is enormous money in Bangalore, ridiculous amounts of money. Software developers and land developers are drawn here, and so are major hoteliers and finance mavens and skeezy guys who want to Make You a Star, IT pros and network gods and Major Industrial CEOS, they've all taken up residence in the cities ever burgenoing, ever expanding skyscrapers and towers. Infosys is the known deity of Bangalore and its biggest company: the "campus," a little outside of town, has taken on the character of a city unto itself and a fine one at that, full of enormous fountains and creative landscaping.

Bangalore was not expecting this. No one was. Bangalore, before, was a sleepy garden city with a lackadaiscal attitude and a few mid-level Raj administrative centers. When IT and technology settled here, and began to transform it, Bangalore's infrastructure was in no way, shape, or form prepared. Considering the circumstances, it's held up remarkably well - better then Delhi - if you're able to ignore the hour long traffic jams at irrational hours of the day, the continual sound of honking horns from autorickshaws and motorbikes, the festering holes in the sidewalk. All things considered, it is the most pleasant major city in India. Bangalore is trying.

"Someday they'll finish the metro," Bangalore residents will tell you, pointing up at the faded cement snake that now looms over half of downtown, patrolled by bored-looking cops up above everyone else. "Someday we'll have a metro."

Yet I love Bangalore. Came of age here in a way. I guess everyone has a pivotal city, where they did a major part of their growing up, exposed some previously unknown or underutilized part of themselves. I had begun life as a somewhat tragically awkward dork with ADHD and an aggressive streak - I came to Bangalore at 19 as (apparantly) a Hot Girl with a penchant for getting myself invited to private parties. It was all shallow and vapid of course. I knew that then, as much as I know that now. (To some extent. This too a need of all intellectal types with a penchant for hedonism: to provide drinking and fucking in fancy clothes with an idealogical underpinning, a reason. We Were Living the Indian Financial Revolution!).

But still it was something different, a look at an India far removed from the filth and maggoty lepers of the Ghandian India, an India with money and confidence, that Knew that It Was Strong. My memories of those days are a bit conflicted - I was depressed and a bit self destructive, as is not uncommon with 19 year old putzes - but still I had a certain, New York-like sensation that anything was possible, that I really could stay here and find something approximating work, that I really could jet off to Dubai with five of my new best friends if the mood struck me.

Coming back to Bangalore was then almost intimidating. I knew I had to find a party because To Party was mostly what I did in Bangalore, the only real way of approaching it. Bangalore is no tourist city, after all. Nothing of much historical or artistic import happened here - there's nearby Mysore for that. It's a city designed for those who work there and those who live there, and if it serves them well, it hasn't got much on hand for the idle. Going to a party or two was going to have to be my job. I dreaded it, a little. I had come off two years in New Orleans and had settled into a pleasant lifestyle of low-budget house parties and low budget booze, of 3;00 AM bicycle rides through the Ninth Ward and standing covertly outside night clubs so as not to pay for them. Sparkly disco clubs, beautiful people, and talk of inordinate sums of money had fallen from my life, had mostly ceased to concern me. Why the hell was I back here? Why was I doing this shit again, when I'd obviously grown out of it?


I had known a guy in Bangalore. At the time there were two warring club-organizer types in town, who stuck to different hotels and clubs and possessed their own seperate marketing structures. They battled to see who could get the most attractive butts through the door on a given night, and they carried out this fight via Facebook, SMS, and irritating leaflets handed out at any restaurant, store, or mall deemed adequately hip-and-trendy. There were two layers to any night out in Bangalore, two barriers to cross. First you had to get on the guest list for any party worth a damn - this was usually executed via Facebook or SMS, and was not a particularly difficult procedure if you knew a guy. Extra points for being white, female, and/or not incredibly ugly (exceptions were made). Second was getting to an after party, because the after party was where all the magic actually happened, pool-side negotiations and covert ass grabs and the consumption of Hennessey, all that shit. There's a powerful conservative faction in Bangalore, and clubs are required by law to close up at 11:30. That's when everyone scrambles to tumble into luxury cars and find themselves an after party, a sort of game of musical chairs played with pretty people in comically tiny outfits and shoes. This usually required knowing a guy too, but exceptions could be made if you were charming or pathetic - and the after parties were the doorway to Knowing a Guy in the first place, really knowing a guy.

