There’s two Indias. (well, there’s more than two, but why let reality get in the way of a good oversimplification?)
There’s this India:
and then there’s this India:
India #1 knows about the existence of India #2, but by and large treats it as a sort of peripheral and mildly regrettable annoyance.
An Indian city (Bangalore being no exception) is an archipelago of type-1 islands in a type-2 sea, and type-1 people travel between them by car, much as a camel crosses the desert, not bothering to count every type-2 grain of sand (or every mixed metaphor, for that matter). For the duration of the voyage, you scroll through your instagram feed on your phone, and pretty much ignore the messy type-2 world outside, even when it raps against your window at the traffic lights.
In my exploration of Bangalore, me and my best friend ChatGPT made a list of neighbourhoods to visit.
On my first day, I took a taxi to MG Road (the first, and most central, neighbourhood on my list), did my bit of flâneuring, and then took a taxi back, in standard type-1 style.
On my second day, I decided to explore the neighbourhood of Indiranagar:
“Indiranagar lies in the heart of Bangalore. It is filled with offices and a jolly crowd of pubs and restaurants. This is an old area of Bangalore that has been evolving over time. You will spot traditional homes and glass-box, modern-style clubs right next to each other. A great mix of culture and age demographic is what Indiranagar is made of.” - The Culture Trip
I could use some of that, I thought, so I fired up Google Maps to check on the drive time, and this is what I saw:
Now there’s an idea, I thought. Why don’t I walk it? After all, I’ve spent the last week stuffing aloo parathas down my gullet, so I could use the exercise. It’s only a couple of hours, a pretty easy hike, and I’ll have earned my beer. And along the way I’ll keep my eyes open, take some pictures, and see what it teaches me.
So I grabbed a bottle of water, and off I set.
First impressions positive! This kind of public facility isn’t something I’m used to seeing in other Indian cities - clean (on the outside at least - I didn’t venture inside) and apparently well maintained, even a jolly Indian flag banner on the top.
Then the road wound around the outside of a large forested area of land, which Google Maps told me was a defence colony of some sort. I later found out that something like 40% of the land in Bangalore is given over to defence use of some kind - the air force and army have large cantonments here. From the satellite view, they look like oases of tranquility, green and spacious and clean. For the most part, their outer walls are a refuge for garbage dumps of one kind or another.
Bangalore is full of little temples like this, some of them open, some of them closed, all of them joyful explosions of colour.
Then, at a major intersection, the entrance to another large defence colony, and the start of a crowded vegetable market.
Yum, herbs of all kinds, and slippers, because obviously the two things go together. I sort of wish I had a kitchen here so I could buy this stuff and learn to cook with it. In my slippers.
Following the route round, entering into an area with lots of small traffic, small houses, and smaller shops. Definitely type-2 territory now.
Bangalore is at the intersection of some of the most amazing cuisines in Southern India - Hyderabad biryani is renowned, and this stall smelled so good it was all I could do to resist and keep on walking. Noted for future reference though.
This street had a plethora of specialist shops, like this one selling packaging.
Wonder what it’s like, sitting there cross-legged selling garlands all day, with the occasional break for a motorcycle ride with your gang of fellow motorcycle-riding flower sellers, I guess to make a raid on the competition in the next village over. Seems like a pretty relaxed sort of life. I can almost see a Tom-Cruise-style movie made about it. You know, Tom Cruise is a motorcycle-riding flower seller, and he’s a pretty good motor-cycle-riding flower seller, until he has a crisis of confidence and can’t sell flowers any more, but then he falls in love with a good-looking woman who talks him into being a better flower seller. Add a laptop and a decent wi-fi connection and I’d be cool with it.
Al-Zam-Zam is what happened to my nostrils when I walked past this place. The smell was AMAZING. Those things in the display case, no idea what they were, but they looked like pies and smelled like samosas, which are two of my favourite forms of nutrition. Nowhere in my philosophy had the idea of a synthesis between these two canonical pastry concepts occurred. Mind. Blown. Again, I exerted extreme self control and kept walking. But I suspect I will be back.
Ah, India, land of contrasts! Right opposite this Hindu temple (to Hanuman, the monkey god) is …
… this shop called the New Fashion Center, doing a roaring trade in…
Those eyes, man… they bored into me like lasers. I came that close to walking in there and buying one right there and then.
Continuing the Islamic theme, the road then wound around the outskirts of a Muslim cemetery:
The border walls of which were, for some reason, lined with the abandoned wrecks of ancient cars, some of them quite photogenic. (as an aside: note the repetition of the term “Zam Zam” - a sequence of letters I had never seen until today, and then it occurred twice. I call this unlikely but oddly common phenomenon ‘the echo’, and like in The Matrix, consider it a signal that I should pay attention).
The artisans that carve the gravestones work on the pavements outside the cemetery.
At the end of this road, an intersection with the entrance to a huge mosque, with some kind of rally going on, and thousands of people in attendance, who had all clearly just been shopping at the New Fashion Center.
I snuck a peek through the railings at the mosque itself, the Masjid-E-Khadria.
Next came a long walk down St Johns Church Road, presumably leading to St Johns Church. Lots of religions to choose from in this town, clearly.
By now I’d been walking for a solid hour, and it was getting dangerously close to lunchtime. As if pre-ordained, what should I clap my eyes on but this:
A not commonly known fact about me is that I consider the humble rotisserie chicken to be one of the highest achievements of human civilisation. In Sitges (a small seaside town south of Barcelona, where I sometimes live) there are not one but two such establishments, one called Super Pollo (modern, profane) and one called La Oca (traditional, sacred); and not a week goes by when we don’t kidnap one (we distribute our business evenly between the two purveyors), spirit it home, and doctor it with various foul adulterants such as Lao Gan Ma, Yuzu Kosho, Shichimi Togarashi, Gochujang, or Patak’s Lime Pickle; and devour it with chips and a bottle of cava.
