My Bangalore Adventure, part 21: The Fabulous Intersection

My last post described a mis-guided, but ultimately interesting walk in search of 80 Foot Road. I had just passed a neighborhood mosque and I kept thinking about the little map from the hotel guidebook. If the fork to 80 Foot Road was not coming up shortly, then I had already passed it though I couldn't see how that could be as there weren't any street signs saying such.

Still, according to the map in my mind, if I had passed it, then I should be walking mostly parallel to 80 Foot Road and I should certainly be there if I turned right at the next large street.

The lane I was on got narrower. I passed a small dark shop with live chickens in cages: were they selling meat or eggs? Maybe both. Next door was definitely about meat, a peice of fresh-that-morning lamb was hanging from a hook outside.



There was a shoe & leather repair shop; a shop stacked full of old newspapers; a few other uncertain businesses; knife-sharpening, old metal, candy and soft drinks. The shopkeepers were invisible, nobody was on the street. Since the call to prayer had just ended, perhaps the entire area was Muslim.

All the shop fronts were faded wood with peeling paint and wide-open doors or shutters -- not many windows, nothing shiny, nothing freshly painted. Just when I was thinking maybe this lane would dead end in a collection of trash heaps and ramshackle huts, it connected with a wider, busy street with cars and buses. 10th Main!

Uncertainty turned into expectation. This looked promising. My little lane might have continued on the other side after a short jog around a sharp corner, or maybe not. It didn't matter. If I turned left, 10th Main would take me back toward 100 Foot Road which would be a straight shot home to the Diamond District.

None of the storefronts here matched the nighttime scenery I had seen the last time we went to dinner on 80 Foot Road. And I still did not see that name on any street sign. I decided to turn right. I had faith in that hotel map. 80 Foot Road could be ahead of me, still parallel to me. Maybe it was just the next block down.

Well no, it wasn't there. But walking along 10th Main was pretty good. Lots of activity, businesses, gated residential complexes, doctor's offices, restaurants. I walked and walked. No sign of 80 Foot Road. In the distance was a tall broadcast or electrical tower. It seemed to be located in a park or along a rail line and it seemed to be near a major traffic intersection. That was a good target for a destination. From there, I could decide what to do - retrace my steps or take that bigger road ahead toward Airport Road.

On the left was a park with squatter's tents and a cricket grounds. I crossed a busy street. The electrical tower was further away than I thought. Oh well, it's not worth the effort. I turned right at the very next corner. Again I was on a small narrow dirt street, crowded with parked cars, empty carts and a few standing cows. Nothing was moving. The street got narrower the further I walked and turned more and more into something that looked like a country village. Then this little street ended. I was on an even narrower, dark dirt lane crowded in by two and three story wood and stucco apartment buildings. I could go left or right but straight ahead was a gate and a walkaway to a building.

This building had a small sign that said Saint Somebody Home(John or Joseph?). This surprised me. I don't know why but I was always surprised by all of the evidence of Christianity thriving in India. It didn't really make sense to be surprised, after all, Americans and the British have been shipping missionaries to Asia for decades. Yet, I guess I never expected those efforts to have really caught on amongst all the competition.

Briefly, I thought this was a home for priests or monks, or elderly believers. Later, I decided it might just be an apartment building that had been given a hopeful sounding name. I turned right so at least I would be heading back towards the Leela Palace and the Diamond District. After a few more buildings, the lane straightened out some and I could see it intersected with that busy street I had crossed a few minutes ago. I was zig-zagging from side-to-side down the lane trying to dodge puddles and cow flops in the dirt so I didn't see the features of the intersection until I was right there in the middle of it. The puddle I was avoiding had caused me to face left and I looked up from my feet.



It was FABULOUS! ASTOUNDING!

There, next to a lively yellow Hindu temple was a white church topped by golden crosses looking as European and as Catholic as could be. Through a glass window you could see Mary praying. It was a painted wooden statue but of a size and attitude as if you were looking in on a living person in their home. The Ave Maria Church. Again, I was surprised by Christianity in India. How did this come to be here? And who were the people who came to this church?

And then, as if to utterly destroy that question, as I looked across the street, I saw a towering Hindu goddess, Ammavaru, three stories high in glorious color. Oh, my, a face-off between divine women. Or maybe they collaborated for universal harmony when no one was looking.

