A Bengaluru Weekend

‘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 12^th 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- 

http://bangalore.citizenmatters.in/articles/a-bengaluru-weekend)