So imagine my extreme excitement to discover a restaurant that has not only figured out that you can do this with tandoori spices, but actually made it the cornerstone of their business.
Ladies and gentlemen, I present: SKC.
This was one of those moments where the universe fixes you in the glare of its beady eye and says, “OK, Ash, this is it. Are you game? Or are you … chicken?”
The entrance to the restaurant could not have signaled peril more clearly.
But then again, no flight of stairs ever sang a more seductive siren song. It was only ever going to end one way.
And yes, gentle reader, it was every bit what I’d dreamed it would be - effortlessly taking its place alongside the top five meals I’ve had in my life (the nameless roadside hawker in Bangkok, the tiny tantanmen joint near Shinagawa station in Tokyo, Momofuku Ssam bar in New York back in its heyday, Lotus of Siam in a Las Vegas strip-mall, that sashimi at Tsukiji fish market). Face-melting quantities of chilli, but lip-smackingly juicy and tangy and complex on the palate, with just the right blend of salty crunch and greasy slurp. Like being smacked across the chops by a cello playing Bach, then squirted in the eye with lime juice and punched in the neck by a fresh onion for good measure.
This, ladies and gentlemen, was the moment I began to fall in love with Bangalore.
Clearly used to this phenomenon, the other customers studiously ignored my yelps of pleasure.
My only consolation is that the whole experience has been Observed and recorded somewhere in the depths of the SKC database, for the eventual edification of posterity.
Thus fortified, and slightly reeling from the aftershock, I stumbled out back onto the road and resumed my pilgrimage…
… past the aforementioned St Johns Church…
… and this extremely cool, gonzo style LED signage artiste.
Then another long, tree-covered route between two plots of defence land.
Bangalore really is a “garden city” - you feel it in the relatively fresh, cool air (a stable 24-25 degrees all day), and the fact that you can at times see blue sky - something that definitely isn’t true in the North. At the time of writing, the Bangalore air quality index hovers at 75, which isn’t great compared to somewhere like London (1) but is positively oxygen-tank-level when compared to New Delhi (as high as 1500 last week).
Aside from the constant threat of a sneak tank attack, it’s perfectly peaceful.
The next stretch of the hike was relatively sparse, mainly defence land with the odd eruption of a temple here and there.
The first sign that I was getting closer to my objective was this sudden, unexpected crag of type-1-ness jutting out of the type-2 waters around it: a designer furniture and lighting showroom, Roberto Cavalli no less.
It’s an axiom of a certain style of “directed walking” (city exploration guided by an algorithm, a pursuit I enjoy) that small, crowded streets leading at ninety degrees off from large thoroughfares are to be marked “interesting” and explored immediately, especially when marked by murals of controversial religious figures. In London, they mark the entrances to “protected enclaves” in which the city’s true delights are to be found.
And sure enough, a cornucopia of spiritual delights awaited me.
I was continually struck between how the different religions are all nestled together, a grand church right next to the most modest possible little Hindu temple, coexisting in a cheerfully neighbourly manner.
By now I was (like you, dear reader) starting to wonder when this was going to end, and cast a longing eye over my Uber app button more than once. I’m not the spring chicken I once was. But inspired by the examples of Mother Teresa and Lord Krishna, I opted to soldier on.
I wandered through a little residential neighbourhood, definitely detecting signs of the oncoming type-1 shoreline over the horizon.
… a sort of home-grown ‘wework’ clone…
… and onto the home stretch, under the elevated railway track leading to the main Indiranagar metro station.
… once again into a zone of bustling commerce, a row of tiny specialist shops and stalls, each more charming than the last. You’re in the city…
… but you’re never too far from the village. The two are sort of intertwined at a basic level, like the bubbles that make foam in beer, shot through with dreams of escape.
Then through a short zone of tiny, squished-together residences and intriguing “liminal spaces” (a term I’ve recently discovered and become interested in, that basically means “behind or between things”)…
Whenever I see places like this I have the same fantasy: of taking it over, leaving the outside untouched, and building a gigantic secret technology laboratory underneath it, in which I fly around on robotic wires with a VR helmet on, surrounded by a swarm of killer drones, or something. Maybe one day I’ll actually do something like that.
And then - finally - the onrush of concrete, the cacophony of commercial property yielding to the final, incontrovertible sign that I’d arrived at my destination: a gigantic temple to the ultimate deity, Colonel Sanders. They’ve plonked one of these down at the major intersection of every #1-type neighbourhood, as far as I can tell.
My legs were about to give out, but I wasn’t quite kissing the pavement: I’m as partial to a bargain bucket as the next man, but in my ideal world that would be an SKC, not a KFC. One day it will be so, mark my words.
Indranagar’s major intersection is still a delightfully green and fresh environment.
This is where you come if you want to buy a phone, a TV, a fridge, designer clothes, and all the other things you need to maintain your type-1-ness.
… they’ve even got a Hamleys.
But first, more pressing business: guided by ChatGPT’s recommendation, I headed to the best known “pub” in Indiranagar, the curiously-named “Toit Brewpub” (how do you pronounce it? I initially tried the French pronunciation of “oi” and came out with something that sounded like “twaat”, but that didn’t seem right, so I tried it the Indian way and that turned out to be correct).
A cheerful place, full of (I presume) tech-working Bangaloreans getting cheerfully sloshed together.
… and where I received my reward for my day’s pilgrimage, brewed on the premises, and a feisty little quiver of something called “Goan chorizo croquettes” which vanished before I had a chance to document them.
… and then home, to my little type-1 eyrie.
But… I’ll be back.