Bathos in Beijing

If the secret PR objectives of the opening ceremony were a) Change the quality perception of "Made in China" and b) Scare the shit out of them all by showing them what we can do if we want to, then the secret PR department has done a great job. 1.5 billion people running in harness was an awesome spectacle.

India meanwhile couldn't get its snout of the trough long enough to think about basic protocol. What was the head of a political party, even the ruling party, doing among the Heads of State? And 56 participants? That's all we could get from one billion people? The local sports meet in one village alone would throw up about 10 possibilities – without special training. Where have all the sponsorships gone? Gone to cricket, every one.

Still, I'm glad I'm Indian and not Chinese. I've not been broke to bridle.

Café Coffee Day, Sterling Suites, Whitefield

The Starbucks of India is as ubiquitous as its American counterpart is in the places where it holds sway, but the coffee is a hundred times better, perhaps two thousand years better.

The music swings wildly from Eminem to Bryan Adams, Alicia Keys to Celine Dion, SP Balasubramaniam to AR Rahman. The clientele is the same sort of mix, a teeming sample of India in a Petri dish.

The English on the menu is impeccable, but everyone else struggles a little with the language. The influences of the two colonial masters, past and present, are not so much intertwined as hopelessly tangled. They do seem to call it a zee now but they don't use it in "realise". It might be listed as a cookie but it's sold as a biscuit. A new generation will have to be trained from birth to call it a jelly donut. Till then it'll be jam. You can offer your customers a muffin but you won't get them to ask for it. It is, has always been, may remain for ever, a cupcake.

People are not quite used to the girl sitting alone and doing her thing but I'm getting them used to it pretty quickly by repeated application – a useful lesson I learned from P G Wodehouse. If I don't go out and do this now I will get resentful and claustrophobic – the other side of living in a small town, caring about the gossip, staying under the radar, "looking out of the window, staying out of the sun". This may be Any(boom)town, India, 2008 but for some of us it's just a small town and I know as certainly as if I overheard it that "they" are talking about me. The difference is that it makes none to me.

I'm glad I have a coffee shop 30 seconds from my house.

61 years of freedom

To really feel Independence Day, you have to be in school. Or have school-going kids or be with people who have such. My mother was chief guest at a school today for their Independence Day celebration. Her description made me as sharply nostalgic for my days of marching in my house in the parade, as I suspect it made her for her days of organising these events. This is the only chief guest I know of whose speech was actually addressed to the students assembled before her rather than into the middle distance. She told them what it specifically meant to be born into an independent country and that what they got out of it depended on themselves, not anyone else.

I went to register myself at the local election office a few days ago and found:
• Government officials have turned polite, efficient and punctual.
• Government procedures are still shrouded in mystery, myth and legend, but less than before.
• Government information is no longer guarded by malevolent spirits and three-headed beasts – it's freely available on detailed Government websites.
• Someone I studied with earns 4% of my salary. She has the same degree I have, the same general background, started with the same lack of influence, old-boy network, money or any other special aids. But she was handicapped briefly by a traumatic marriage, which would explain some of it. There but for fortune, maybe.

Eddies in the space-time continuum

Going through old files in a frantic search for my school leaving certificate, I learnt the following:
• 1 cubic foot of water is 28 litres.
• Our household takes 10 to 24 hours to go through 250 litres of water.
• 1 tractor with a 9-tine plough can plough 20 acres in 10 hours.
• You can grow 144 mango trees in one acre of land.
• The Israelis know many useful things about commercial farming.
• A teacher can also be a polling officer.
• There's a special course on how to teach "gifted children".
• For the price of my college fees, I would today get a sandwich and coffee. It may run to a muffin as well, but that's about it.
• My parents planned to buy a flat down the road a few years ago but abandoned the idea for an unspecified reason
• My brother missed dad and the dogs most in boarding school. He had friends named Clive and Ashok and my mother used to send them home-made jam. I sent him a card for his birthday.
• He was an eight-year-old in exile. Kids that young must never, ever be sent away from home.
• My granddad had beautiful handwriting. He did not believe his grandson was over his homesickness but tried to reassure his son by pretending to think so.
• My grandmom (on the other side) wrote out detailed knitting instructions for booties but knowing my mom, they have been lying unused in this file or another for 35 years.
• Both my mom's children have forged her signature on highly creative excuse notes – but characteristically my brother's got caught and preserved while mine remained a secret until now.
• I was an intensely annoying kid.
• For the supposedly sentimental member of the family, I've preserved relatively few bits of memorabilia. And so far, they do not include my school leaving certificate.

