Wikipedia and the India guidebook I consulted before traveling, describe Lal Bagh as a botanic garden. The mere fact that I am writing this post probably indicates that I beg to disagree with that description. Let me tell you about it.
First, the Wikipedia entry is a good source for history and the current tree-cutting situation. The photos shown and linked there tell a true story, but not all of the story.
Paul and I really like botanical gardens. We are members of the Chicago Botanic Garden and wherever we go, if there is a garden there, we try to make time to visit it. Although most of our travels have been in the US and Canada, we've seen a lot of New World gardens ... Vancouver and Victoria, BC.; Hilo, Hawaii; Catalina Island; San Antonio; San Franciso; even Peoria, Illinois, just to name a few favorites (sorry, states south of the Mason-Dixon, graveyards and Civil War sites trump gardens down there).
So what will I see at Lal Bagh? It was on my mental tourist checklist and when Deepali recommended it in my first week, I moved it to the top of the list. Arriving there was quite impressive. I came by auto-rickshaw and after paying admission, we drove down an alley of giant cypress trees and canna lilies to the parking lot. From there, the first thing I encountered was a spectacular gelogical formation that I didn't really expect (I had read the TW guide, not the current Wikipedia listing.)
It was so vast and subtly extruded from the ground that my initial impression was of a concrete pouring gone wrong; I thought maybe it was a botched attempt at creating a rock garden, or some landscaping in progress. It looked like a gigantic dish of gray ice cream set out in the sun.
I couldn't figure out why a botanic garden would start such a badly-designed venture until I walked on a little farther and realized that the scale was too massive to be a man-made garden feature. It was a natural rock formation... or maybe rather, the worn-down skeleton of a hill older than the hills.
At the top was a little shrine, a monument to the place ... the Peninsular Gneiss which forms the bedrock of all of southern India. Way Cool!
Except there was no end to the bits of trash, plastic bottles, roast corn cobs and paper plates of partially eaten food tossed all around this place. A wonderful place where a person could stand in silence in blind, relentless sunshine and contemplate thousands of years of the earth's rotation.
An aging process invisible yet completely vulnerable to human, and only human existence. A thing far greater than any single one of us, the thing to which we will all return someday when the composite minerals that form our bodies and their containers dissolve back into the earth which gave us our original structure and home.
So there I am contemplating life, death, and the human equivalent of monkey dung and I am wondering why everybody else seems to have no problem with it. This is the essence of my Bangalore adventure.
to be continued...
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