How to Love A City in 10 Days
By
Anasuya Avadhanam
TY B.Sc. Economics (2023-27)
Estimated Reading Time – 4 minutes 17 seconds
I lived my whole life in the same city, any travel was temporary, leading me to fully believe that home can always only be Hyderabad. When my dad told me that he’s being considered for a possible transfer to another city, I was heartbroken and tried to mask my protests as those coming from a place of concern for the elderly, it was definitely not about me. Well, they moved. The train tickets from Pune became increasingly difficult to book, the travel time screamed that I might be just fine spending long weekends here, in Pune.
Eventually I gave in and found myself in the midst of the infamous Bengaluru Traffic this Diwali. I tried to fight all the reels on instagram recommending the hot shot eateries in the city and happening events that seemed increasingly cool. I couldn’t anymore. All of those recommendations were shoved into my saved folder on instagram and a million screenshots of pieces I read on Bangalore’s cafes lay in my gallery, wondering if I ever even bothered to think about Hyderabad while saving them. Let’s pretend I did.
Image source: Photo by author
My first and possibly the only reason I thought Bangalore had any chance to win was the flower market. Pune deprived me of beautiful South Indian flowers. The fragrant jasmines that you could tell from miles away, aren’t the same here and the insane prices?! The goal to adorn my hair comes with some budget constraints that Pune flower markets could never meet. Bangalore offered varieties that even Hyderabad didn’t, my mom took me to the wholesale market in Madivala and to tell you it was colorful is the least justice done to a market like that. I don’t think I saw a more beautiful yellow than the yellow on the marigolds, I have never seen hues so beautiful until I saw purple chrysanthemums along the road. The quantity of flowers you could get for less than five hundred rupees was insane. I went to the market to find jasmines; I found more than that. Past the flowers, came the fresh produce. Freshly picked carrots, shiny shallots, yucky looking yams and cauliflowers lined up like little flower bouquets. The vendors were so happy, chippy and chatty that it felt like the city spoke to them and it was surely something humorous.
As if my review of a city that has been seeing increasing migration over the last decade really mattered, I went on to mentally rate its metro network as well. People lined up, I am almost positive that I heard mrundangam music while waiting at one station and the ladies coach, well, had just the ladies. I thought to myself that the city seems more than okay, in fact it has faster and better connectivity than Hyderabad. Then to convince myself that I cannot give in this easy, I took a public bus the next day. All I got is convenience, conductors who let you know about your stop and some happy/nice people who fought for our seats with others. Either my standards for judgement are really low or the city screams happiness more than others that I have been to.
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Being home is always fun. For a few days it’s about being around family and the luxury of my own home, but almost everyday is because of the food. Sure, yes, I love it when my mother cooks but sometimes I am that ungrateful daughter that convinces her parents to get food from outside for at least one meal every other day. Traffic or no traffic, it didn’t matter, I wanted every benne masala dosa, all kinds of baath – masala baath, badam baath, kesari baath. We woke up as early as 6am in the morning to beat the traffic, travelled 10kms to get a table at the famous Vidyathri Bhavan. Yeah. That was something. The benne dosa was all things crispy and flaky but nothing hits the spot like a good roadside butter paneer dosa at Ram Ki Bandi. This was the only time in the entirety of my trip that I missed Hyderabad.
Image source: Photo by author
Image source: Photo by author
At this point any expedition led me to like the city so much so the hater in me had to take a step back. With a new happy spirit replacing my usual skeptic self, I signed up for a workshop with an intention to actually get to know the city. The workshop, called “Between Taps and Tanks”, was conducted by the BLR Design Centre where city enthusiasts, environmentalists, students, urban planners gathered to hear about the institute’s work in water planning as well as the history of water resources in the city of Bangalore. It was two hours of water, crisis and sprawl but the visual aids, the narration and the enthusiastic Bangalore citizens, old and youth alike, made every second incredibly exciting than the other. The more I looked around on the internet, on the streets, I saw more engagement of Bangalore’s inhabitants with its administration and governance. I wasn’t brave enough to venture out on my own in Hyderabad to stumble upon such instances there nor do I know the language well enough to participate in Pune. Some center or the other hosted as many citizen reform and public consultation sessions as possible and such lack of non-chalance amongst people in Bangalore was motivating to say the least.
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Route after route, restaurant after restaurant and the same dosas over and over again led me to fully accept everything the city had to offer. The weather, the public transportation, everything seemed agreeable and more than doable. At the end of my trip, I could ring up friends in Hyderabad to tell them that Bangalore won me over and Hyderabad only has the people I love and a home that I once cherished. Ultimately, romanticising a city is an easy task, sunsets and green lanes are almost everywhere. The separation of memories a place offers from that of the experiences it did is what makes people like me have beef with cities just because. If you ask me now, Hyderabad or Bangalore, I will chase you with a gun.
Image source: Photo by author