The Old Ways, They Will Not Die (12°56'19.77"N, 77°34'15.57"E)

 

There is a Kannada song from the thirties that is still sung by a few people ironically. It was meant to be a paean to Bengaluru’s charm, old-world ways, and evergreen nature. The campaign for its release featured a look at everything that had endured over the years – gardens, dancing, old songs, old buildings, you know the drill. The moment it released, everyone sang it as a sarcastic reminder of the how the city would never develop or grow or change for the better. That is still how they remember it today. There was an English translation of this song called ‘Forever Bengaluru’, and its chorus goes like this.

The old ways, they will not die

We shall keep our flag flying high

Now Bengaluru, forever Bengaluru

The old ways, they will not die.

The famous modern urbanist Mathieu le Bâtiment opines, “For true growth, a city must move as one; all its organs changing at the same time, accepting the new.” As I walk around Basavanagudi, one of the older parts of town and where I was educated, I opine that everyone here would have beaten modern urbanists to within an inch of their lives before dusting themselves off for their evening ‘upma’ or ‘masal puri’. In my work at Urban Gravestones, I have seen many sections of metropolitan areas refuse to accept things like new construction standards or redevelopment projects. The reasons for this are varied – a wish to protect history, a perceived misuse of public funds, allegations of corruption, gatekeeping and so on.

Basavanagudi and its environs, however, have not changed because they simply do not want to. This area is both a time capsule and one of the biggest examples of sheer bloody-mindedness I have ever seen in my career. And I feel quite conflicted about it as I slowly move through its avenues, covered completely by canopies of huge trees and lined with even more greenery that interrupts excellently maintained stone pavements in an orderly fashion. Is this stupid? Surely it is. But why, then, do I feel a begrudging admiration for what I see?

I studied in this area. When I attended my graduation, I was one of five people in my entire classes who was not high as a kite. I was going to be a serious practitioner of planning and urban design, and I was going to protect cities from losing their cultural centres; what I saw as their essence. I remember taking part in a debate shortly after in which I said, and I quote, “The best way to allow the heritage of a city to survive is perhaps to leave it alone; to protect it from the looming hand of modernisation at the cost of cultural integrity.” Some people clapped at that statement. I was an idiot. Obviously, I failed miserably at effecting any change and stopped practising three years into my first job before languishing in unemployment for a decade, until someone decided to take a chance on me and allowed me to publish my first volume of ‘Before The World Ends.’ That was 2032.

Now, here, it seems like the area has all but turned its back on the city that supports it. You cannot do automatic payments for anything here. You cannot use the drone network here. They stop all flying vehicles at the borders of its administrative division. They do not vote on civic issues that are not directly concerning them. The roads still have old two-wheeled and three-wheeled vehicles; if you want to ride in one, you have to haggle and listen to their stories about ‘how expensive it is to raise a family’ before inevitably paying more than the ‘rate’, whatever it is. Coffee still comes in small glass cups. You still have to sit at the ‘katte’ to talk local news with people who are somehow always middle-aged and say things like "I don't like the internet." They still hold the ‘Kadalekai Parishe’, Bengaluru’s historical peanut fair, every year (I will recount my experience of it later in this diary.) The temple with its big idol made from butter still has throngs of people every morning and evening. They are still roasting corn cobs on the coals as the sun sets.

As I pass by the gates of my old college (which I don’t enter), I’m a bit torn on the idea of such a place existing. I have had a great day eating the best food I’ve ever had in my life (just like it used to be when I was a young fool.) It’s extremely inconvenient to not be able to transact normally, move around normally, and have to exist in a world deliberately stuck in the past. Bengaluru has always been a city of hamlets and villages, and nothing exemplifies its lack of unity like Basavanagudi, with its old-world charm and its happiness to be stuck in the mud. As the devotional songs that have always soundtracked the city blare from a hundred speakers in a hundred temples, I find myself humming, “The old ways, they will not die...”