More of the same

Some time back I was in a small roadside stationery shop in Bangalore, stocking up on pens, pencils and notebooks. I found the bill surprisingly steep. When I asked the shopkeeper why ordinary ballpoint pens were so expensive, I got a rather sharp answer from him. Perhaps he could sense some of the baggage those who live in the capital carry with them to other parts of India. Perhaps he wanted to let me know I was a notebook-buying dinosaur who didn’t know how much the times have changed. At any rate, he looked at me scornfully and boasted, “This is not Delhi. This is Bangalore. Naturally the prices are higher.”

Over the next week, I discovered some other little ways in which old friends of Bengaluru can now be, in a manner of speaking, Bangalored.

To begin with, there are certain words that have become essential to any conversation. No one takes a lowly bus to Mysore anymore; they take a Volvo. (I hear you also take a Volvo to the new airport.) Young and upwardly mobile families don’t go out on Sundays; they either de-stress or bond. The stress-conscious may look up weekend getaways on websites with names like getoffurass.com. The middle-level management may bond with spouse and children at “spa resorts”. In the spa resort I visited on a Sunday, the hearty voice of the master of ceremonies had a desperate edge to it; he was urging fathers (who were drinking beer) and mothers (who were shy) to join their children in dancing to Kajra re. I suspect such a Sunday is punishment for overusing and misusing two words that used to be respectable: “concept” and “issues”. If almost anything is a “concept”, you are bound to have “issues” that force you into either a getaway or bonding with the family instead of taking a weekend nap.

The new devotion to the word “issues” is a special case. I have to admit it’s been a while since I heard, in any of our metros, a question such as, “So you’ve been married five years. How many issues?” Instead I have been hearing of X’s ego issues, Y’s alcohol issues and Z’s adjustment issues. But in Brave New Bangalore, it’s possible to have pure, unadulterated issues. If you ask the man who’s taking apart your computer what’s wrong with it, he says, with suitable gravitas, “It has issues.” If someone who’s meeting you for coffee is late, he texts you that he has issues, would you please wait a little longer. I looked around hopefully for a hoarding advertising issueless mobiles, or a building called Issueless Manor, and was disappointed to find no one has got there yet.

But there is quite a range of residence-names to choose from to let everyone know where you are most at home. There’s the somewhat dated regal genre, the Belvedere Mansions and Barton Courts and Residency Manors that sound like they belong in a residential colony, not the more up-to-date complex or township, leave alone the cutting edge integrated enclave that boasts three theme gardens. There’s the evergreen nature-gone-purple sort of address: Cascading Meadows, Canary Wharf, Rainbow Drive, and even, in a stroke of anthropomorphic magic, Laughing Waters. There’s the somewhat cryptic Sobha Fiorella, possibly an indication of how at home the residents are with pizza and pasta; or Aquila Heights, where the residents are, perhaps, more partial to tequila than Mr Mallya’s beer. There’s the equally trendy but more plain-speaking Sobha Lifestyle and Ferns Icon, or the evolved Brigade Harmony.

Going by what it calls its homes, the new IT-ed and MNC-ed Bengaluru seems to reassure you that you don’t have to take that Volvo to the airport too often. It’s possible to stay in the global section of the city and see the Riviera or Palm Springs. If fusion is your idea of trendy fashion statement, there’s Mantri Espana, Purva Venezia and Sterling Shalom.

And if people live in these places and lead a life that is harmonious with their addresses, they can hardly be expected to shop in places without ambitious names. The little neighbourhood shops that aspire the hardest seem to prefer two names — a main title and a subtitle. A garment store for instance, invited me to Come Fall in Love; the subtitle, for mystified outsiders, is Western Wear for Women. Next door, the hole-in-the-wall selling underclothes has a better subtitle: the Complete Underscene Solution.

The words that are bandied about in our daily conversation say something about us. Our words and our names — the names we make up and attach to our given names like a postal address — say a lot about the new fantasies we want to live out.

Perhaps a friend’s account of a family ceremony — appropriately for our purposes, a naming ceremony for a visiting NRI baby — illustrates this best. The baby’s grandmother was clearly the family repository of tradition. Having just returned from America herself, she waxed magisterial to stay-at-homes about how easy it is to observe madi — the requirements of purity and pollution — in American homes because there are no servants, and the basements can be kept free of outsiders. Once the naming was done, the grandmother took the baby onto her lap and cooed at him. But she didn’t use his new name. She crooned, “Puttani Green-card holder! Littlest American citizen!”

The ideal fusion fantasy is a global address that allows you to hold on to the safe familiarity of provincialism. I don’t know if the baby gurgled in grateful response, but I hope he did.

The old Bangalore (and the old Bengaluru) are still there of course, though their oxygen level dips day by day, especially when you hear that Bangalore “is one of the most happening cities in India where you can find all the high-tech trends of developed societies”. Garden City is mostly gone with the uprooting of venerable trees, and so is the Pensioner’s Paradise. Now it’s not just Electronics City and India’s Silicon Valley, but also IP (or Intellectual Property) City.

I got back to Delhi, feeling put in my place. I live on a campus in Delhi where the areas have names like Uttarakhand and Dakshinapuram, and the hostels Brahmaputra and Tapti. The place doesn’t feel like it has an awareness of what is globally acceptable. All it says that it’s somewhere in India, and that doesn’t seem enough anymore.

I found my newfound humility didn’t last though. I happened to go to Gurgaon — or Gergen, as an English acquaintance calls it — soon after. Driving past malls and condominiums with names like Hamilton Court and Celebrity Homes, a hospital called Japanese Clinic, and a building with cement awnings like the skirts of maternity swimsuits, I found it. I found the ideal global address, an exercise of naming fantasies that would have done the NRI grandmother proud. Manhattan Personal Floors. I felt a flash of triumph. The waters may laugh in Bangalore, but where else but in Gergen can you make Manhattan, or at least one floor of it, your personal property? Eat your heart (or its intellectual property) out, Bengaluru!