Tag: bangalore

Pre-trained models

On Sunday evening, we were driving to a relative’s place in Mahalakshmi Layout when I almost missed a turn. And then I was about to miss another turn and my wife said “how bad are you with directions? You don’t even know where to turn!”.

“Well, this is your area”, I told her (she grew up in Rajajinagar). “I had very little clue of this part of town till I married you, so it’s no surprise I don’t know how to go to your cousin’s place”.

“But they moved into this house like six months ago, and every time we’ve gone there together. So if I know the route, why can’t you”, she retorted.

This gave me a trigger to go off on a rant on pre-trained models, and I’m going to inflict that on you now.

For a long time, I didn’t understand what the big deal was on pre-trained machine learning models. “If it’s trained on some other data, how will it even work with my data”, I wondered. And then recently I started using GPT4 and other similar large language models. And I started reading blogposts on how with very little finetuning these models can do “gymnastics”.

Having grown up in North Bangalore, my wife has a “pretrained model” of that part of town in her head. This means she has sufficient domain knowledge, even if she doesn’t have any specific knowledge. Now, with a small amount of new specific information (the way to her cousins’s new house, for example), it is easy for her to fit in the specific information to her generic knowledge and get a clear idea on how to get there.

(PS: I’m not at all suggesting that my wife’s intelligence is artificial here)

On the other hand, my domain knowledge of North Bangalore is rather weak, despite having lived there for two years. For the longest time, Mallewaram was a Chakravyuha – I would know how to go there, but not how to get back. Given this lack of domain knowledge, the little information on the way to my wife’s cousin’s new house is not sufficient for me to find my way there.

It is similar with machines. LLMs and other pre-trained models have sufficient “generic domain knowledge” in lots of things, thanks to the large amounts of data they’ve been trained on. As a consequence, if you can train them on fairly small samples of specific data, they are able to generalise around this specific data and learn around them.

More pertinently, in real life, depending upon our “generic domain knowledge” of different domains, the amount of information that you and I will need to learn a certain amount about a certain domain can be very very different.

Everything is context-sensitive!

Rameshwaram Cafe – Review

I’m just back home after belting a Garlic Roast Dose at Rameshwaram Cafe. This was the first time I went there, though you may not believe that since I’ve already written an entire blogpost on “Hosur cuisine”. Having eaten there once, I’m not sure I’ll describe Rameshwaram Cafe as “Hosur cuisine” any more. I’d instead call it “netflix cuisine”.

A few years back, when Netflix started making its originals, there were a bunch of articles and blogposts on how Netflix “used data and machine learning to craft its shows”. If you look at the trajectory of Netflix, initially that was novel and people loved its shows. Over a period of time, that didn’t scale, since it led to a whole bunch of “premium mediocre” shows.

Oh, on this note, you should read this article on how “everything is becoming the same“. And more AI and ML might just accelerate the trend.

Back to Rameshwaram. We were in the middle of our breakfasts, wife having “ghee pudi masala dose” and me having “garlic roast dose” (basically the same thing, except that my dose had Bangalore-style red garlic chutney smeared in, while wife’s had Tamil-style chutney puDi).

Someone wearing the Rameshwaram Cafe uniform approached us with the pickup line of “you guys come here often right?”. We replied that it’s our first time there, and he proceeded to ask us how we found it.

“Dose is fine but I don’t like the sambar”, I started off. “Yes, that’s because we make the sambar in Tamil style. You must like the Kannada style sambar, but we don’t make that here”, he said. We chitchatted for another minute when I excused myself to go get a second helping of chutney (yes, the initial quantity of chutney served there is grossly inefficient).

Essentially, Rameshwaram Cafe is the application of data and analytics and ML to restaurant menu building. Everything here is a conscious choice. The idli, vaDe and sambar are Tamil-style (thankfully the menu board said “40 rupees for a pair“, so I figured it must be tithi vaDe and stayed away from it). The dose is Bangalore style. Chutney taste is in between, but served Tamil style (small quantities of multiple varieties). I half expected to be turned away when I asked for extra chutney but most of the staff speaks Kannada, so they empathised.

The coffee was good. I didn’t really feel like having anything else – the iDli and vaDe on others’ plates didn’t look appetising at all. And so we came home.

