Curiouser And Curiouser

The contrast between the familiar and the exceptional was everywhere around me. A bullock cart was drawn up beside a modern sports car at a traffic signal. A man squatted to relieve himself behind the discreet shelter of a satellite dish. An electric forklift truck was being used to unload goods from an ancient wooden cart with wooden wheels. The impression was of a plodding, indefatigable, and distant past that had crashed intact, through barriers of time, into its own future. I liked it.

--from Gregory David Roberts' Shantaram

From the moment I read this passage, in which Roberts' narrator recounts his first impressions of Bombay, it lodged in my consciousness like a burr in my slippers. That penultimate sentence perfectly encapsulates our experience of India thus far, where the old and the new dance together, whirling and entwining and making love on the bustling sidewalk between the glass high-rise and the open sewer, begetting a child, India, with her feet in the muddy primeval and her eyes ever turned toward the sunrise.

And nowhere has that enduring dichotomy rung more true than in Bangalore, the capital of India's high-tech industry and foster child of our global economy. We arrived early, getting down from a bus that had traveled through the night over dusty, unpaved roads that were jagged mountain ranges, with peaks and valleys shaking bouncing rollicking us from stolen minutes of fitful slumber. Just outside the city the single dirt lane changed to a crowded modern highway, sardined with the morning's commuters honking and jockeying for position in the crawl toward the 9-to-5. A rickshaw found us and accepted our haggled rate to get to MG (Mahatma Gandhi) Road, the center of town, where we found one of the ubiquitous chain coffeehouses and tucked into large, steaming cups of The Real Thing. We spent an hour or so chatting with an Australian traveler who had arrived in India through Pakistan and China, sharing stories and comparing notes on our experiences thus far. Happily caffeinated and a little jittery after our long night and the shock of brewed black coffee, we parted ways and went in search of food.

We had time to kill, as our Couchsurfing host, P, would not be arriving in Bangles* until late in the afternoon. And we trod the city sidewalks fully laden, as no hotelier could be convinced to keep our packs for a few hours at any price. Strange days, my friends, when not even the baksheesh can get you access to a left-luggage room. South of MG Road, the streets are lined with Western chain stores and restaurants, the signage above your head touting the wares of European and American corporations. You can buy your Levi's next door to the nightclub selling Heineken, get a new pair of Skechers across from the "First International Donut Chain in India." We had read about this proliferation of chain eateries around the MG Road area, and I was in the midst of a full-on Mac Attack by the time we saw the Golden Arches.

Let me explain: We had been restricted to South Indian idli-dosa breakfasts in Gokarna town and the small number of beach shacks dishing out mediocre-to-bad multicuisine fare after the early sunsets made the rocky headlands between the beaches no-travel zones for safety reasons. This had been our enforced diet for a week on Kudle Beach, and while the banoffee pie at Ganga was extraordinary (and dearer by ten rupees than a room for the night), we were roundly unimpressed by the Indian food we had been able to obtain apart from the aforementioned breakfasts. A few nights of lousy curries and strangely palatable pizzas, and I figured we might as well push our tolerances for shite food to the very corners of that greasy envelope.

So I had the Chicken Maharaja Mac** (fries and Coke), and D got the Paneer Salsa Wrap (ditto). And, oddly, they were far from terrible. But we were hungry, so...

A phone check with P gave us an approximate arrival time, so we figured that the best way to kill a couple more hours was to catch a flick. There was a glossy new mega-mall just east of the McDonald's, so we clomped down the road and through the metal detectors in front (the guards laughed when they saw our packs and waved us through with but a cursory pass of their wands). Up the escalators and through the jungle of consumerism, the Inox multiplex had no showtimes that matched our schedule. So, after noting the number of shoe stores (my right Teva blew out in Palolem and was on its last, er, legs?) and the timings of English-language flicks, we set off back toward McD's to another twin-screen cinema and sat down for our first Hindi picture in India.

The typical Bollywood movie is an extravagant affair, its palette every color of a candied kaleidescope, its musical numbers advancing the story as much as (if not more than) the dialogue that marks time between songs. That said, No Smoking is not your typical Bollywood movie. We could make neither heads nor tails of the plot, a dark existential comedy (or was it?) following the travails of a wealthy Mumbaiker who can't seem to kick the habit. It begins with a dream sequence (or was it?) against a snowy backdrop with goosestepping Russian soldiers and a faraway bathtub at the top of a steep hill. Thought balloons emanating from the main character's temples read in English, before switching to Hindi script. This is the sense it made from the first five minutes, and it was all downhill from there. One of P's friends (P2) later told us that it was a really interesting flick examining the courses a life can take following a single decision (or something?), how one's future can change or not, depending upon the choices made or decided against. I'm hip to the idea, and I'd like to check out a subtitled DVD at a later date, but all we got at the time was a really slick light show (with only one musical number) in a dark, air-conditioned room. For that, it was worth the rupees.