The hotel was one of the large corporate edifices in Bangalore, set a little outside of town and conveniently on the golf course. I adjusted my dress and worried some. Perhaps I had grown unspeakably hideous in the intervening years. My loose associations with Bangalore might have failed me - an absence of two years is a desperate eternity in club time, enough time to consign me to the museum, a veritable fossil. I paid up the rickshaw man - embarassing, since it looked like everyone else was pulling up in proper cars - and walked inside. Please god let there be someone I know, I thought to myself, please don't let me sit in the corner and tap my feet awkwardly to the bad music please please please.

Saw the Guy I Knew at the entrance, wearing an Ed Hardy shirt and doling out high-fives. He recognized me immediately. "Faaiinnee! You look just the same!" He slapped the guy with the clipboard (there's always a guy with a clipboard) on the shoulder. "Come on in, come on in." I was on the list: I was issued a stamp on my hand and a few handfuls of free drink coupons.

Everyone I met in Bangalore would tell me in tones of wonderment that I looked just the same and hadn't changed a bit. I wondered and still do if I should be offended by this, as if two years was actually meaningless. The dog died and I graduated from college and I made some new friends. That was two years.

The club room was nicely kitted out and designed, as they all are in Nouveau Bangalore. Dark mood lighting and patterns projected in white on the walls, shifting lights, a soundtrack of thumping and relatively generic house music, lots of people (and most of them women) dancing in the shuffling manner of those early to the party. (One thing about Indians, though - when they get going and are in the proper mental state, they can really dance, dance their brans out, put us Westerners to shame. When they feel like it). It was some sort of Ladies Night type event and they had middle-aged women in saris put up in the corner of the room, doing nail polish and mehndi temporary tattoos. Everyone was drinking Red Bull and Vodka, the power drink of Asia, everyone was eying delicately the cocktail snack armada (oh god will I get fat?). They had a teenaged boy wandering around in a sombrero and a Spanish vest, pouring tequila shots.

In other words, standard-issue Bangalore party fare, really. Another night on the subcontinent. I ordered a rum on the rocks and, as I had expected, stood there. I had to break into a conversation, obviously, and I had to do it fast before anyone noticed me and that I was alone, alone and uncool. I edged crab-like around the little clusters of talking people, listening carefully for something - where could I butt in? Where could I make my new best friends?

Aha. A bunch of youngsters from mostly the USA and Europe, standing over there in their party clothes and looking marginally confused, thinking the same thoughts I did when I first came here - This is India? This is India? I sidled up. I asked The Question, the one all foreigners ask each other.

"So. What are you doing in India?"

"We're with Infosys," one of them replied, a small and very pretty girl who looked Latina. "I'm from San Francisco, she's from New York, he's from France, he's from Nigeria, you know, all over. We're interning for a month or two."

"Fabulous," I said, in my Hi Let's Be Pals voice, "that's really cool." The Second Question. "Do you like India?"

A moment, pause. "It's...different then we expected," the New York girl said. "I mean, better and worse then we'd expected, I guess."

"We're on the Infosys campus, and it is very large. So we do not go to the city so much. It's about 30 minutes away, a long drive." The French guy.

"Ah, but India is interesting," the Nigerian guy said (clad in a Hawaiian shirt). "It is always so interesting."

That's the truth. We chatted for a while - at least I'd established myself with a couple of people. The music sped up and people began dancing less tentatively, the booze was sinking in. I danced with the Nigerian guy - who was pretty good - and the French guy too. I made the aquaintance of a hot and remarkably stoned looking Italian, who was working for a textiles company here. I chatted with a number of young Indian things in extremely tight clothing about the music and how much Justin Bieber sucked. It was raining outside, or had just stopped, and I followed the Infosys crowd to the patio as they smoked cigarettes, and we talked and watched the rain dripping off the banana leaf trees.