The coming of the roads

Hundreds of hoardings across the city state without preamble or explanation: "I believe in Bangalore… because Bangalore is in my DNA."

I can't quarrel with the second part but I'm not sure what we're supposed to be believing in – the metro that's taken longer to build than whole cities have? Or the indiscriminate granting of building permits so that green expanses turn overnight into forests of apartment buildings? Should I worry instead that my long walks yield not one quiet lane in what used to be the city's most picturesque suburb? Should I be glad that the peripheral ring road is almost ready when it means that by this time next year the farmland, eucalyptus groves and wild grass on either side of it will have become "tech parks" and gated communities?

Yesterday, when my Dad and I drove down it to see how far it's come, it was a beautiful, soothing drive. Next month, the goatherd we slowed down for will be honking at us from behind the wheel of a Ford Explorer, having sold his paddock for untold sums to somebody who wants to build an expensive row of identical haciendas called Casa Del Dancing Butterfly.

It's hard to tell what is right and what is wrong. On the one hand, the goatherd deserves his turn at the SUV, the solar water heater, the plasma TV. On the other hand where does it end?

The butterflies have precious little to dance about, but they seem to be doing it anyway in my parents' garden. I'm told they are pests – they lay eggs in the leaves and the caterpillars destroy the plant when they hatch. Perhaps that's why they're dancing. My parents seem to be philosophical about it; there are certainly no pesticides in sight.

But you can't deny the vastly improved public transport and roads. The perceptible lifting of middle-class poverty. The sense of optimism in the vast numbers of young people swarming up and town the tower blocks that could be in any city in the world. The IT kids, the BPO boys and girls, the frequent rags to riches stories that strengthen the ideal of democracy. These children deserve to enjoy their new cars and swanky flats, the Tag Heuer watches, Body Shop lotions and Smirnoff Ice, just as much as the goatherd his own version of prosperity.

Meanwhile, here in this corner of Whitefield - as perhaps in other corners around the city - neighbours still visit each other. Club members still meet to play cards. Long-standing residents like my mom and dad still extract exemplary service from garbage collectors, road workers and policemen through sheer force of personality. The baker, or rather a baker, a butcher and a kebab-maker still greet me as the kid who was sent to the shops with a list by her mother.

Then there was shisha last night, on a rooftop in the rain, two bottles of very drinkable Indian Shiraz, a highly hospitable "sports bar". And three new friends, with easy conversation that felt as if'd known them a long time. Because we're old Bangaloreans and for us, this is still Bangalore, where an impulsive drink on a Sunday evening will always have strangers at the table, included without fuss or ceremony.

Maybe Bangalore now is only in our DNA. The gleaming towers and glittering lights spread out prettily below us belong to another, more hopeful city, a new era called Bengaluru. I want a piece of it myself.

The Coming of the Roads, Peter Paul & Mary, Album: Songs of Conscience & Concern, 1999

Breakfast at Koshy's

The atmosphere is the same, mostly the easy negligence of old money. Silver sugar bowls flung casually together with cheap steel ashtrays that even truck-stops would disdain now that they drive Volvos rather than Ashok Leyland lorries. Some tables have neat tablecloths, others are weird Formica. The coffee pots are polished to perfection, the coffee cups are indifferent china. The coffee as always is the best I've ever had.