Plus, if religion wasn't your thing, there was a shop behind me that was filled to the rafters with an undescribable rainbow of plastic exports from China -- toys, housewares, jewelery, flip-flops, etc. It was magical. Everything that was wild, wacky, unexpected, and contradictory about my Bangalore adventure was summed up in this accidental walk to this fabulous intersection.



(Ironically, the Google map shows clearly that I was on 80 Foot Road all along and just turned the wrong way at 10th Main.)

A few more adventures to come....

My Bangalore Adventure, part 20: Confined to the Neighborhood

My Bangalore explorations ran into a wall after that weekend in Bannerghatta. the The preliminary outings and introductory classes of ThoughtWorks University (TWU) were over and the students and trainers alike were digging into the hard stuff.

My week days generally ran like this:

7:30-8:00: get to the Royal Orchid (a very nice hotel behind the Diamond District) around 7:30 for breakfast, class setup and the trainers’s morning huddle.
9:00: start class.
4:00-5:00: End class.
5:30-6:00: Get to TW offices in time for after-class student presentations or student one-on-one coaching, or grading homework, or trainer meetings or preparing for the next day’s classes.
9:00 approx.: Eat dinner.
10:00-11:00: finish dinner and go back to work. Or sleep. Or maybe blog.

Even Saturdays and Sundays would have TWU things going on.


I’ve included a little chart of my hours before, during, and after TWU to illustrate. That big dip is a a week of vacation and traveling home before starting my next assignment in Chicago.

Given such a schedule, there was little opportunity for getting out beyond the neighborhood. The only birding was along the drainage canal on the way to the Royal Orchid and I was seeing the same birds over and over. If I needed a little more greenery, there was a pretty good public garden down the road across from New Santhi Sagar. A big sign made me think the park’s name was Puravankara but after seeing that name in several places in Bangalore I figured out it was just the name of a real estate developer. The formal name of that park is Domlur SAARC Park.



SAARC stands for South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, a body that promotes socio-economic development. The second summit of the SAARC was held in 1986 in Bangalore and was the incentive for building out the golf course that is adjacent to the Diamond District and the Royal Orchid.

You can probably figure out what I'm thinking; Puravankara probably developed and donated that little park down the road as public space in conjunction with various deals going on to showcase the area for the benefit of the golfing elite and visiting dignitaries.

Besides that park, taking a walk now meant “going to get the basics” like shopping for groceries on 100 Foot Road or at Total Mall (where we had gone for McDonald’s). Or hunting down a book at Axis Books on the Inner Ring Road in Domlur. None of these destinations were much more than a mile from my apartment, so “taking a walk” also just meant doing the “same-old, same-old”.

One Sunday I decided to get out and really do something different. We had gone to some very nice restaurants on 80 Foot Road that Rixt, another trainer, knew about. We always went there at night in rickshaws but it seemed fairly close, just a few turns down twisty streets and voila! ... dining and shopping sophistication appeared. I had a small paper map from a hotel tourist magazine and it looked like I could walk there in about 20 minutes.

That little map suggested that 80 Foot Road branched directly off a street that joined Airport Road beside the Leela Palace Hotel. Easy! Let's do it!

My walk started with an ordinary stroll along Airport Road, across the pedestrian bridge, and past the front gate of Leela Palace. I turned the corner onto Kodihalli Main Road, a broad shady street that borders the hotel. This section has some impressive homes across from the hotel and although narrower, reminded me of spots along 100 Foot Road. But after a few blocks, the street shrank and I fell victim to the mapmaker’s imagination, or was that misinformation?



A pretty white mosque with green trim lay ahead near a fork in the road. According to my little map, the right-hand branch was the connection to 80 Ft. Road but to my eyes, it just looked like a crooked dirt alley running between houses. There were no obvious street signs to help me out. So I stayed to my left, on the side of the fork that went past the mosque. As I passed, it blasted my ears with a loud broadcast call to prayer.

It was like a foghorn marking a ship’s passage into unknown waters. I had been sure I was headed for the trendy part of 80 Foot Road but soon it would seem I was on course, quickly, for some other place.... (to be continued)