11:30; time for the club to clear out, time to shut it down before the cops came in, shouting and waving their bamboo sticks around. This just meant it was time to scramble for an after party. I don't think the Infosys kids knew that this was the game, that no one just *went home* at 11:30. But I was tired, sick of keeping it together. I wanted to go home and surf the internet in my underwear, take off my lipstick. I didn't search for an after party at all. I walked by the lobby and watched everyone else tip-toe in kitten heels to someone's car, but I didn't jump into the fray. I found a rickshaw outside the gates, and we sped home, splashing through endless puddles.

I did okay for not knowing anyone, I guess. When I was younger I viewed the nightlife thing as a competition, a sort of arcade game: how many people can I talk to, how many people can I charm, how many new friends/associates can I leave the evening with? I'd bounce from group to group hyperactively, I'd flash my big white American teeth, I'd cadge free drink after free drink, and flirt massively. That's what the party was for. It was fun.

Now, I don't know anymore. Maybe I got too accustomed to the cheapness in New Orleans, my friends. We'd sit outside on the porch in New Orleans and smoke cigars, swat at mosquitoes, bitch about supply-side economics and foreign warfare. We'd watch a lot of Youtube videos then jump on our bikes to the French Quarter, eat 1.00 truck tacos and stand at the doorways of clubs so they wouldn't charge us admission. You live in New Orleans, you begin to throw away glamour - like anyone ever looked good eating a crawfish. You begin to re-evaluate the notion of the Party, the notion of the competition. (The juxtaposition, too. Grinding poverty in New Orleans and India, and making merry right on top of the squalor, the horror. All of those memories). We spent too much time passing joints by the levee, obviously, the levee where the homeless men would emerge from the bushes and offer us some *real* good shit, where we'd go nuts at 3;00 AM and try to climb the parked barge, sit by our primal little fires and converse. I had been rendered smelly and bohemian. Ruined.

In the rickshaw, I was sad, a little, that it had stopped being fun. At least for now.

Maybe it would be again. And in any case - Bangalore was having fun, India was having fun. The great unwashed were still in the gutter, and the Common Wealth games were going to shit, and the Ayodah judgment was coming down and God knows what would happen, and the monsoon was going to last forever this year - but someone was having fun. Someone was sipping Red Bull and vodka and anticipating something better.

Shravanabelagola: Giant Monoliths, Bigger Rocks

Walking up the to monolith at Shravanabelagola.

Karnataka is a big and remarkably historical state, and one of its primariy attractions are the temples of Belur and Halebid. Curiously enough, these historical and remarkably beautiful places - located not too far from Bangalore - get very little traffic from foreign tourists. Which is a shame. This is Southern Indian art at its absolute zenith, under the creative and artistically inclined rule of the Hoysalas, and it is absolutely worth seeing.

I ended up renting a taxi for the day through the Sumanjay Home Stay, my guesthouse in Bangalore. The proprietress, Summa, and her daughter, ended up joining me. This was wonderful: having locals to interpret and explain everything to me really helped. They're also very interesting and well-read people, and we had a lot of nice discussions in the car about the similarities and differences between American and Indian culture. Intellectually minded Indian friends are worth their weight in gold. The drive up began in the very early morning and provided a nice look at Karnataka's rural and village areas. It is really a uniquely blessed and verdant land, full of swaying palm trees, lush rice paddies, meandering groups of water buffalo and women, women everywhere, threshing wheat in saris and shouting without seriousness at one another from across the road. Granite hills rise up from the pancake flat greenery: these lucky repositories of rock provided the base material for most of the historical wonders of ancient Karnataka.

The Hoysalas ruled the area between the 10th and the 14th century, their kingdom stretching into Tamil Nadu and bits of Western Andhra Pradesh. The name derives from a somewhat doubtful story concerning one of their young and charismatic founders. This young hero, Sala, supposedly saved his beloved Jain guru from a tiger that the two encounter near the Vasantika goddess temple at Sosevur. "Hoy" means "to strike", and so the two were combined into Hoysala. An agricultural kingdom, the Hoysalas operated off a landlord system, and also collected taxes on irrigation systems, marriage, spices, and whatever else seemed apropo. They are best known for their zealous patronage of incredible temple art, and hundreds of their distinctive soap-stone temples remain dotted around the lush tropical landscape of rural Karnataka. The Hoysalas were known for their religious tolerance, and seemed to get along fine with various Hindu sects. There were also a large number of Jains in their kingdom, as is evidenced at my first stop, the sacred Jain center of Shravanabelagola.


