It gets better, and worse

Subir Roy: It gets better, and worse
OFFBEAT
Subir Roy
Business Standard

Is Indiranagar as beautiful as it used to be 20 years ago, asked Dharen, in the style of a classical rhetorical question, not expecting an answer because it was implicit in his current address — a farm down Kanakpura Road well outside of the city limits of Bangalore. What had brought him and his family out to the city on a Sunday morning was to introduce a relatively newcomer like me to one of the abiding charms of the city — breakfast at Koshy’s.

It is not that I needed to be introduced to Koshy’s, which is so close to my office. My wife has got round to saying that Koshy’s has become for me a latter day college canteen or Coffee House on Kolkata’s College Street. I keep going to Koshy’s out of habit and design, engineering even professional meetings that could well have been held elsewhere, the extent of the addiction being revealed only by the depressing details of my monthly credit card bill.

Dharen had brought us there when he heard that for all my paeans of praise for what’s best in Bangalore, I had not yet made a glorious breakfast out of appam and stew at Koshy’s. Come by 9.30 am, he said, or the appams will finish. So there we were, a bit bleary eyed after relishing the demolishing of English pride at the hands of Portugal and trying not to cry for Brazil.

The stew was remarkably light, the appam could compete with a rumali roti in its own lightness; there was no space for masala omelette on toast but Dharen, I realised, over orders. And I could not resist stuffing myself by topping it all up with a piece of fruitcake, and downing the coffee, full of aroma and sans sweetener, to get the full bitter taste to offset the over-satiated feeling.

Once we had paid due obeisance to the food, we went back to Indiranagar. No, it is not what it used to be, but yes, it still remained such a charming and liveable place. The bad news is that a large new retail store, M K Retail, had opened on CMH Road just round the corner from where we live, making it difficult to cross the road or go down the side streets during weekends.

A quite residential area is being commercialised the right way — through land use reclassification. But you cannot have the best of both worlds — live in a placid neighbourhood while remaining within walking distance of cosmopolitan charms.

A small way in which life’s got a little better is that a new branch of FabIndia has opened nearby. But the big change is, if you seek to give yourself some cerebral airs, you can now do so with even less effort — Max Mueller Bhavan has just moved into its elegant new home virtually opposite the new retail store.

True to form, MMB has begun by offering the best of global academia. Even the snatches of conversation between Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak and Upendra Bakshi on law and society that we late-comers on the back rows could pick up despite the faulty sound system made our day. The bonus was that we could catch up with friends Sathya and Vishala whom we had not met in months as, true to form, they had come from a good 15 kilometres away so as not to miss the event.

So I can’t really make up my mind on whether Indiranagar is declining like most of Bangalore. The quite and peace is going bit by bit, but the place is getting even more cosmopolitan than ever.