There is a particular kind of afternoon in Bangalore, somewhere between the second cup of filter coffee and the evening traffic building up on the main road, when time seems to stop asking anything of you. The ceiling fan turns at its usual unhurried pace. Somewhere outside, a vendor calls out, selling something you cannot quite make out from indoors. And you sit there, doing nothing in particular, and for once you do not feel the need to apologize for it. I have spent a good part of my life being suspicious of such afternoons. Law trains you that way. Every hour has a client attached to it, every minute a fee, every pause a cost you will answer for later. Idleness, in that world, was not just unproductive. It was almost immoral, a small betrayal of the people counting on you. I carried that feeling long after I stopped needing to. But somewhere in the last few years, I have started to make peace with idling, and I want to write about why, because I suspect a fair number of us are stil...
Bangalore, Bengaluru, City Life, Memoir, Indian Cities, Church Street, Jayanagar, Cubbon Park, Blossoms, Writing Life I have lived in Bangalore long enough to watch it argue with itself. One side of the argument is glass, traffic, and the word opportunity . The other side is a narrow street after rain, a bookshop that still smells of old paper, a house in Jayanagar where the rooms feel larger than they should because the children have left. I was not born here. Raichur came first courtyard, tulsi, the particular smell of wet earth when the monsoon finally arrived in North Karnataka. Bangalore was the city I grew into. Law school. Courts. Firms. The long years when the city was becoming “the Silicon City” and we were all supposed to keep pace. I did not keep pace with everything. That turned out to be useful. The Bangalore I walk, not the Bangalore I read about People write about Bangalore as if it were a product launch. Startups. Weather that used to be famous. Traffic that is n...
Bangalore, Bengaluru, City Life, Monsoon, Everyday India, Memory I have lived in Bangalore long enough to stop explaining it. Visitors want a sentence. Pleasant weather. Garden city. Silicon Valley of India. Traffic. All of those sentences are true on some days and useless on most. A city is not a sentence. It is the way the light falls on a wet road at four in the afternoon, and the way people wait under a shop awning without looking at one another. I came here from a smaller place. Raichur had a courtyard, a tulsi plant, and rain that arrived like news. Bangalore had scale. It had ambition. It had the feeling that if you stood still, the city would go around you and not come back for you. For years I treated the city as a route. Home to work. Work to home. The rest was noise I learned to ignore. That is a mistake many of us make here. The city that works, and the city that waits There is a Bangalore that begins before dawn milk, newspapers, the first buses, the men who open s...
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