A view down the rock.

Shravanabelagola is about 158 KM from Bangalore, and is considered to be one of the most important places to the Jains. The Jains, as most people know, are an ancient religious sect of India with a strenously anti-violence philosophical basis. Cut down to a state of somewhat brutal simplicity, a Jain seeks to use persaonl efforts to move his soul to a state of divine conciousness and liberation, with the eventual goal of becoming a a Supreme Being or jina. Jains today are a prominent and powerful religious minority in India, and their business acumen is renowned throughout the world. There are plenty in my hometown in California.


The town below.

Shravanabelagola is an ancient place of worship situated on top of a strikingly large rock. The name means "White Pond of the Jain Monk", in allusion to the impressive tank that may be seen from the top of the mount. The town has two hills - one has a Basadi built by the Emperor Ashoka himself, though we didn't go there - and the Vindyagiri hill, which is what we are concerned with here. Vindyagiri features a profusion of temples dedicated to various saints and martyrs.


Entry to the monolith's temple.



Vindyagari also contains the 57 foot tall monolithic statue of Bhagavan Gomateshwara Bahubali. The statue is very large and truly striking, albeit in a slightly distorted fashion (his legs are too short). To reach the statue, there are a bit of stairs. Which is a gross understatement, as there are many many stairs, right up the mountain. The powers that be were kind enough to provide some metal railings. The sick and exceptionally lazy can hire four guys to carry you up on a palanquin, though this is more then a bit embarrassing. It was drizzling a little and the stairs were a bit slippery, which added an element of fun and adventure to things.




Bahabuli is a very important figure in Jainism, the second son of the first Tirthankara, Lord Rishabha. As the story goes, Bahabuli's brother, jealous of his money and success, decided to challenge him in battle for the throne, in lieu of entering into a total war. The competition duly arrived, but as the fight began, Bahubali realized that such a battle for resources, against his own brother, was a pointless and repellant act. Instead of striking his brother, he pulled out his own hair, ceding the battle. Afterwards, Bahubali renounced all his possessions and went to live as a solitary hermit - inspiring his brother, Bharat, to eventually do the same.



The reason that vines climb up the statues leg relates to this solitary period. Bahabuli was determined to achieve enlightenment, but his ego refused to allow him to visit his father's court, which was the final hurdle needed to achieve his goal. If he visited his father's court, he'd have to bow down to his 98 brothers, who had taken up the mantle of asceticism before him, and this would be entirely too embarrassing. Unmoved, Bahabuli kept on meditating anyway, remaining so inert that vines grew up around his legs. The saint's worried sisters asked Tirthankar Adinath how he might be helped. The sage replied that Bahabuli had failed to realize that he "was standing on an elephant," which of course represented ego. His sisters promptly went to him and asked him (logically) to please get down from the elephant. After a bit of thought, he realized his colossal error, and achieved enlightenment. In the stories happy ending, he went and reconciled with his father and brothers, and soon became an icon of the Jain religion.


Stone inscriptions outside the temple.

A more obvious question remains. Why the hell is he naked? Well, there are two sects of Jains. The Sky Clad monks (Digamabar) wear no clothes, whereas the Svetambar monks wear only white. Digambara monks don't consider themselves nude: they are literally wearing the environment around them, and they feel this is entirely adequate for their needs. The monolith here of Bahabuli examplifies this ideal. As a result of this, you will see a remarkable number of naked guys climbing up the stairs to the temple. Try not to stare. (As an aside, a Jain temple is called a Basadi).

