Askew: A Short Biography of Bangalore

by T.J.S. George

is perhaps woven into the texture of the human mind to build and enjoy, then to overbuild and suffer, then to collapse and complain, and then to become argumentative about what happened.

The real estate mafia arrived in a frenzied rush, their grip on Sarjapur becoming as Dhritarashtrian as their embrace of Whitefield.

chose Bangalore as the headquarters of the oldest of the three engineering groups of the British Indian Army—the Madras Sappers. It was this centre that developed the Bangalore Torpedo, a mine-clearing weapon used in the First and Second World Wars and still in the armoury of many armies.

Diwan Seshadri Iyer began harnessing waterfalls and in 1904 Bangalore became the first Indian city to have streets lighted by electricity.

When the fabled founder of Bangalore set out to build his dream capital in the 1530s, his mother gave him two instructions: ‘Keregalam kattu, marangalam nedu (Build lakes, plant trees)’.

In 2014, Bangalore ranked second in the number of murders (Delhi was first), third in robberies (after Delhi and Bombay) and third in dacoity cases (after Pune and Delhi).

Hyder Ali found time to create Lal Bagh, one of the finest botanical gardens in the country.

Jayanagar, laid out in 1948 and still described as one of the largest planned neighbourhoods in Asia.

‘Bangalore is the IT capital, so SMS keeps it going,’ said V. Ravichandar. ‘SMS. Show Me Suitcases.’ Ravichandar was part of a movement that grew out of the desperation Bangaloreans

Vittal Mallya, the low-profile owner of UB, who went on to make whisky, brandy and rum is credited with coining the classic term Indian Made Foreign Liquor, IMFL.

Unlike Chicago and Bombay where prohibition gave birth to criminal syndicates, Bangalore never experienced prohibition and therefore never saw the liquor industry giving rise to organized crime.

Such was the pull of Basavangudi’s literary aura that a barber shop came up with the concept of haircuts styled after writers. The owner of New Modern Bombay Men’s Parlour, V. Harish, a school dropout himself, was proud about the Kannada writers who had won the Jnanpith Award. He collected their books, displayed them on the counter in front of a wall-wide mirror, and put their framed photographs on the wall. Then he devised specially styled haircuts—a ‘mushroom cut’ that made the hair stand up like a tuft on the skull, exactly like Kuvempu’s. He followed this up with the Shivarama Karanth Scissor Cut, the U. R. Ananthamurthy Beard Trim, the Chandrashekhara Kambar Bleaching, the Girish Karnad Eyebrow Threading, the D. R. Bendre Face Shave and the Masti Venkatesha Iyengar Head Massage. This was Harish’s way of making up for his lack of education. (His two sons completed Class X before joining the salon.)

PhD time—Precious Hours of Drinking.

Woodlands, established by Krishna Bhatta, also known as Krishna Rao and Dasaprakash, started by Sitaram Rao in the 1930s,

When rice became scarce during the Second World War the Maiyas experimented with semolina, leading to the invention of rava idli, a hot staple today in South Indian menus the world over.

R. Prabhakar fairly well though our conversations were rather laboured. Even if I ignored the reality that his English was no better than my Kannada, it would have made little sense to get him to tell his story for me. Outside his cultural comfort zone, he was a reticent man. To get around the problem, I approached Ravi Hegde, a newspaper editor who had known Prabhakar for a long time. Over a few dosai sessions with him and Balu, crowned by a daring incursion into a microbrewery, a new trend among the young and the impatient and the opposite of Udupi’s Brahminic civilization, Ravi narrated the Prabhakar saga, shouting to be heard above the decibel levels breweries

Soon By 2 Coffee, as the restaurant was called, opened in a small room in Basavangudi.