I(n)diosynchronicities

Yesterday was Sunday, aka Sightseeing Day. And, partly because it is the biggest statue of the Hindi liberator south of Mt Kailash in Tibet and partly because my brother told me about it, we visit Shiva on Airport Road. At 65 foot, he is indeed the most beautiful Hindu statue we have seen, if you ignore the snotty girl gazing down from her crumbling building above.
Thank all the gods that there is something tangible for all these beating souls to hang onto.
And then, because we reckon we could do with a bit of a green lung, we head for Cubbon Park. Cool statue of Queen Vic, tall trees, lots of courting couples – all huddled on dry patches of ground surrounded by litter. OK, so it looks like one small area is being regreened, but it is very small. As we feel, in this vast pollution-spewing wilderness.
It’s hard to refuse the smily boy who invites us to join his family for a picnic lunch, but our conversation is gaining momentum. There must be a solution. It’s a conversation that’s probably been rehashed a million times, but what if every Bangalore-based company outlined a green strategy as part of their social responsibility programme and donated a bit to regreening Cubbon Park? Jobs would be created, the city would breathe, people would feel better.
If post-apartheid Johannesburg, with its masses of unemployed and more apathetic uneducated masses can do it, so can Bangalore.
Besides, synchronicity is real: this morning’s India Times attests to it. Some planet lovers are on the same tack: Green Dream is planting trees all over the city, which has seen a six percent reduction of green cover in the last 15 years, and is appealing to individuals and corporates to donate and get involved.
At just 100 Indian rupees to plant, procure and maintain a sapling for a year, can we afford to refuse? (She says, gazing at the withering old wise tree, put to death in his prime, across the road, and wondering whether the purchase of 8 potplants for under 300 rupees makes any difference at all. Or whether sapling buyers will remember to feed it after its first birthday?)
Fiat arbores!

And then there’s cricket, that other colonial leftover which is possibly more a part of the national Indian psyche than the English one. I never watch it in South Africa because I’m a cerebral chick and my father taught me to score too young, but as an ex-pat acquaintance told me after two years here, you’ll do things you never normally do when you’re in India. So I accept a ticket to a local match between the Bangalore Royals and the Hyderabad Chargers. Besides, it’s 20/20 and my third cousin, Mark Boucher (who is descended from a slave – not from India, but it’s interesting nevertheless), is playing. In addition to our picnic lunch (of bottled water and biscuits), suntan lotion and mosquito repellant, my cigarettes and lighter are confiscated at the gate. I later learn that it’s to stop spectators setting the cardboard banners-cum-sun shields alight. And I thought the Spurs/Manchester soccer game on English home ground was rough. (It was, but then you don’t get free bunny chows with your ticket, or even fish and chips for that matter, in Blighty, and the pom pom girls, if indeed there were any, were not imported. Which caused no small amount of concern, when question was thrown onto the attire of the American imports, who, except for the spunky Bangalorean shorts wearers, kow-towed to popular opinion, and covered up.)
I’d like to think it wasn’t just the Hard Rock Café (and the life-size replica of Eric Clapton’s guitar) blue cheese burgers round the corner which took me back to a second match against the passionate Punjabis, but I can’t be sure. Besides, 20/20 is just not cricket, and who am I, a South African potpourri, to wage war on authenticity?

A fellow traveller/blogger has asked me to compile a list of comparisons between home and here, and though it’s anathema to my culturally conscientised psyche, I do it all the time, and if writing it down helps progress on either side of the globe, aluta continua.
Born and mostly bred in South Africa’s poorest and most anomalous province, the Eastern Cape, it’s possibly easier to pass constructive comment than for a cosmopolitan Capetonian. Though our cows are kept where they belong, in the confines of farmlands, or on rolling hills along the rural Transkei coast, where the worst that can happen is missed footing and a headlong dive into the ocean (I have seen this only once), our sacred ones are just as dirty. The recent stayaway by the majority of Bangaloreans during provincial elections because 36 candidates held criminal records rang loud familiar alarm bells; with a subtle difference: at least Indians didn’t feel compelled to vote, like many South Africans who base their motive on emotion and the rationale that apartheid was to blame.
A subject which could produce more than a book, but, for the practical purposes of this blog, calls to mind another major difference I noted early on. While South Africa tends to blame its high crime and violence rate on poverty (arguably also apartheid-derived), India, with a poverty rate of (compare SA) is relatively crime-free. Whether this is a result of deep-seated religious beliefs, a more passive take on life or just that escape is virtually impossible in an overcrowded city, I’m still trying to fathom, but my in-bred SA paranoia is virtually non-existent here. It is possible, though, that my frustration levels have eclipsed all other psychological tics: sense of urgency is all but absent, and, while most people speak some English and get by with body language, a head wobble over the phone is impossible to differentiate from passive aggression.
Silicon Valley indeed; Bang Bang might have a super-duper shiny techno city full of super-intelligent techno geeks designing beautiful web pages and sophisticated communication links, but when it comes to maintenance, it’s like everything else – shitty shitty bang bang.
Case in point: my internet ceased to function six days ago (which, like electricity, it often does, but for short periods of time, so I wasn’t too fazed), so lodged a complaint. Over 50 calls to four different numbers, three complaint log numbers, 73 different diagnoses and three visits to smelly makeshift internet cafes later, I am still unconnected. And the reluctant new owner of an assertive telephone manner, after one of the clerks, having gleaned that I was South African, phoned me back to ask me if I would like to continue the friendship.
It goes against the grain to give him any benefit of the doubt, but perhaps he’s just used to boob jobs: all silicon, no muscle.