The Bahabuli statue is the subject of an immense Jain festival every 12 years. In the Mahamasthakabhisheka festival, devotees gather here in huge numbers to smother the statue in offerings of milk, sugarcane juice, saffron paste, and precious stones, jewels, and flowers, all possessing great symbolism to Jains. The last event was covered live on TV. I imagine this is fascinating to see. The next ceremony takes place in 2018, if you want to make advance plans.



Temple on the hill. There's a number of them built up here, mostly very old. People have been coming up here for a very, very long time.


Excellent rock carving. There's interesting stuff scattered around everywhere here, most of it under-interpreted.



A statue of a female saint.....


The Gulleyaki to be precise.



The Tyagada Kampa, a pavilion housing a pillar. Which is explained below.


Jain saints are big on renouncing stuff. Go figure.


Some nice paintings on the wall. Summa's daughter was suspicious as to their antiquity. Having seen some very vivid rock paintings in the Western USA of great age, I'm more credulous.


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Summa bowed down and prayed briefly at a number of the icons inside the main temple. I didn't pay this much (if any mind) but like many of my Hindu friends do in such situations, she felt a need to qualify herself. "You must think me very religious," she said, as she got up.

"And I'm not - but Hinduism is all encompassing, you know. It's not really a religion, more of a way of life." The icons inside the temple are very old and weather-blackened, and have offerings from various passerby slowly rotting in front of them.

"We Hindus can pray to anyone we feel we should pray too," she said, her voice tinged with a bit of pride. "There are not many rules."

The men at the front don't technically charge to enter the sanctuary, but you are prompted to give a Donation. You will receive a polite but extremely disdainful look if you don't give. First timers in India's religious and historical places are often shocked and a bit disgusted by these overt displays of capitalism in a theoretically holy place, but it doesn't bother me over-much. All religious organizations and localities operate by some form of a tithing or donation system: so what if these guys are out in the open about it?


Lovely orange gecko on the rocks. Don't ask me for the species.

After Shravanabelagola, it was time to make for the temples at Belur. Next blog post.

Lalbagh Gardens: Greenhouses, Feral Dogs, Somewhat Relaxing

Lalbagh Gardens is one of Bangalore's green centers, and it is also a source of sanity for a large proportion of the area's people. Lalbagh has stands of flowers, a surprisingly mostly-clean lake, an old English greenhouse, and a general air of orderly greenery that is sorely needed in the traffic-choked heart of the city. It is also Bangalore's supreme make out point, giving the young and amorous of the city a chance to wander through the grass, hold each other's hands, and maybe even kiss surreptitiously if no one's looking. It's hard to be an Indian teenager.



A nice enough temple near Lalbagh. If someone could tell me what this kind of structure is generally called, I'd be most grateful.

Tipu Sultan can be credited for Lalbagh. Like many Muslim rulers, Tipu was inordinately fond of gardens and flowers. His father, Hyder Ali, began Lalbagh, but it was Tipu who finished it off, designating it as a protected place in the midst of the at-the-time mid sized town. Bangalore grew around Lalbagh, and the English appreciated it too: they erected the classic-style greenhouse in the park's center.



There is a very big rock in the middle of Lalbagh. It's one of the highest spots in Bangalore, and accords decent views of the cities admittedly not super-prepossessing skyline. If you look the other way, there's a (usually smoking) trash heap. Well, you know. India.



There really are an unusual amount of bird species in Lalbagh, which is impressive for a very urban center. Then again, birds seem to have adapted remarkably well to India's urban localities - you see immense vultures and remarkably pretty little green parrots feeding off trash (or bodies, in the vultures case), perching in people's somewhat emaciated looking backyard trees, and generally going about their business.



I usually avoid stray dogs in India - I'm not too keen on getting rabies - but the dogs in Lalbagh are generally extremely friendly and thus hard to ignore. I recall a torrid but sadly brief love affair with the friendliest stray dog ever here, a few years back. I hope she's still around. The paucity of stray dogs in the USA often shocks Indians. "But where do the dogs go? What do they do all day?" they ask. Well. We usually just give them lots of Puppy Prozac....


Indians love to eat cucumber with chili and salt on them.