Will we go back? It will depend on the circumstance. This will NEVER be everyday food like the nearby SN is for us. The dose was good while I ate it, but I don’t like the aftertaste. It’s not a place I would avoid (like if it were on a highway, or if I needed to eat at midnight when no other darshinis are open, I would go). However, it’s not a place I would seek out and go.

And the more I think about it, the more “premium mediocre” it is. Because they seem to have used data and analytics to find their menu (some items Bangalore style and some Tamil style – and it seems to be a very deliberate choice), the food by definition will not be spectacular. However, the place is hygienic, has pretty good operations and does well on the business aspects, so it is “premium”. And will continue to do well – just that I won’t go there too often.

“This has never happened to me”, my wife said as we were walking out. “I’ve never seen the restaurant manager at a place like this take customer feedback. And that feels odd. Places like this are supposed to be like ‘this is what we make. take it or leave it'”. Then again, she has never been a fan of fusion cuisines.

Hosur cuisine

Some 6-7 months back my office shifted from a relatively quiet semi-residential lane in Indiranagar to the slam-bang commercial area of Residency Road. This meant that Udupi Vaibhava, situated next to our old office and had served many of us rather well, suddenly lost a bunch of business. We, however, needed something to find something.

On the first day in the new office I visited good ol’ Konark next door for “tiffin” and coffee. Food was good but transaction cost (of sitting down and waiting) was rather high. And then people in office started raving about this “IDC Kitchen” across the road, and a week later I went there for breakfast.

I asked for idli-vaDe, and the first look of the vaDe gave me the jitters – instead of one large vaDe, there were two tiny vaDes, the sort we make at death ceremonies here in Bangalore. The idli looked dense as well. “Oh gosh, this is Tamil-style food”, I thought. And then I found that the sambar was red and sweet, of the kind you normally find in Bangalore. It was a bit of a relief.

Yet, the food was confusing. Some of it was evidently Tamil style (the “pODi iDli” and stuff), but it wasn’t quite entirely Tamil style. The dosé was thin. Chutney was neither thick nor thin. Very very very confusing.

And then a few days later a friend insisted we have breakfast at “Cafe Amudham” in Siddapura, insisting the dosé there was excellent. I didn’t want to have a dosé that day, so I asked for iDli-vaDe, and once again it was insanely dense iDlis, but normal sized vaDes. The sambar was more Bangalore style as well – again massively confusing.

Based on these two data points (and that yet-to-be-sampled data point that is Rameshwaram Cafe), I hereby declare that there exists a new cuisine that I call “Hosur cuisine”. It is basically a mix of Bangalore and classic Tamil cuisines. It is like the chromosomes of the two cuisines having undergone a random crossover (and some mutations), and so different restaurants serving this cuisine have adopted different aspects of the cuisines of the two  states – the style of sambar, density of idli, thickness of dosé, size of vaDe, number of chutneys served, etc.

And recently, having got quite bored of IDC (I’ve pretty much stopped eating there now), I tried the Virinchi Cafe next door to that. They make thick dosés but have drumstick in their otherwise red sambar. Incredibly confusing, and I can say that this is yet another “strand” of the Hosur cuisine crossover.

In any case, I’ve been brewing over this blogpost for a few days now, and then I saw Sandesh’s excellent dissection of Rameshwaram Cafe, and decided it’s time to put this down.

I’m yet to visit a Rameshwaram Cafe – the only one within my orbit is in JP Nagar 2nd phase, but it’s way too close to SN Refreshments to give it a try (and I have breakfast at SN some 2-3 times a week at least!). I suppose that is yet another random crossover of the Bangalore and Tamil food styles .

PS: This blogpost has absolutely NOTHING to do with my grandmother-in-law who is from Hosur

Discoverability and chaos

Last weekend (4-5 Feb) I visited Blossom Book House on Church Street (the “second branch” (above Cafe Matteo), to be precise). I bought a total of six books that day, of which four I was explicitly looking for (including two of Tufte’s books). So only two books were “discovered” in the hour or so I spent there.

This weekend (11-12 Feb) I walked a little further down Church Street (both times I had parked on Brigade Road), and with wife and daughter in tow, to Bookworm. The main reason for going to Bookworm this weekend is that daughter, based on a limited data points she has about both shops, declared that “Bookworm has a much better collection of Geronimo Stilton books, so I want to go there”.

