Bangalore Bound
Added on Thursday, July 17th, 2008 by Carole Nash Editor
Meeting up with Niranjan
I’d arrived on the outskirts of Bangalore when one of the website’s most prolific followers, Niranjan Skoda and pals met me by the Hebble Highway. Niranjan has been kindly following my adventures for five years. That evening I stayed at his uncle’s place and slept well.
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The next morning I gave myself time to film in the city and sat pillion with Niranjan. We left early morning for the Barista coffee shop in Koramangala, a prosperous suburb of the city. I wi-fied for a couple of hours while the lads planned a day for me. We tried unsuccessfully to take some photographs at the Embassy Golf Club IT Park where Microsoft and IBM have located their India headquarters. Security guards are paranoid in such areas as they are sensitive locations for possible terrorist attacks. So the lads led me along the ring road and then the old airport road towards Leela Palace, one of only two hotels in India with seven star facilities. At $550 a night it’s one of the biggest and most expensive hotels in India, some say the world. They also disallowed me to film there so we moved on again in some hope that I might be able to film somewhere in Bangalore without a security guard asking me to move on.
After the hotel we connected to Whitefield along the same airport road and then onto the Marathahali Road to try and shoot at the International Technology Park. This is the area where ten years ago the hi-tech boom in India started. 30% of the business has now moved up to Hyderabad, but nevertheless, 25% of the world’s best software engineers are Indian, and specifically are trained in Bangalore. I had ridden 3000 kms from Delhi to experience the other-side of India, with its cutting edge reputation, but it was Sunday and everywhere was closed. Even clever people have to go home for their tea. So I had a chat with the lads and asked them the hardest question of all; what is it like to be an Indian?
To put this into perspective, it’s like trying to acknowledge being English by referring to cricket and the fact that we like drinking tea. This is a clichéd attempt to define one’s nationality, it’s like saying Americans only like baseball. It all has to go deeper than superficial ruminations such as this. KK thought being an India is all about taking up a challenge. There are one billion people in India. 65% of this huge population are also straining to take up this challenge in every possible way. Education is a key channel along which the educated middle class Indian can better himself. Consider this genetic pool as the size of a sea and you are plankton. When the good ones emerge at the top of the food chain they are superb achievers indeed. If you survive the challenge of fighting off a thousand million other people, you’re good.
Skoda said this challenge was amplified at every level including sourcing food and shelter. A billion people are 15% of the world’s population housed in just one of the 212 countries of the world. China with a similar population is geographically five times bigger. Being the world’s largest peninsula doesn’t help. As an aside, income per capita is 43 times less than an average North American and fuel prices are about the same.
India is full of tremendous facts. Its charm and character go hand in glove with something approaching the unbelievable. Some of the cleverest people on the planet commute to work past people who live off less than a dollar a day.
We then rode back across the city to the Forum Mall, the biggest indoor shopping centre in Bangalore. It is the happening place to be for young people encompassing every available imaginable item for sale along with an 11-screen cinema multi-plex. It was noisy and crowded. Here, a security guard came up to us as we chatted outside the men’s loo. He wanted to know what we were talking about. KK wants to be a politician and instinctively remonstrated with the man on the basis that it was none of his business. In Bangalore there is a law prohibiting the gathering of more than three people so he was entitled to question us. Four months ago there were several bomb attacks on the Hyderabad Metro and India is on some high alert.
We all adjourned to Coffee Day, a national chain of coffee house evident in all major metropolitan cities. They also refused my taking any photographs, saying I needed permission from the manager, who of course wasn’t there. After that we rode back to Skoda’s uncles place in the west of the city.
The next day the lads escorted me to the outskirts of the city. Skoda and the lads were very kind and were typically emotional when we said goodbye. Indians hide their feelings poorly and they all decreed lifelong friendship and brotherhood to me as we parted on the road to Chennai. In a state of calmness, Indians are the ultimate gentle people.
210 kms from Chennai on the road out of Bangalore, the real rains started and I had to stop to shelter. The rain was heavy and saturating and was different to the showers I had so far experienced. It was always going to be like this, wet in the east and had it not been for a delayed monsoon, wet in the west, so I had been fortunate to be dry for so long. Stopping in a small roadside garden restaurant I ordered a chai and waited for the rain to stop. These heavy bursts should only last half an hour and it had the advantage of cooling down the air. As I drank my tea, crows barked their parched sound and water on the leaves around me made them look preciously green. Palm fronds are particularly luxurious in the wet; broad, sharp and tropical.
130kms from Chennai I went into an STD booth in the town of Vimal and called the Royal Enfield factory. I was put through to Mr Faravana who said he’d need to get permission from his bosses before he could agree I turn up and film. India was turning into a land of permissions. Presumably some invisible sub-manager would ask his over-manager to ask his boss to see if his boss would find someone to talk to who might be able to make a decision. The chain of command is necessary as it soaks up the unemployed. 300 million people without work is a tall order to remedy so perhaps it’s better they are not entered into any statistics other than the state of their poverty.
As this permission was going to take an hour or so, I was not going to get into the factory tonight so could slow the pace a little. Time-wise I am just over half way around the world but my mileage has still to improve. This journey is not a sprint, but a way of thinking.
Across the way from the phone booth, a bakery and sweet shop looked like a good place to hang out. Inside it had a 1950’s feel with its solid woods and substantial furnishings, just, that it looked tired. Through a big window I watched the village do what it did as the afternoon sun began to set behind the palm trees. Schoolgirls in their green shawls queued for their bus. Here, in country towns in the south I wasn’t mobbed. Either the population was less dense, or the level of education and literacy was higher than central areas, but I began to enjoy my privacy however snatched it seemed.
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