Indians like to venerate trees. This is no exception. Indeed, the Peepul is of course the Bodhi tree under which the Buddha himself sat. King Ashoka's son and daughter are said to have brought clippings of the original Bodhi Tree (in Bihar) to Sri Lanka, preserving it after the original died.



The English style greenhouse, one of many Raj-era nods to the Homeland. The greenhouse is of course totally out of sorts with the rest of Bangalore, but I think it functions well as a metaphor. The English wanted to replicate their homeland, their climate, and their foliage wherever they went. It was for this reason that they built up the cool weather and intensely Anglo hillstations in Mussorie, Darjeeling, and Shimla. It was why they stubbornly refused (mostly) to adopt native dress, sticking to wool and cotton clothing that proved uncomfortable and downright dangerous in the Indian heat. They brought over their food, they brought over their language, and they brought over their modes of etiquette and their mail system and thousands of other things beside. (They also brought over some thrilling new venereal diseases, but let's not get into that). The greenhouse stands for all this: it is a glass house made to enclose delicate Continental flowers, it is a contained ecosystem with no relation to the immense and seething India all around it, it is controlled and orderly and gentle. Or was.



Now, of course, the Indians have got it. It is not used for much, although there was a swiftly rotting Independence Day flower arrangement stuck inside this go-round.


Riotous tropical flowers.

Lalbagh also has a considerable amount of cultivated flower species - exotic and local- that are maintained by a small army of dedicated gardeners. It's nice to wander around the rows of flowers and attempt to ID what they are.



The other big attraction of Lalbagh is its lake. It's quite a lovely lake, especially consdering that it is located inside a park in a major Indian city. If one overlooks the occasional patch of suspicious and trash-related bubbles, it's possible to imagine one is somewhere else entirely. There's a surprising number of storks, herons, and other wading birds here.


I love India's occasionally worrisome efforts at public art.

There's a rose garden in Lalbagh, but you can't go inside it. Mustn't pick them. At least you can walk on (or roll on, or play on, or eat) the grass here. I spent a summer in Beijing, once, and grew desperate for the sight of a tiny patch of grass in that grey and highly polluted city.



I went to one of the former Imperial parks and managed to find myself a tiny, table-sized spot of grass, the only one I had come across for weeks. I promptly sat down on it and opened a book. Two minutes later, a young and apologetic looking park attendant came by, and shooed me off. "It's not for sitting on," he explained, "just looking." I could have cried.

But that is beside the point. There is grass here, and it is good.



Lovely and glossy black millipedes in the heart of the park.

Queen's Restaurant: Good Bangalore Punjabi eats

Queen's is a bit of a Bangalore institution. Located on Church Street in a weird mud-brick paneled room, complete with simulated cave-art, it definitely doesn't look like much from the street. I passed by it multiple times in a state of extreme suspicion during my first trip to Bangalore, passing it off as one of the city's multiple bacteria-farms. Good thing I was assigned to write about it. Queen's has some of the tastiest no-frills Punjabi food in the city, and it has a weird sort of charm - especially at night, when they break out the candles and the Carnatic music. The Church Street people watching? Even better. (You probably never imagined that so many young, drunk, and rowdy IT professionals existed in one place, but folks, Bangalore is it.)



It's a Punjabi place and by default, they have good tandoori items. I like the murgh tandoori here a lot. It's very tender, the spice combination is forward but not in your face, it isn't coated in over-exuberant yogurt (which masks the flavors) and there's plenty of it. These were not anaemic birds in life. The addition of a candle inside a tomato is totally delightful. More of my food needs to be served to me flaming. They also have some kathi kebabs and tandoori paneer here, for the veg inclined.



Sarson ka saag is on offer here, along with the traditional parathas. Well, only in season. The mustard greens aren't available fresh this time of year in Bangalore, but plain ol' palak proves to be a tasty second-runner up. Also: it is completely impossible to take an appetizing or sexy picture of palak. I mean, come on. Just look at it.



Aloo gobi is another good rustic Punjabi dish, and they do a fine turn with it here. Good cauliflower to potato ratio, a nice cinammony spice mixture, and most importantly, it doesn't come out doused in oil. This is a dry curry the way it *should* be.

