My Bangalore Adventure, part 13: Cariappa Park

As I mentioned in my last post, Cariappa Park turned out to be a little bit different from Lal Bagh or Cubbon Park. The guidebooks list it and you can see it on some maps, too, but it really didn't get my attention until I rode past it in a rickshaw. It looked really wild and green, like a forest not a park. Interesting. I put it in the mental files to investigate.

The next weekend turned out to be the first weekend of ThoughtWorks University. We had 16 students, a few from the Bangalore area but most of them from other parts of India and some from China. They had had a Thursday and Friday of orientation in the office with official TWU starting on Monday after the weekend. The plan was to do a some sort of Bangalore tour with the trainers on Saturday as an icebreaker.

BangaloreWALKS is a walking tour service that offers a variety of public and private outings around different themes. Maybe we should have gone for the Beer Walk, but instead, for a Saturday morning, we arranged a Victorian History tour on MG Road (MG stands for Mahatma Ghandi).

There was a lot of standing around listening to stories but that was OK for me because I really didn't know any of the history of how England came to power in India and the role the French and Sultan Tipu played. I also learned why Bangalore had so much real estate devoted to the Indian Army and Air Force and why Bangalore is a technology center for India today. For a little flavor of this walk, click here.

If you clicked that link, then you would have seen an inviting view of people having brunch on the balcony of a tall building (13th Floor). From here, our guide pointed out a band of greenery that started at one end of the army parade grounds (just visible in the photo). These were Cariappa and Cubbon Parks. I decided to check out Cariappa Park that afternoon.

The park is owned by the Army and only open to the public from 6-9 AM and 4-7 PM. A little bit odd but a lot of places in Bangalore and elsewhere have split hours like this. I figure maybe the Army wants to make sure they get some private time (pun intended) in there.

The guidebooks point out that a major feature of this park is a planned series of exercise stations installed along the paths. But some of the other references mention that this park has pretty much been left alone to grow wild and that is exactly what I found. In fact, it can feel just plain scary in spots.



I showed up about 4:30 PM and took the walk to my right, figuring it would circle the park and let me get a feel for whether I wanted to try any of the interior paths. After passing a rusted jungle gym type of structure, the walk became very overgrown and trashy with food leftovers and wrappers. It looked to me like a few homeless people had been making camp there. And a trio of wild dogs were quite assertive about one part of the path; maybe they win more times than lose. Anyway, I told them where to go and they agreed and disappeared.

The only good part about this section was finding an Eurasian Sparrowhawk in a nearby tree. We looked at each other for a minute or two and then it took off towards the Parade Grounds. I was past the spookiest part now and could see the walls that separated the park from more mundane military activities. The landscaping was a little more open here and soon I could see other paths with named markers. I could also see a few ordinary-looking people; middle-aged men taking a brisk walk, lovers sitting in shady spots.

The path looped back toward the entrance in sort of a figure-eight or butterfly pattern and the central lane took me past a very large fountain with, no-surprise, no water in it. Too bad. It looked like it was meant to simulate a large waterfall.



Not far from there was a memorial to Field Marshal Cariappa, a ground-breaking figure in modern-day Indian military history.

The memorial was dated 1996. Continuing on, I began to notice other signs pointing out structures or memorials from the same year, except the structures were either in ruins or, remarkably, in the case of an entire bandstand pavilion, completely gone. For the first time, I noticed that the paths were lined with broken light fixtures. The story was obvious and amazing. Here was a park, designed and laid out by the army in 1996 to honor this military man, and in less than 15 years it was completely neglected and abandoned to the elements.

You can read more about it here.