[silk] New book on writing from Bangalore

[Udhay Shankar N]

Sometime silklister Kalyan (the "Bah, Humbug" 
voice quoted below) sent this along.

Udhay
http://business-standard.com/lifeleisure/storypage.php?tab=r&autono=268815&subLeft=6&leftnm=5

`My name is Ivy Timberwoods?`

Kishore Singh / New Delhi December 22, 2006

"There is no way around it: Bangalore has no 
Grand Narrative in its interstices. It has been a 
middling, moderate city, short on ambition…" 
writes N Kalyan Raman, a lone voice in an 
anthology that, like an interesting magazine, has 
essays and extracts and fiction put together 
higgledy-piggledy in no discernible order. It 
shouldn’t work but it does, like Bangalore 
itself—different things to different people, 
yesterday’s pension town that has transited so 
fast into a boomtown, its residents haven’t had the time to complain.

The tradition of one-in-two coffee might have 
faded, the tree-lined roads may be choking with 
traffic, development might have caused changes in 
its salubrious climate, and politics may be 
threatening the city’s newfound confidence, but 
Bangalore is liberalised India’s voice and pulse.

For India’s young (and for many Americans), 
Bangalore isn’t the pensioner’s paradise it was 
touted to be till just a few decades ago. This is 
India’s (even Asia’s) own Silicon Valley, a 
gargantuan factory that churns out fortunes and 
accents in equal measure, a mythic Riverdale 
where real Indians make and spend a lot of real 
money. Despite renaming fiats, it is no longer 
possible for it to turn back into Bengaluru, the 
City of Boiled Beans. Its infrastructure might be 
struggling with the invasion of the youth from 
around the country for whom its multinational 
jobs and liberating atmosphere is like a breath 
of America itself, but, like India, it will 
self-correct rather than self-destruct. For now, 
all those freshly minted millionaires and their 
success might be guilty of avarice as they seek 
peer comfort in brands and pubs and nightlife, 
but in time they will discover the arts and the 
heritage and the gentility (and possibly genteelity) the city has to offer.

Great literature will then follow, but for now 
the itinerant writer is in the city as part of 
the gold rush, whether Thomas Friedman profiling 
the city 24x7 call centres, or Mike Marquese 
chasing India and Pakistan’s World Cup match, 
Anthony Spaeth who chances upon the person whose 
chance ruby collection is probably the richest in 
the world, or Annalee Saxenian making sense of 
the IT boom. Jeff Greenwalk comes looking for 
Star Trek aficionados and the impact it might 
have had on “Hindustani hackers”, cyber geek Bob 
Hoekstra does a reality check on the people of 
the city, Po Bronson writes on Bangalore boy 
Sabeer Bhatia and the idea (and sale) of Hotmail, 
Joe Roberts finds a fauji family in Bhagpur 
Extension, William Sutcliffe suffers from food 
paranoia, and Martin Buckley discovers that 
Bangalore has possibly become “more sophisticated, more anonymous”.

If these accounts are about the new reality of 
the city, other writers seem less inclined to the 
discovery of chips and gigabytes, more involved 
with its human stories. There’s Shashi Deshpande 
a trifle bewildered by “the pace of change”, 
Jayant Kaikini amazed at its paucity to absorb so 
much sambhar, Sunil Khilnani who sees it as just 
another “stopping place in a global employment 
market”, and Suresh Menon who analyses the city’s 
links with traditional classical music as well as 
rock concerts that serve as links to a past about 
which R K Narayan writes with great felicity, and 
to which Winston Churchill’s diary paints a 
portrait of life in a mofussil town. Because 
successful cities have their dose of crime, 
there’s also a gripping real-life piece by 
special investigators D R Kaarthikeyan and 
Radhavinod Raju on the hunt for Rajiv Gandhi’s 
assassins—who collectively choose suicide by 
cyanide rather than succumb to the hands of the CBI.

The bulk of the Indian contributors turn to 
fiction, Bangalore merely the location for their 
storytelling. Yet, these stories are uniquely set 
into its changing cultural paradigm, knitting it 
into its fictional skeins, chimerically evolving 
with each author’s interpretation of its people, 
its lanes and bylanes and restaurants, its 
migrants and residents…as seen by Anita Nayar, 
Shefali Tripathi Mehta. Vivek Shanbag, Shinie 
Antony, Timeri Murari and Uma Mahadevan-Dasgupta, among others.

Kalyan Raman may lament the city’s lack of 
greatness, but for every such critic, there’s a 
Yusuf Arakkal who writes, “… I believe Bangalore 
is the best city in the world. It’s a city that 
made me what I am, a city that transformed a shy 
sixteen-year-old into a tough man ...” Of course, 
there are many who believe that Bangalore is the 
world, as Friedman faithfully reports: “Woman 
operator in Bangalore giving directions as though 
she were in Manhattan and looking out of her 
window: ‘Yes, we have a branch on Seventy-fourth 
and Second Avenue, a branch at Fifty-fourth and Lexington…’.”

A city, you might say, with ambition.

Beantown Boomtown
Bangalore in the World of Words

Edited by Jayanth Kodkani and R Edwin Sudhir
Rupa Price: Rs 295; Pages: 339

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((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))