They also do an excellent daal makhani (black daal with pounds of ghee) and very tasty butter garlic naan here.

The Bangalore City Market, The "Real" India,

The Bangalore City Market (some of it).

So. In a Facebook controversy of sorts, I had been accused (fairly gently) of doing India too plush this time, of avoiding the Real India. Now, the Real India concept is one that I find vastly irritating, mainly because it seems to escape the lips of everyone in the West who has been to India, is thinking of going to India, or has ever even vaguely noticed the base existence of India.

I took the Real India question to a number of Indian friends of mine. My Indian friends, I hasten to add, are definitely not what you might define as salt-of-the-earth types. They're uniformly well educated, hold down good jobs (or have done so in the past) and have generally traveled at least somewhat, either nationally or internationally. No, these are not the people of Mumbai hovels, Calcutta orphanages, or Bihar's baking and miserable plains. However, all of them, every single one, took serious umbrage to the notion of a "real" India.


Apples for sale at the market.

As a friend of mine observed: "Why do Westerners think the Real India is something out of Slumdog Millionaire? What, am I not a real Indian because I have a BA and I don't live in a hut? Where the hell do you people get these ideas?"


Flowers at the market.

I suppose it's wrapped up in the Western, educated notion of Authenticity Tourism. In other words, we want to get away from the beaten track and tour-buses sort of travel and get at something real, touch the heart or the soul of a country in a fashion closed off to the average and lazy-minded tourist. This is, I think, a noble goal. But I also think that this goal causes some Westerners to point-blank dismiss all that is not gritty, difficult, and mildly disturbing about India (or any developing country) as "not real" enough for them. As I overheard while in Sikkim, a little-known and incredibly attractive and well-maintained area of India: "Yeah, I mean, I like it here...but it's so Westernized. So clean."

The Sikkimese had better knock that civic pride and prosperity shit off if they want to draw the Western bohemian tourist set, apparently. Maybe they should import some starving children and leprosy-ridden beggers from nearby Calcutta to jazz the place up.

This notion that a clean, safe, and functional place is somehow "false" is, to put it plainly, a load of hooey. And highly offensive to the Inspiring Native People to boot, who are often extremely proud of what they've achieved in just those areas of cleanliness, safety, and functionality.

Think of it this way. When you receive friends from overseas or out of state, do you immediately drive them to the nearest ghetto-area (and there are plenty, even in the USA) to show them the "real" America because your nice house and interesting neighborhood somehow lack "authenticity"? Somehow, I doubt it.

Now, I think that a tourist should take it upon themselves to get out of the "nice" areas and officially sanctioned tourist areas. Slum tourism is a sticky moral issue in my book, but it seems to work for some. Volunteering is another popular, if somewhat controversial, way of getting at a reality not accessible at the immediate surface. These are things that are good. But they are not the only things.

I refuse to buy that you are somehow being a decadent and ignorant Westerner if you occasionally skew towards the "nice" end of the tourist spectrum, even in developing countries. If staying in a safe hotel that is refreshingly bed-bug free and avoiding cheapie night-buses is a flagrant denial of the Real India on my part, then, well, I suppose I am guilty as charged. To quote Anthony Bourdain, I guess I am a mere tourist and not a traveler.

Another surprisingly uniform thought emerged from my Indian friends.


Dried fruit cart.

"There's no such thing as a single India. You can't define a Real Indian, or even a stereotypical India. India is a bunch of different things mashed together, more so then anywhere else." In other words, there is no Real India (just like there is no Real America) and you are out of luck if you intend to find it somewhere untouched and off the tourist-track. There is no real India, and the notion will set off a fiery and impassioned debate if put to a group of Indians pretty much anywhere.

That is one blanket stereotype about Indians that is 100% true. They are incredibly argumentative).

But anyway. I was feeling guilty about this Real India thing, and so I decided to go out and have a look at the closest thing wealthy Bangalore offers to the Real India of tourist and literary fame. I headed to the Bangalore City Market.


The market building.