After No Smoking, we decided that the coffee from earlier was wearing off to a point that our senses, still not so keen after the long night and the longer morning/afternoon, should be treated to a few glasses of cold draft beer. And then maybe a few more. So we wandered into Guzzler's Inn, which is not nearly as shady as it sounds. In fact, it was refreshing to see an actual bar (gasp!) behind the darkened glass doors, and not the typical dim, dingy, depressing boozing parlour we had learned thus far to avoid. There were even women sitting and drinking and smoking and talking about whatever with their male colleagues and boyfriends. The crowd was young and vital, and guys strolled in with motorcycle helmets in one hand and pool-cue cases in the other, heading for the billiards tables upstairs. We ordered a pitcher of Kingfisher and sat while the surreal scene around us unfolded to the biggest Billboard hits of the 80's and 90's.

A glass or so into our relaxation, it hit me just how fucking foreign Bangalore seemed--for all its familiarity--after our last many weeks in India. The only constant element of our travels has been the fluidity of what it means to be In India. Here we were, sitting across a well-lit table from each other, mixed company among mixed company, listening to American tunes and to our fellow patrons speaking in English***. Hours before, we had eaten American-style fast food and cruised the mall like teenagers in every suburbia anywhere, staring in the windows at the portable advertisements of Western consumer culture**** up for sale at fixed prices, no haggling.

And the kinda sad, embarrassing, pitiable part of it is that it's exactly why we came to Bangalore. The sights and architecture and temples that have been our reasons for other destinations were not in evidence in Bangalore, which boasts a few nice old buildings and a botanical garden amidst the commercialized sprawl that the IT industry and its money have ushered in. I needed a new pair of sandals (which I found the next day after trying on 4400-rupee Nike flip-flops, the new new shit according to the young, punky-haired salesman) and we wanted to catch a flick (we saw one more the next day, this time in English) and eat some really good, expensive food (we had great North Indian and Thai meals at Sikander and Shiok, respectively). In short, we wanted to be American tourists in India's America. We were not disappointed.

So from the Guzzler's Inn to P's home east of the city center. We scarfed street-food dosas over introductions before retiring to some much-needed slumber. The next day was spent wandering the streets and the mall before meeting up with P (pictured left, with D and Me) and Team Yahoo! (pictured above, during pub power outage) at a bar with very mod framed graphic art of Zappa, Bowie, and Clapton. Enjoying the pub culture in the last (read: "only") place we thought we'd find it, we ate spicy Indian pub cuisine and quaffed pitcher upon pitcher until the management signaled that the pumpkin hour was approaching. We whiled away the wee hours after closing time in P2's apartment bitching about the lack of public transpo in Bangles and other notable towns and cities, and P provided the solo guitar accompaniment for a rollicking and horribly off-key round-robin of karaoke. We made dinner plans for the following night, which meant cooking up an Indianized batch of my patented shrimp etouffee after two extended and amazing excursions into the local supermarkets. The cajun drew raves (I'm proud to say) from a crowd of Indian kids making their way in Bangalore's modern marketplace. Sitting and talking with everyone made us feel like the world really is smaller than we let ourselves believe.

For better or worse? I'll leave such speculation to the professionals.

*: An unofficial nickname, one that I like (and will continue to use) as much for its flippancy as for its evoking the favored adornments of Indian women of every caste and class.
**: No beef in the burger joint, natch.
***: Given the 300 languages spoken throughout the country, the young IT set in Bangalore converse in English, a lingua franca more accessible to both North and South Indians than even Hindi.
****: There's a ubiquitous television commercial here for Zeiss spectacle lenses in which a cubicle dweller shows off his name-brand watch and name-brand shoes to his coworkers. Peering over the wall between them, his female colleague sees his generic glasses and exclaims, her nose wrinkled in disgust, "What's on your eyes, man?" Over giggles from the rest of the office, the voiceover intones "Brand nahi toh style nahi," which translates roughly as "Ain't got a brand, it ain't got style." It's one of the most disgusting examples of how pervasive consumer culture is getting over here, and one for which I want to cut the American right out of me. Not that I feel any different about such status-baiting back home.