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In the beginning, long before Heinz or Gandhi even, there was a jungle. And probably a number of beanstalks, because when the lost Chola king drifted past her cottage, the old woman whipped up a fresh meal of boiled legumes for his consumption. So delectable were they, or she, or both, and so appreciative was he that he decided to build a town in her honour. So satisfied was he, after ridding himself of an internal build-up caused by the digestion of hunted fellow mammals, that he named the town, in his Kannada tongue, after the beans which had afforded him this luxury: Benda Kalooru.  Ever since, Bengaluru, or Bangalore to the colonial imports who soon picked up its unique qualities, has upheld its reputation for causing sensations, many of which are sensory. When a local chief decided to modernize the town 400-odd years later, he was at pains to ensure that the jungle be kept leafy, as opposed to concrete, and the city earned the revered title of ‘Garden City of India’.

Half a century later, though many trees and many smells remain, the former seem to be disappearing as fast as the latter multiply. Pinpointing the exact cause of this evolutionary quirk is not easy, but it is thought to be linked to the advent of the computer (the Garden City is now also the Silicon Valley of the country and an important player in the Global Village), migration and poor infrastructure.

The <a href=”Undergoing MyBlogLog Verification “>blog writer, though only a recent immigrant to the Karnataka area and still a humble student in the dichotomies and politics of the city, wishes to make it her quest, after last night’s cyclonic storm, to try and understand whether Big Bang is the name of the synergies which created the Karnataka jungle and the beings in it or the title on its crumbling epitaph.

Or, ideally, to give another connotation to the name. Big Bang and City go together like Party and Garden, don’t they?