The same waiters as well, looking exactly the same though years have passed, and consistently of the old school – they do not ask how you're doing, whether you'd like the specials or if you're enjoying the food, they just give you what you need quietly, courteously and without fuss.

The mince on toast – in fact, the whole eccentric menu – is wonderfully unchanged. The legend on their napkins says that their business is food but Koshy's is and has always been a hub, a facilitator. Decades of serving artists, journalists, theatre groups, writers, new love, break-ups, teachers, students and angst-ridden Marxist believers have accustomed the staff to all sorts of special requests. So when I asked a busboy if he would buy me a pen and notepad from the newsstand across the street, he didn't even blink. It may be the only restaurant in the world where the smoking section is larger than the non-smoking. It's certainly the only one I've seen where the swank part has a notice on the door saying "Use of laptops prohibited here".

I got a coveted window table by dint of watching it like a hawk from an inferior one close by and leaping like a salmon as soon as it was vacated. I was actually surprised when someone left. They tended to squat for weeks.

As usual it was full of familiar faces but none of them resolved into names. I know that my brother or friend would have recognised and been recognised by at least half the lunch clientele. They would have had to make a sort of victory lap before they got to their table, if they ever did. Momentarily I had the old familiar feeling of being just a spectator on the sidelines of Bangalore's interesting life. But then I noted with the pettiest pride and pleasure that while I am still the girl in the corner with a book, I am no longer invisible. People turn to look. Certain male people were clearly wondering what life was like for the sort of guys who could go up and talk to a girl just like that. Age is a wonderful thing. Or maybe it was the grey contact lenses. Whatever. I'll take all the help I can get.

Finally the thing about Koshy's is that the first time I came here I was a toddler who needed the high chair stacked in the corner. I have vague memories from the monkey years of my brother and I ruining my parents' leisurely Sunday mornings here, of scrambled eggs and sausages, appam and stew. Neither they nor Koshy's have changed since. The bad paintings though have been replaced by framed photographs of old Bangalore, which I guess is in keeping with the prevailing mood among old Bangaloreans. Koshy's today is a fall-out shelter in a time when very little is left of the city we grew up in, and the rest belongs to America.

Breakfast at Tiffany's, Deep Blue Something, Album: Home, 1994

Karma chameleon

From all the Hindu myths we've absorbed over the years, we know that seekers of enlightenment tend to find it in moments of self-inflicted pain at high altitudes. That's why mine came when I was perched on six tortuous inches of extremely fashionable mock-snakeskin. From this pinnacle of achievement, I saw many things, eternal truths, the essential continuity of even the most overgrown paths and the fundamental stupidity of most things.

It was sparked by running into a college classmate. I haven't seen her since we moved on to different majors after two years in the same class. She belonged to a scary snob school circle that I wouldn't even consider breaching. Now she's just a person, while I... I was the intimidating one. I saw that in her eyes, recognised it because I know the feeling well. And I see clearly all the time wasted feeling inadequate, fat or defensive when I could have been making friends.

I see also that one of the reasons I left was to find out whether, in a place where I was not one rock star's sister and another's friend, I would still be invited to parties. I was. And they came in droves to my own, too. More time wasted on the wrong side of imaginary fences.

Best of all, I see that Bangalore was never really my city in that sense. I was on the fringe. So I'm not re-starting anything, merely starting something. That I can do. And since I spotted it early no time will be wasted trying to pick up the threads of a teenage life I thought I should have had. I am free.

Karma Chameleon, Culture Club, Album: Colour by Numbers, 1983

Caution: Wire crossing

You know you're in Bangalore when the telephone department makes careful distinctions between dead and half-dead. When you call the "telephone faults" number, these are your options:
Dial 1 if your phone is completely dead
Dial 2 if you have partial service
Dial 3 for instrument fault
Dial 4 for something else
Dial 5 for broadband fault

If you can diagnose it, they will treat it. There is no option to transfer to a call centre agent.