This time there were no books I had intended to buy, but I still came back with half a dozen books for myself – all “discovered”. Daughter got a half dozen of Geronimos. I might have spent more time there and got more books for myself, except that the daughter had finished her binge in 10 minutes and was now desperate to go home and read; and the wife got bored after some 10-20 minutes of browsing and finding one book. “This place is too chaotic”, she said.

To be fair, I’ve been to Blossom many many more times than I’ve been to Bookworm (visits to the latter are still in single digits for me). Having been there so many times, the Blossom layout is incredibly familiar to me. I know  that I start with the section right in front of the billing counter that has the bestsellers. Then straight down to the publisher-wise shelves. And so on and so forth.

My pattern of browsing at Blossom has got so ritualised that I know that there are specific sections of the store where I can discover new books (being a big user of a Kindle, I don’t really fancy very old books now). And so if I discover something there, great, else my browsing very quickly comes to a halt.

At Bookworm, though, I haven’t yet figured out the patterns in terms of how they place their books. Yes, I agree with my wife that it is “more random”, but in terms of discoverability, this increased randomness is a feature for me, not a bug! Not knowing what books to expect where, I’m frequently pleasantly surprised. And that leads to more purchases.

That said, the chaos means that if I go to the bookstore with a list of things to buy, the likelihood of finding them will be very very low (that said, both shops have incredibly helpful shopkeepers who will find you any book that you want and which is in stock at the store).

Now I’m thinking about this in the context of e-commerce. If randomness is what drives discoverability, maybe one bug of e-commerce is that it is too organised. You search for something specific, and you get that. You search for something vague, and the cost of going through all the results to find something you like is very high.

As for my books, my first task is to finish most of the books I got these weekends. And I’ll continue to play it random, and patronise both these shops.

Recreating Tufte, and Bangalore weather

For most of my life, I pretty much haven’t understood what the point of “recreating” is. For example, in school if someone says they were going to “act out ______’s _____” I would wonder what the point of it was – that story is well known so they might as well do something more creative.

Later on in life, maybe some 12-13 years back, I discovered the joy in “retelling known stories” – since everyone knows the story you can be far more expressive in how you tell it. Still, however, just “re-creation” (not recreation) never really fascinated me. Most of the point of doing things is to do them your way, I’ve believed (and nowadays, if you think of it, most re-creating can be outsourced to a generative AI).

And the this weekend that changed. On Saturday, I made the long-pending trip to Blossom (helped that daughter had a birthday party to attend nearby), and among other things, I bought Edward Tufte’s classic “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information“. I had read a pirated PDF of this a decade ago (when I was starting out in “data science”), but always wanted the “real thing”.

And this physical copy, designed by Tufte himself, is an absolute joy to read. And I’m paying more attention to the (really beautiful) graphics. So, when I came across this chart of New York weather, I knew I had to recreate it.

A few months earlier, I had dowloaded the dataset for Bangalore’s hourly temperature and rainfall since 1981 (i.e. a bit longer than my own life). This dataset ended in November 2022, but I wasn’t concerned. Basically, this is such a large and complex dataset that so far I had been unable to come up with an easy way to visualise it. So, when I saw this thing from Tufte, recreating would be a good idea.

I spent about an hour and half yesterday doing this. I’ve ignored the colour schemes and other “aesthetic” stuff (just realised I’ve not included the right axis in my re-creation). But I do think I’ve got something fairly good.

My re-creation of Tufte’s New York weather map, in the context of Bangalore in 2022

2022 was an unusual weather year for Bangalore and it shows in this graph. May wasn’t as hot as usual, and there were some rather cold days. Bangalore recorded its coldest October and November days since the 90s (though as this graph shows, not a record by any means). It was overall a really wet year, constantly raining from May to November. The graph shows all of it.

Also if you look at the “noraml pattern” and the records, you see Bangalore’s unusual climate (yes, I do mean “climate” and not “weather” here). Thanks to the monsoons (and pre-monsoons), April is the hottest month. Summer, this year, has already started – in the afternoons it is impossible to go out now. The minimum temperatures are remarkably consistent through the year (so except early in the mornings, you pretty much NEVER need a sweater here – at least I haven’t after I moved back from London).

There is so much more I can do. I’m glad to have come across a template to analyse the data using. Whenever I get the enthu (you know what this website is called) I’ll upload my code to produce this graph onto github or something. And when I get more enthu, I’ll make it aesthetically similar to Tufte’s graph (and include December 2022 data as well).

