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After Independence Koshy’s offered an ambience that was a cross between a London pub and a Paris cafe.
Maiyas had appointed quality analysts in white coats to check what went into the kitchen. But what goes into the soil before the grains and vegetables are harvested remains a national frustration.
vegetables won’t taste as they should,’ he said. Thanks to Balu’s tutelage, I learned that the Byadagi chilli from Karnataka could not be substituted for Hindupur chilli from Andhra.
Wood fire and the gas stove produced different tastes in food.
Clay pots provided flavours that stainless steel vessels could not. The days of innocence were over ...
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The family split saw MTR Restaurant holding on to its established heritage under the leadership of Hemamalini Maiya, a granddaughter of the founder, while MTR Foods specializing in packaged preparations went under Norwegian ownership.
Sadananda Maiya, the founder’s son who had played a major role in building MTR’s reputation, did not stop at bringing the Vikings into MTR Foods. When the time was ripe, he opened a new chain of restaurants called Maiyas, chasing the same quality status as MTR’s, counting on his own acknowledged leadership position in the restaurant business in Karnataka.
Then the unexpected happened. Sadananda Maiya introduced in his menu ‘North Indian’ and ‘traditional Gujarati thali’. Kosh...
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Spearheading the renewal was an unusual man whose deceptively simple ideas fundamentally changed the restaurant culture of Bangalore. Thousands of old and new hoteliers benefited from his schemes. They called him by many names—the Food Genius, the One Man Army, the Ideas Man.
R. Prabhakar
conversations were rather laboured.
shouting to be heard above the decibel levels breweries are known for.
‘He was an angry young man,’ Ravi said, angry that shopkeepers were cheating customers. He started a campaign for consumer rights, crusading against high prices, adulteration and lack of transparency.
The unassuming consumer activist had launched, without realizing its full implications, an idea—that a strong middle class had emerged, willing and able to sustain businesses that were fair in their ways.
city began to see what it had not seen before. Prabhakar was not a rich man, nor did his interests lie in becoming one. His style was to develop ideas and get his entrepreneurial friends to implement them.’
Under Prabhakar’s direction, a friend opened the first Cafe Darshini in Jayanagar in 1983.
‘The end result,’ Ravi said, ‘was bharjari oota, sumptuous meal—a healthy and hygienic Mysore-style spread of unlimited rice, curry, sambar, rasam, chutney, buttermilk.’
All this was served for 10, an incredibly low price in the 1990s.
So sensational was the idea that traffic jams developed in front of the restaurant in the Majestic area. On one occasion the police ha...
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His explanation was that the trick lay in volume and in cost cutting. They were selling about 2,000 barjari meals a day. That led to an economy of scale at which 10 yielded a nearly 10 per cent margin of profit. This was the same approach, he said, that made it possible for ISKCON to provide Akshaya Patra meals for 6. If your volume was large and your profit goals modest, such things were possible, he explained.
Prabhakar helped another of his entrepreneurial friends to set up a kitchen called Nammura, which meant our place. Here food could be ordered in bulk—solid items by the kilogram and liquid ones by the litre. The kitchen was very modern and open to visitors and the prices very competitive. Nammura proved another runaway hit.’
without a footing
The restricted menu meant economy in raw materials, storage and labour.
He campaigned against the widely used block ice, saying that it was unhygienic. He was the first person in Bangalore to attack hotels that used monosodium glutamate and other harmful additives. He exposed the widespread practice of tea adulteration in some parts of the city; used and discarded tea leaves were mixed with stimulants to make strong tea that hooked users. These campaigns made enemies of powerful syndicates. Twice ‘supari’ contracts were put out against him. Prabhakar went on, protected by the goodwill he enjoyed among admiring hoteliers.
Azim Premji’s family roots were in Kutch, but it was in Bangalore that his ideas reached fruition. He became identified not only with Bangalore but also with the spirit of public service that some information technology pioneers promoted. His institutions quickly became part of the city’s history, culture and aspirations.
Plague hit Bangalore in 1898. People reacted by building the only temple in the world dedicated to the Goddess of Plague, the Plagueamma Temple in Thyagarajanagar in South Bangalore. The government reacted by decongesting the city and laying out what became the familiar pre-Internet Bangalore of Malleswaram on one side and, marking the passing parade of British babus, Fraser Town, Richards Town, Cooke Town, Cox Town, Austin Town, Benson Town, Murphy Town, Cleveland Town on the other.
‘quaint little name stones’ from Bangalore’s old houses and make a wall on M. G. Road to remind the world that ‘there used to be homes in Bangalore that were beautiful’.
No one has captured the power of this nostalgia more tellingly than Paul Fernandes, the cartoonist who immortalized old Bangalore as Mario Miranda eternalized old Goa.
Fernandes conveyed joy dipped in sadness. Others compiled books—Bangalore: A Century of Tales from City & Cantonment by Peter Colaco, Bangalore Blue edited by Stanley Carvalho—every page filled with yearning, every writer pining for genteel days gone by.
In the 1970s and 80s Pattabhirama Reddy’s homestead in a cosy corner of St. Mark’s Road was the city’s intellectual epicentre.
It was in the Reddy home that Gopala Gowda, socialist hero of the 1960s, narrated to Ram Manohar Lohia the story of U. R. Ananthamurthy’s novel Samskara.
It's one of most beautiful contemporary stories about caste conundrum.
Premier Book Shop when it closed in 2011?
The city remained a booklover’s paradise with Select Book Shop, founded in 1945, holding pride of place with its unrivalled collection of old books. K. K. S. Murthy, aeronautical engineer turned sage, became both a father figure among bookstall owners and a Bangalore institution. Relative newcomers like Blossoms ensured Bangalore’s primacy as a used books centre after Moore Market in Madras was destroyed by a mysterious fire in 1985.
Flipkart’s year-ender report in 2015 listed Bangalore as the book capital of India with more book lovers than any other city.
If Margazhi, the December-January ‘Chennai season’ is the best known event in the annual Carnatic calendar, Bangalore has two seasons no less important.
Bangalore Gayana Samaja, is the oldest running music sabha in the country.
The emergence of new Bangalore alongside classical Bangalore may be best exemplified by Vikram Bhat, an heir to the Udupi culture and owner of the highly successful M. G. Road landmark, Ulhas Refreshments.
Bangalore’s standing as a home of theatre arts was firmly rooted with Gubbi Veeranna (1890-1974), a dedicated professional shining as a perennial source of inspiration. T. P. Kailasam and Sri Ranga, both ‘England-returned’ scholars, added new dimensions to Kannada theatre while Shivarama Karanth and B. M. Srikantaiah introduced the spirit of experimentation. B. V. Karanth, Girish Karnad and Chandrashekhara Kambar enlivened the stage with contemporary ideas and techniques.
In the 1960s, Bangalore Little Theatre, modelled after the little theatre movement in Britain, became a moulder of ideas among theatre enthusiasts.
In 2011, Jagdish and Arundhati Raja who had won fame for Bangalore with their Artists’ Repertory Theatre opened Jagriti, their own specially designed auditorium in Whitefield.
The late N. S. Ramaswamy, founder-director of the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore, used to describe the city corporation’s Bangalore Water Supply and Sewage Board as the Bangalore Sewage Supply and Water Board.