It only takes a few minutes (once you're done calling the number five times just to laugh) to realise it’s a good method. These options cover the most common problems. And if you have any other sort of complaint, it's probably serious enough for you to storm their offices with a large stick. This way they've ensured that our irate dads only do the stick and storming bit for the big problems instead of twice a week.

Overcoming commitment phobia

I had to wait almost two hours for my parents to pick me up because my flight landed at a small hour that they couldn't quite do. (There's never a question of making my own way, I save my breath for the important battles.)

So I had time to look around me and felt much proprietary pride and pleasure in the shiny new airport until I encountered the petty bureaucracy of the free WiFi. One, it's not really free if you have to send text messages over international roaming for a one-hour password. Two, the password came four hours after I had reached home so it's not only unfree, it's also unusable.

But apart from this weirdness – I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt since it was just the one time for me – it's great. After all these years of no-strings camping in someone else's airfield, saying "but we're doing fine, why change things now", Bangalore has finally taken the plunge.

The airport is... well, a real airport. Swank too. They'd even opened up all the immigration counters instead of just one and a half as per usual government procedure. There are seven baggage carousels in place of the one rugby scrum that collecting luggage used to be. The trolleys work. All wheels. At the same time, in the same direction.

There are shops, cafes, bars, restaurants, a spa, more than one telephone, things to do. (I was once stuck in the old airport for seven hours because of a "suspicious flight" with nothing to eat, drink or do once I'd finished my book. It got so bad I risked arrest – unpleasantness, anyway - to sneak into the domestic terminal where the party was at. I bought a book, a sandwich and a coffee and got busted on the way back. I traded the coffee for my freedom.)

Standing in the immigration queue reading, I was briefly disoriented when I looked up, compounded by the fact that there was a giant ad on one wall for Damac properties, with Dubai phone numbers. For a moment I forgot where I was – Bengaluru International Airport did not know it, but that was a huge compliment.

Pride and prejudice

In the course of my packing I came across the journal I kept through my holiday in the US. The last entry is a list of observations written on the flight back. For some reason I've never put it on the blog and I will proceed to do so now.

Things I learnt (it says),

1. "The American people" considered as a single entity has a low quotient of independent thought. This is not their fault – all official communication goes to painful lengths to talk to the lowest common denominator. Everyone else has no choice but to follow.
2. This entity is also surprisingly chary of having a good time. Nor does it laugh at a joke unless it comes labelled as such.
3. The security measures at the airports are by and large all activity and very little action. I went through "special screening" three times in one day with a rather large lighter left in my bag by accident and nobody found it even after an elaborate search involving tipping the contents on to the counter.
4. In Orange County, people clap when Matt Damon acts the hero (as Jason Bourne, in this case) in much the same way that Rajnikanth is greeted with cheers and whistles in Chennai.
5. People were better dressed and worse behaved in LAX than all the airports I went through.
6. In Philly, they don't go to the beach, they go "down the shore".
7. Here, "think of Europe" is not useful in describing Indian diversity because many say European the same way the ignorant say Indian.
8. They don't know English. They can't speak it. They can't understand it. Only a few can read or write it. The only way to survive is to treat "American" as a different language and, as in any foreign country, learn to communicate in it.
9. They can't make dessert. Even their own apple pie is ruined with whipped cream or caramel (pronounced "carmel").
10. They also can't make cheese, bread or chocolate. Perhaps the collective taste buds have long been deep fried out of commission.
11. Farmers' markets, fair trade shops and organic stores are very big among the socially, politically, environmentally aware. But coming from an amoral industry and a cynical race, I am deeply suspicious of anything that's on such a large scale.
12. Everything, but everything, is hard sold. You are hustled aggressively, constantly by billboards, leaflets, license plates, museums, park notices, everybody – in the same spirit as taxi drivers and souq merchants in the picturesque countries.
13. They don't do customer service. In any form, ever.
14. The relentless cheeriness of strangers seems empty and annoying to begin with, but you slowly realize that they genuinely believe in themselves as a friendly race.
15. They should get out more.