 

Go East Policy

When you take time off work, one thing you want to do is to explore the world – go to parts of it that you haven’t been to before.

The original idea for this week was to travel – we wanted to do an impromptu road trip starting the past Sunday, booking only one hotel at a time on each day. As it happened, on Friday, daughter’s school sent an email that offline classes would begin on Monday, so we didn’t travel.

Instead, I decided to do a “staycation” – continue to be off work but be at home and vegetate. However, not going anywhere didn’t seem right. The whole point of taking time off is to go see parts of the world you haven’t seen before. And so I decided to set aside today for this purpose, apart from meeting people. Thanks to the pandemic and the latest round of lockdowns and school closures, I hadn’t seen too many people outside my family since the beginning of January.

And so I set off east, to parts that I hadn’t really seen or explored in a very long time.

  1. Bellandur
    First stop was Bellandur, to meet a friend who I hadn’t seen in over two years, and who’s recently moved back to “Bangalore”. We were to meet at a sort of a mall that’s part of this absolutely massive office complex.

    Despite all the metro construction going on, I got to Bellandur in quick time (the only wait being at Madivala checkpost). However, getting to Bellandur was only half the story. To get to the “bay” (as the mall was called) I had to turn off outer ring road, and into what felt like a strange road, with random barricades and private security personnel every 100 metres. Both sides were office complexes.

    Finally, at the end of the road (2-3 km in), I found the “bay”. It’s a sort of strip mall with a food court, and coffee and tea shops, and even an Apple reseller store. Maybe because most offshored businesses (which largely populate this area) haven’t got back to office yet, the place was largely empty. I had a bit of an embarrassing incident, though, as rather confusing signage meant I had opened the door to the women’s restroom (a janitor stopped me).

    I found the entire area sort of unreal and weird – even if the metro comes to ORR, it is going to be a massive pain to get to these offices and apartment blocks (and “mall”). There is no sense of redundancy in the roads. Security personnel every 100 metres is disconcerting.

  2. Windmills
    Next on the agenda was  Windmills Craftworks in Whitefield, where I was meeting someone for lunch. It was going to be my first time there, so I simply followed Google Maps.

    I was pleasantly surprised that this drive took only 25 minutes, again because most offshored staff have not returned to office. I was also pleasantly surprised to see a reasonably wide road that connects somewhere in the middle of nowhere in outer ring road to Graphite India.

    The location of the brewery is a bit strange – being located in a middle floor of a commercial building! The person I was meeting is a Whitefield local, and the thing that invariably happens in a microbrewery happens – he ran into others he knew. The food was good. I didn’t have much of the beer (since I was driving), but the IPA sampler was good as well.

    The valet was strange. When I got off the car, I was asked for my phone number and name, and got an SMS. When I was done, I simply clicked a link sent in the same SMS – by the time I came down, the car had arrived.

    On another note, I was thinking of all the places that were collecting my number – the valet, the restaurant above, some random shop I’d been to yesterday, etc. I was wondering what can be done with all this data. At one level, it scared me. At another, I thought it would be exciting to work with all this data and see what can be done with it!

  3. Sheraton Whitefield
    I was meeting someone at the coffee shop here. Being tucked away inside Prestige Shantiniketan, the hotel was a bit hard to find, and given that offices in the area have not yet been staffed, the hotel was empty.

    The hotel seemed nice enough and the coffee was good. And there was very little traffic in the usually rather busy road in front of it. I don’t expect this to last once people are back in their offices.

    _____________________________________

The way back was largely uneventful. Again I trusted Google, which took me on yet another random road to get from whitefield back to ORR. This was narrower and involved going through some rural areas.

Apart from some sections where the metro was being constructed, the drive back through ORR into Koramangala (I was meeting yet another friend after getting back to town) was quick and peaceful. And I noticed that the one-way systems in Hosur Road and Sarjapur Road have been reversed yet again. If there is a road (or pair of roads) deserving to be a “Tughlaq” in Bangalore, it’s this system. I’ve lost count of the number of times they’ve made these roads one-way and two-way (going back to at least 2004).

So the “exploring new areas” part of my week-long vacation is done. I want to step up on meeting people, but I’ll possibly do it on “home ground” in the days to come.

PS: The general convention I’ve settled on in life is that when one person travels to meet the other, the latter pays for the food / drink / coffee. As it happens, EVERYONE I met today offered to pay, and I simply let them without once insisting that I take the bill or we split it.