The City Market is technically located inside an ornate and lattice work-ridden building in the center of town. This is not actually the case, because the Market is an enormous and tentacle-bearing organism, an organism that has spilled out of its original surroundings (if it was ever contained by them) and has grabbed at most of the neighborhood nearby.


The City Market is nearish to Lalbagh Gardens, but it is easy enough to tell when you're almost there: the automobile and hardware shops increase in numbers, a lot of signs in Arabic and people in white robes appear, and the number of free-roaming cattle and women carrying stuff on their heads increases exponentially. Congratulations, you've made it to the Market.

I like the Market for a few reasons.


Pomegranates at the market.

The first is that the Market clears up a number about mysteries about the operation of Bangalore as a mostly-functional civic unit. The Market is, to put it simply, where most stuff comes from.



Ever wonder where your neighborhood fruit guy gets his stuff? (yes, the one who shouts about fruit while wheeling about his cart at 6 in the morning, turning your thoughts to murder, that guy.)



Why, of course, he goes to the local pineapple wholesaler, who crouches spider-like in the middle of what looks like a pineapple massacre, and sells his stuff to all comers. There's other Guys for all manner of other fruits: bananas, melons, pomegranates, apples, custard apple, guava, you name it, it's here. Don't ask where it came from.




Many restuarants in Bangalore serve their thalis on banana leaves. Paan sellers also use smaller leaves to wrap their mildly narcotic goodies up in. Well, this is where they get them. From this lady. Let's pretend they are given a good chemical bath before coming to the table. (That's a good one).



I am endlessly fascinated by these enormous cones of spices and sandal-paste. I have no idea how they are made or how they manage to stand up like that, without losing their structural integrity. If someone can tell me how this is done, I'd be very grateful.



Ever wonder where the endless, endless buckets and mounds and bags of flowers used for puja come from? Well, here. The Central Market may be better termed the Flower Market, for that is the good that now dominates the entire central area of the building.



It's an absolutely magical sort of place - the corriders are small and incredibly crowded, and you squeeze through as if conveyed by an outside force, shoved along in the crush of bodies, past stall after stall of fresh and heavily scented flowers. The flowers mask the usual India scent of body-odoer and cattle dung, or at least they mix it up and turn it into something more roundly appealing.



The boys at the stalls shout when you go by and hand you armfuls of roses and marigolds: I am totally inept at tucking them behind my ear in the demure fashion of the South Indian girls, but I do them the honor of trying.



The flowers are everywhere being fashioned into garlands, piled into immense structures, or crushed into the ground by the millipede-like churn of a thousand almost conjoined feet. You come in and out of the flower trading area very quickly mainly because you are not able to stop moving, not unless you find something sturdy to hold onto, an anchor in the sea of chlorophyll.




The first time I came here, I was somewhat terminally stoned. The combined effect of the flowers color and scent and the constant movement of the selling arena was, well, psychedelic. You might want to try it. It's not like half of the sellers aren't stoned themselves, you know.




The flower market's best aspect is from above. If you walk up the stairs, you'll find yourself with a fantastic view of the action below. Great photo ops. You tourist, you.



A lot of people in India like it when you take their photo. You have to be careful about this - it's often a scam involving pay-per-snap moolah in touristy areas - but is usually an entirely authentic request in places like the Market. This old lady just wanted to see what she looked like these days. Like this. There was some gesturing in broken English and Hindi afterwards. I recall that I got a marigold out of the deal. Life goes on.



There's quite a few restaurant supply stalls up here. If you ever wondered where you might acquire a karahi big enough to cook a reasonably-sized person in, well, here you are. Not that anyone would ever want to do that.



The Mosque near here. This and Commercial Street are the more "Muslim" parts of town, which is apparent enough judging by signage and what people on the street are wearing. I was in Bangalore at about the height of Ramadan, which meant the faithful were taking especial pains to play by the rules.



India is defined by its street-side food sellers, isn't it? What a shame that us Westerners are advised to stay away from the street-stands, for fear of stomach bugs and possible death. Tragically, the warnings are extremely sensible. But what tasty looking stuff is on offer.