Two months into life in Bang City and I am questioning my pacifist views. In essence, Gandhi’s ‘an eye for an eye leaves everyone blind’ does it for me, but the axiom ‘in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king’ gnaws hungrily at the back of my mind. If I was a blinded tiger, I would find it difficult, and, worse, cowardly, not to scratch out the sabre-yielding carnivore’s remaining peeper. But it would be my last resort: the carnivore would wreak much less destruction in a padlocked cage than roaming in the wild.

We did snooty Ooty last weekend – a Tamil Nadu hill station so nicknamed because of its upmarket image created by the Brits. The air was crisp and clean, the hills green and lush, and despite environmental warning signs, and our guide’s attestation that the provincial government banned plastic bags in the fertile Nilgiris area, the horses were eating out of rubbish bins overflowing with plastic debris. While we came back feeling refreshed, the memory of the elephant, chained to do logging duties in Mudumalai national park, with mangy pink spots on its trunk, had me tossing and turning. The newspaper report the following day about the reintroduction of tigers to Rathambore up north, after an earlier demise caused by incessant traffic through the area, made me wonder again whether the tigers billboarded on the main road running through the park are all that is left of the striped cat here. Oh Gandhi, do your people misinterpret your contention that you can judge a nation by the way it treats its animals? Do they think sacred cows enjoy sharing space with traffic jams? Don’t they know that feeding apes will only cause them to become more human, violent and lazy? Are they oblivious of the fact that they are, as DH Lawrence noted over 100 years ago, only slightly higher than their linguistically impaired brethren? Or are they happy with their monkeys-minding-machines status? A notch lower than the all but vanished Toda hill tribes, who, afforded government land after being displaced by British planters, still refuse to dig the land to erect buildings?

Perspective is a most marvellous human propensity, I’ve decided, having reread my meditating brother’s subtle e.mail reminder that poverty is a state of mind.
It’s impossible to understand why dry river beds are filled with litter, and why sour sewerage smells are allowed to permeate the atmosphere near clogged rivers, while IT centres and car dealerships multiply by the day. Why stray dogs, which all have torn ears, are allowed to join their suburban brethren howling deep into the night, why signs have to be erected to stop peeing on walls and why new houses, often replacing solid colonial structures, leak and break and creak.
But even more impossible to understand is why the step of those living in roadside shacks is so light, how you can leave your mega-lens camera at a linen stall and recover it an hour later without suspicion of theft entering your head and how filth-encrusted rubbish collectors can look enthusiastic about filling recycling bags meticulously with airport debris at 2 in the morning.
Or is it? While suicides average about six a day in Bangalore, there appears to be a positive conviction that prosperity is on the way. Everyone seems to be dutifully working at something, worshipping someone and/or helping someone.
Methinks Winston Churchill, who ran up a gambling debt here on an 1896 sortie at the age of 22, was onto something when he declared India the best place on earth to forget ‘home worries’.
Just when he developed his inspired bipolar madness is not clear, but it may not be far-fetched to imagine his oft-quoted axiom “Never never never give up” was born, together with his writing career, in budding Bangalore.

The theory that it takes only six weeks to break a habit is probably based on a simple switch in the human psyche which makes it possible to adapt to a new environment in that amount of time. Though having a foreign guest to stay when you yourself are a foreigner probably has more to do with the process of assimilation than anything else. Instead of comparing every facet of your daily life to the more sophisticated bits ‘back home’, you find yourself looking for ways to entertain. Suddenly you forget that your independence has been robbed because owning your own car is a fate tantamount to death by congestion, and the adaptable auto becomes not just a mode of deliverance from earthly displeasures, but a ticket to sightseeing freedom. Exhaust fumes and phutting engines go almost unnoticed as your visitor mirrors your initial awe (and possibly fear) at the ability of two- and three-wheelers, cars, buses, trucks and cows to snake their way in four or more undemarcated lanes picking up little more than the odd scratch. (“Like a kaleidoscope where all the fractured bits fit into each other and create ever-evolving wholes,” says the visitor.)
You also realize that you feel far safer, and freer in many senses, than you do in streamlined, speed-limited, road-signed traffic in the left-brained first world. A hoot round every bend and at the sight of any other vehicle or pedestrian human metamorphoses from annoying to friendly in an hour. Not only can you engage your visitor with passing sights and sounds, but e.mails and cellphone conversations are lengthy, cheap (if you ensure your driver uses the meter) and accessible: if your shady avenue is not part of the driver’s driving repertoire, he’ll simply ask someone else.
Gandhi may have had a point when he said sacrifice should be a joy: when it comes down to it, an auto ride in the disappearing, but still shady, city-village could well be better for the soul than an isolated, air-conditioned ride down the N1 in Cape Town.

Balloonmen there may not be, but the far and wee whistlings of cart vendors are shrill enough to awake holidaying workers from their slumber. There’s plenty to be green about – the fresh fruit and veggie cart is genuinely fresh, sans plastic packaging, and we make off with an ample helping of radish, potato, chillies, ginger, tomatoes and what looks suspiciously like mange tout, all weighed on a hand scale. On the plant front, three hibiscus and two indoor palms cost just under INR500, and the smiley boys, who add fertiliser on the spot, knock regularly to ensure you keep your plants watered. Which reminds me, I must get a washer to replace the tatty twine connecting the tap to the hose, though a jug is probably a wiser water-saving move.
The storm seems to have temporarily eradicated the sewerage problem round the block, and just for today all is leafy in Koramangala.

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