Bangalore.

Since I spent the last 2 months roaming around Bangalore, I suppose it becomes obligatory for me to write a blog about it, and anyway, there really ain't that many topics in the blog currently.

Now, I don't want this to be a school-essay about how I spent my summer vacations. However whenever I read any intelligent accounts of people's travels, for example, the "diary" column on the last page of Outlook, they generally talk about little details of everyday life, and/or politics and high fashion in the city concerned. While it is definitely possible to give a similar account of Bangalore, I am really too mundane a person to indulge in that kind of a discourse.

For one, I love to eat. And its not as if I am a connoisseur of good food, its just that I love to fill my stomach to bursting point. Hence my stay in Bangalore is not an account of the minutae of its life, but rather a diary entry of how I gorged food in every corner of the city, or to be more accurate, M.G.Road and its vicinity.

Besides food, Bangalore offers an incredibly large number of bookshops, again in the vicinity of M.G.Road. Plus, Bangalore has a very mild climate. Hence, making allowances for the bad traffic, its really the ideal city (at least for me) to live in.

My first month in Bangalore was not particularly entertaining. My project (oh ya, thats the reason I was in Bangalore) hadn't really taken off, so I spent all my time exploring the campus of the Indian Institute of Science. I shouldn't complain though, since the campus is pretty large, and had some interesting trivia about it, for example, I didn't know that they had an IBM Blue Gene Supercomputer there. A quick wikipedia reference reveals it to be one of the fastest supercomputers in the world, though of course I was never allowed inside the building its housed in.

The campus is always playing host to some conference or the other, and me and my friends enjoyed more than one free lunches, without having to sit through the lectures.

Public transport in Bangalore is the real pain in the arse. The buses are irregular, and the conductors have a very strict aversion to Hindi/English. Though this did come in handy a few times, as when I was blocking the Ladies seat, and the conductor kept shouting at me, and I couldn't get a word of what he was saying.

A rather good thing about Bangalore is the large number of colleges there, as a result of which you will always find quite a few aquaintances to roam the city with. In my case, there were something like 30 people from my college, and another 15, some of whom were pretty close friends. So the first month was pretty much consumed by movies, food, and books.

One rather recurrent accusation levelled at Bangalore is that once you have been to M.G.Road, you have pretty much seen all Bangalore has to offer. I mean, one mall is the same as the other.
However, I would tend to disagree. I admit that I myself most of my time in that vicinity, but the thing is, a new restaurant opens once every at least 3 months. And these are not some ordinary restaurants I'm talking about- these are specialty restaurants, each with its own unique cuisine to offer. 2 months is totally inadequate to explore them fully.

Having talked about the rather banal subject of food, we now turn to books. As it happens, despite going to a very large number of restaurants, my major chunk of spending in Bangalore was not food or even living, but books. I bought around 25-30 books in this period, I bored my friends and my sister (who was in Bangalore) endlessly about the merits of some author or the other. The used bookstores were particularly nice. Of course carrying all those books back home proved to be a back breaking job, but I think it was worth it. Reading all those books is of course another matter.

However, despite everything, you get the distinct feeling that Bangalore has not yet matured into a full time metro. Now I don't know why I'm saying this, maybe because most of the people I met were college kids, or maybe because Bangalore is really not as large as Bombay/Delhi, despite expanding like anything in the past few years, but still, the feeling was there.

As I reached the end of internship, and also the end of my bank balance, I reflected that Bangalore is the ideal place for someone straight out of college in a high paying job. Given the shiny new international airport, and the frenzy of construction, which includes the metro rail, I am pretty sure I would prefer Bangalore over a lot of other cities for working in.