‘Wish you a wonderful weekend’,
screams the DJ on FM as my car labours its way through the serpentine traffic.
For the happy weekend to begin I must get home first and so must the lakhs of
office-goers. But Friday evenings are not like any other. Now I am at the nerve
centre of the city, ‘Majestic’ which is bursting at its seams. People are
scrambling towards the KSRTC bus stand on their weekend journey towards home or
‘native’. To other parts of Karnataka, to Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra, or to Telangana.
Private buses are parked haphazardly along the roadside and travellers have no
other option but to cross the road hither and thither. The city bus station
looks the same, just how it was in 1993 when I was in college but the
population has doubled. Did we hear somebody say that Bengaluru will be
transformed into London or Singapore? Or is it about Mumbai? Whatever.
I drive past Majestic and head
towards Malleshwaram, past the ever-ongoing Metro works (will it ever end?) and
hit the Sampige road. Almost home now. After suffering another ten minutes of
violent struggle of vehicles to get the better of one another, tympanum-shattering
honking, I am at the pearly gates of the heavenly campus of Institute of Wood
Science and Technology. I know that I am fortunate to stay in this forested
part of the city which does not feel like Bengaluru one bit. So, the best part
of my weekend is staying at home and when push comes to shove, driving or
walking within the Malleshwaram ward boundaries.
My children can never be put to bed before 11
on Friday nights. They have the liberty to sleep till they get bored the next day.
The riotous gang of kids is late to raise dust on the cricket pitch and a
hapless kitten in the neighbourhood is allowed to loll freely for a little
while more. I am certain that the kitten despises the weekends when the kids
are always after its life and must be welcoming Mondays with a sigh of relief.
Then it is the time for ‘special
weekend classes’. Music, abacus, computers, dancing, singing, cricket coaching,
painting and what not. We all are in a frenzied hurry to make our children what
we are not or could not. A couple of months back when my son Adithya pestered
me to allow him to join a cricket coaching centre, I was not amused. I
remembered my childhood in the 1980s when one Sunday morning, me, my brother, a
cousin and another friend-owner of a cricket kit, gathered at the school
playground. We reverentially touched and felt the pads, gloves, leather ball,
bat and then put on the gear and experienced the thrill of playing cricket just
like the real players on TV! These days every fourth kid in the neighbourhood
carries the hope of his parents to become the next Tendulkar which is manifest
in the overcrowded grounds. It is near stampede like situation with small
armies of cricket enthusiasts in whites practicing in the limited spaces of
shrinking playgrounds. Incidentally, I am not entirely unhappy that Adithya’s
interest in cricket is waning fast!
Malleshwaram ground in the weekends is a sight
to behold. Once I counted at least 25 cricket matches going on simultaneously
which means a total of fifty teams. In such a scenario it is extremely
important for the players to concentrate on their match. You blink longer and then
you may end up catching a ball hit by a batsman from another match, inviting
angry protests! Many a matches have been lost when an excellently executed shot
has been stopped by a third party player preventing a four. Similarly, many run
out have been effected due to unintentional deflection. When the ball is struck
along the ground, it is highly unlikely to reach the boundary what with
hundreds of pairs of legs moving in all directions! One interesting thing I
observed while watching the matches here is that most of the bowlers chuck and
only a few bowl the genuine way.
An evening stroll along the Sampige
or Margosa road is not without its usual rewards. Benne dose at CTR is one and
Vada at Veena stores is another. Now there is an excellent ‘bye two kaafi’ in
front of CTR! We walk past the Adigas hotel and cross the Saibaba temple.
Weekends are not the rush hours here but Thursdays. Some devotees stop their
vehicles almost in the middle of the road and try to get a long-shot darshan. Never
mind the pile up of vehicles behind. Bhakti comes first.
The Malleshwaram market on the 12th
cross will transport you to a perfume factory with an array of beautiful and
fragrant flowers on display. The market has a diverse and exotic collection of
vegetables. But the prices of greens is a scam here. I have found the rates of
cauliflower, beans and okra at least twice that of what we find in Hopcoms. Of
course, the vegetables look fresh, clean and shiny green but I am sure that
each piece of an edible item has at least two percent of its weight of
chemicals on it. I avoid them scrupulously.
Now that the market has been razed
to the ground, the sellers are completely on the footpath and also on the roads
with their wares. They say that a multi-storey shopping complex is coming up soon.
Hmmm, may be in a decade.
Weekends are not the best of times
to walk the footpaths of Sampige road. The crowds are like ants on a candy
stick. Between tenth cross and sixth cross you cannot walk without brushing against
others. Occasionally during these wanderings I see a drama enacted by police
with sickening regularity. Some officer is about to arrive to inspect the
footpaths. There is a mad and desperate rush by the hawkers on the footpath to
collect all their belongings-flowers, trinkets, bags, dresses, toys, cut
fruits-and then they run towards the awning of adjoining buildings two steps
away. There they wait with trepidation for the rage of the policemen to subside.
The police scream at them, occasionally landing a couple of blows with their
lathis on the merchandises but rarely on people. The officer arrives in a jeep-does
not usually get down-and slowly drives away. Then it is business as usual for
the hawkers. You discuss the problem with the hawkers and they reveal that it
is all part of a drama. The ‘maamoolu’ anyway has to be paid to the police.
There are no prizes for guessing the most efficient hafta collection system in
the country.
A routine round of vegetable shops
and a couple of provision stores and we are back home. Praneetha has the garden
work and tending to her roof-top vegetable orchard to keep her busy. By the way
‘oota from your thota’ (food from your kitchen garden) feels great and is also
chemical-free. Occasionally I roam around the campus with a camera. Bengaluru
has grown so much over the years and so haphazardly that it is a punishment to
travel from one end of the city to another, especially to meet relatives and
friends. I stay at home and console myself by saying that everybody needs their
break to relax after a hectic week.
The weekend is over before it even
began, or so it feels.
(You can also read the blog here-
