Breaking Promises, Uncertainty and Empty Roads – The Third Bangalore Photowalk

When I thought about starting this Photo Walk thing, I had told myself “no MG Road” business. I had thought that it’s an area of Bangalore that everyone goes to and so there’s not much value added by having a Photo Walk in that area. “It’s too cliched”, I had thought. But then, about a month back, on a cloudy Sunday morning, I was walking from the Mayo Hall area to Richmond road, along Commissariat road. And I noticed a number of things that I thought are eminently photograph-able. And that this place deserves a photo walk.

I will still keep the promise. We won’t touch M G Road during the walk. However, the walk will be in this general area. We begin at the junction of Brigade Road and Residency Road at 8 am. We are moving back to the old starting time since this allows people to have a round of breakfast before the walk begins. I must mention here that this time, I haven’t made any plans for us to go for a collective breakfast after the walk.

Photo walks are much more random than I had initially thought. You get a diverse variety of characters. You have slow-moving people and fast-moving people. Shutterbugs and people who just prefer to walk. People who want to take a single building from seven angles, and those who give one look and walk on. This leads to tremendous uncertainty, uncertainty with respect to the distance covered. Given that most of us are fairly flexible with respect to distance, and not so much with respect to time (we should wind up at 10am), the solution would be to bring in more uncertainty – the route itself is uncertain to an extent.

Half the route is an area that is usually bustling with people, but you won’t find too many of them early on a Sunday morning.Hopefully traffic won’t be as heavy as it was on Nrupatunga Road a fortnight ago. There are a number of photograph-able old buildings. There are also a number of photograph-able new buildings. And enough of quirky signboard-level stuff to interest people like me. Enough of the globing now, and I’ll get to the details.

The Third Bangalore PhotoWalk

Date: 29th June 2008, Sunday
Time: 8 am to 10 am
Starting point: Intersection of Brigade Road and Residency Road.
Ending point: Intersection of Brigade Road and Residency Road.

Route:
We start off by moving up along residency road, in the general direction of Mayo Hall. On the way, we take photographs of the nice Opera building, and also the large number of modern buildings that have come up in this stretch. Once we reach Mayo Hall, we do a couple of pradakshinas to the place while taking photographs. We then pay homage to the deceased Victoria Hotel, and take snaps of the ugly Bangalore Central.

Next, we move on to commissariat road, and along with some police quarters, there are a couple of nice buildings before we hit Garuda Mall. We continue walking on, and there are a lot more interesting things to photograph here, until we hit Richmond Road, near Lifestyle. We walk along Richmond Road towards Shoolay Circle, and on the way there is the Sacred Hearts Church and some school. This ends the deterministic portion of the walk.

The next part of the walk (random as of now) will be in the inner lanes of Richmond Town. Just to throw around a few names, the roads we will cover will be Pulliyar Koil street, Markham Road, Castle street, Wood street, etc. Of course, this is all probabilistic. We will be walking extensively here if we have the time. Not at all if we don’t.

We hope to emerge out of the inner lanes of Richmond town somewhere on Museum Road, and we will use that to return to Residency Road. Once back on Residency Road, we will pay homage to the non-existent Imperial cinema hall, and then walk up another hundred meters, and we will end up where we started off. I’ll conclude by telling you all the story again – I’d have told it to you right at the beginning. Maybe if people have the enthu, we could even shoot a small video.

Here is the link to the probabilistic route that we are going to take on the 29th.

We should adjust our travels through the inner lanes in a way that we conclude at 10 am.

begin{distraction}:
I’m just back from an “unofficial non-public photo walk”.

? landed up in Bangalore yesterday and demanded a photowalk. We walked around the MG Road-Brigade Road-Church Street- Rest House Crescent area (which anyways is taboo for official photowalks). I’ll upload the pics soon.
end{distraction}


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