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As for modern Patna, its image is so scarred by the crudeness of some of its political leaders that it is difficult to imagine that it was a centre of intellectual energy at the time of Independence.
In the mid-1960s, when I moved to Patna to take up the editorship of The Searchlight, it was still possible to walk into a Patna College staffroom and hear a discussion on the unreliability of written history.
The best known doctor in the city, Bishnu Mukhopadhyaya, could keep you riveted with his informed comments on the differences b...
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Patna was one of the few cities in India rich in natural water and in the availability of non-agricultural land, Contractor said that a Dubai could be built on the banks of the Ganga in Patna.
I had come to a city that was gentle and green, where life was orderly and people had the time to greet passing strangers.
Appropriately enough, Whitefield began as a white enclave. The European and Anglo-Indian Association only had to ask and the Mysore government in 1881 allotted 4,000 acres to the east of Bangalore for them to establish a settlement. Eventually, they retained only 542 acres because they could not raise the money to develop the rest. Agricultural farms and a few dozen residences constituted the settlement they named after D. S. White, the founder of the original association in Madras. A couple of churches and a school completed Mr White’s field. A 1920 tourist guide noted that ‘there is some
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The colonizers on their part 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.
The commissioner of Mysore, Mark Cubbon, did so much to enrich Bangalore that the 120-acre Cubbon Park is still known after him despite a patriotic attempt to rename it.
N. Lakshman Rau. As administrator of the City Municipal Corporation, Rau planned and implemented so many schemes for the public good that he came to be known as the architect of modern Bangalore.
Ramesh Ramanathan and his wife, Swati, for example, were in their early forties when they uprooted themselves from New York where Ramanathan worked with Citibank. In Bangalore they set up the Janagraha Centre for Citizenship and Democracy.
Naresh Narasimhan of Bangalore’s celebrated architecture firm Venkataramanan Associates pioneered campaigns for preserving the city’s heritage sites.
‘The second channel is called “Lost Revenue”. The city corporation has several key properties in central Bangalore. These are rented out at less than nominal rates, big commissions going to officials regularly. The same system works for hoardings in the city. The advertiser is charged near-full rates, but only a portion of it is shown on record.
That’s how even Bangalore’s garbage collection is mafia-controlled. The garbage mafia is actually a transport mafia; they want the garbage to be carried in their lorries to distant destinations, not segregated at source and treated.’
Following public interest litigation and a court order, the structures, barring the temples and the church, were demolished. Scores of middle class families and senior citizens had invested their life savings in the apartments and had been living in the area for twenty-five years. They were all thrown out while the mafia that carried out the encroachments and the officials and politicians who partnered them managed to keep their wealth untouched.
employees’ living quarters and schools and shops. IT tore this system apart. They set up fancy headquarters buildings with no thought to the living and commuting needs of their tens of thousands of employees. With that Bangalore lost the chance for orderly development.’
Another prefabricated disaster took shape under the cable-stayed bridge in K. R. Puram on the busy highway to Kolar. The bridge itself was an engineering accomplishment, but horror reigned below. The railways put up their walkways as they pleased, the roads department worked out their alignments as they pleased, transport companies positioned bus bays as they pleased and sidewalk vendors did whatever they pleased, leaving office-goers, housewives and schoolchildren no option but to risk their lives as they negotiated the chaos. It became one of the flyovers in the city that has made traffic
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‘Alcohol was the city’s defining industry... Alcohol printed the city’s newspapers, produced its movies, put down hospitals and schools and sports teams—and ruled the men who ruled its people.’
To wean them away, the authorities allowed, in 1889, the first industrial enterprise in the Cantonment, a factory set up by Bangalore Breweries to produce beer.
When the time came for Britain to withdraw from India, a young accountant running United Breweries in Madras bought up the shares of BB, eventually merging it with UB. 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. Apocryphal or not, Mallya’s IMFL enterprise grew into the largest liquor company in India.
The House of ...
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The ground where Bangalore Breweries stood was reborn as UB City
there are many Bangaloreans who will tell you which liquor baron built the private home of which cabinet minister.
No other state had witnessed such blatant misuse of students for political ends.
Sanskrit gained currency and Basavangudi saw scholarly Kannada Brahmin families settling in its surroundings.
R. K. Narayan joined the two precincts to form Malgudi, the small town where his stories took place.)
(Basavangudi’s main road was named D. V. Gundappa Road),
Bangalore Nagarathnamma
The mention of gurus reminded Radhakrishna of Bhairavi Kempegowda, an extraordinarily gifted classical singer whose rendering of the Bhairavi Raaga used to send audiences into raptures.
Gandhi Bazaar, the nerve centre of Basavangudi.
Such was the pull of Basavangudi’s literary aura that a barber shop came up with the concept of haircuts styled after writers.
When Mahalaxmi Tiffin Room opened in Basavangudi in 1926, its superior khaali dosai became an instant favourite.
Circle Lunch Home
A one-liner that found its way into local folklore was that Kuvempu did not name his sons but sentenced them.
Veena Stores.
A native of Udupi, Madhwacharya (1238-1317), founded the Dvaita school of philosophy as distinct from Shankara’s Advaita. He established eight Brahmin mutts with meticulous arrangements for their upkeep. Himself a good cook, Madhwacharya laid emphasis on developing a school of cooking that would strictly adhere to the sattvik tradition.
The Brahmin communities of South Canara took it as a collective mission to fashion a new approach to cooking that would do justice to Madhwacharya’s stipulations.
Named after a gram panchayat in Udupi, Shivalli Brahmins took to cooking as a profession.
‘Kota Brahmins and Koteshwara Brahmins who are Kannada speakers later joined them and, in due course, distinguished themselves in running hotels and restaurants.’
Some family-based sects dominated the business—the Adigas, the Maiyas, the Bhats, the Raos.
pakashastra, the science of cooking,
These were not to be repeated each day, a stipulation that forced the chief cooks to become innovators and improvisers, constantly in search of new variations.’
Woodlands, established by Krishna Bhatta, also known as Krishna Rao and Dasaprakash, started by Sitaram Rao in the 1930s, became iconic Madras symbols of fine South Indian dining. Udupi restaurants opened in pre-Independence Karachi, Lahore and in Rangoon. South Indian food was on its way to becoming a familiar attraction all over the world.
Ramakrishna Karanth, a Kota Brahmin, opened Mahalakshmi Tiffin Room in 1926. Venkataramana Ural started Vidyarthi Bhavan in the 1930s and later handed it over to an Adiga. In 1965 Nagesh Adiga opened Brahmins’ Coffee Bar.
Suryanarayana Hegde opened Veena Stores
MTR. Founded by Yajna Narayana Maiya,
Mavalli Tiffin Room
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.
The Koshy who founded what became an instant landmark was a Syrian Christian from Kerala, the significance being that Syrian Christian devotion to beef, mutton and fish is almost canonical.
Originally named Parade Cafe, it was adjacent to the Cantonment’s main thoroughfare, South Parade (M. G. Road).