Topography of Bangalore

My day on Twitter didn’t start out too well today. I wrote this:

As I’ve stayed on for longer, with more data, things have improved today. I’ve learnt a few things, had a few conversations, and watched some fights. But so far, my day has been made by this article about Bangalore’s topography and development.

I’m halfway through reading it, so can’t say yet if I can agree with its conclusions. But what I really really like about the article is the maps. The main map they have is a topographical map of Bangalore (unfortunately, focusses on the cantonment area, so my areas are left out), and then zooming in to bits to explore development.

Topography of Bangalore, from the India Forum article

So many insights already from this:

  1. There is a clear correlation between areas that are perceived to be “posh” and elevation. The better planned areas of Bangalore are built on higher ground than the worse planned.
  2. “High grounds” lives up to its name
  3. While the article (so far) is mainly about construction of the cantonment, the preference for high areas post independence is also evident. From the bottom of the map seen above, you can broadly identify the northern boundary of the area that is now Jayanagar and Basavanagudi. Similarly, the Vidhana Soudha is built at pretty much the highest part of Bangalore (before the Metro came up, you could see the Vidhana Soudha by standing on top of the Trinity Church spire)

Later on in the article there is a more zoomed-out map of Bangalore. And that confirms that Jayanagar is indeed on lofty land.

Jayanagar is right at the bottom of this image. It’s interesting that parts of Banashankari (a rather hilly area) are actually low-lying

Progressing in the article, and it goes off into the (not unexpected) caste and class conflict territory. In any case, I’ve got my value from it. These maps are absolutely fascinating! I hope you like them as well

Covid-19 recoveries in Bangalore

Something seems off in terms of the Covid-19 statistics for Bangalore. The number of “active cases” just don’t seem to be going down in line with the drop in the number of new cases. It seems like we’re not counting “recoveries” like we used to.

Active covid-19 cases in Bangalore in the second wave

In terms of active cases, covid-19 cases in Bangalore peaked in the middle of May. And then active cases started dropping rapidly. It seemed (when I ran this analysis towards the end of June) that active cases would drop well below 50,000 in the middle of June. However, as the graph shows, that hasn’t happened. The reduction in active cases has come down to a trickle.

Now it might well be that the way down is more gradual than the way up, but the thing is that the drop in active cases doesn’t square at all with the number of daily cases.

One metric we can look at is – how many days back do we have to go (in terms of newly infected cases) to get the current number of active cases? This is not correct – it assumes that infection is “first in first out” – but a good enough assumption for our analysis.

I’m writing this on 20th of June. As of today, there are 71000 odd active cases in Bangalore. And we have to go back 26 days to total up 71000 NEW INFECTIONS (assuming none of these people have died). This means that the average recovery period is far more than 26 days.

It wasn’t like this. I graphed this (I’m apologising for using a weird metric here. I thought of dividing active cases by new cases but thought that’s less accurate than this).

At the beginning of June, the number of active cases was equal to the number of new cases in the preceding 18 days. And notice that through June that number has gone up steadily. For whatever reason, the number of days after which a patient is considered “recovered” has been going up. It seems like we’re not counting the recoveries like we used to earlier.

I don’t know why we are doing this.

For the record, if the number of active cases has continued to be in the range of the number of new cases in the preceding 18 days, then we would have about 35,000 active cases in Bangalore right now. That is half the official number of active cases right now.

Again – I’m indulging in curve-fitting of some kind. Just that the data doesn’t tally.

PS: All data in this post from the brilliant covid19india.org .

Reliving my first ever cricket match

Earlier this week, I came cross the recent Sky Sports documentary “spin wash” – about England’s 3-0 Test series defeat in India in 1993. That’s a rather memorable series for me, since it was the first time that I actually saw India win, and win comfortably (I had started watching cricket on my ninth birthday, with the 126-126 tie at Perth).

Prior to the series I remember chatting with an “uncle” at the local circulating library, and he asked me what I thought would happen to the series. I had confidently told him that England would win comfortably. I was  very wrong.

Anyway, one video led to another. I finished the series, and then remembered that it was during the same tour that I had gone for my first ever cricket match. It was an ODI in Bangalore, either the 3rd or the 4th of the series (depending on whether you count the first ODI in Ahmedabad that got cancelled). This came just after the “spin wash” and the expectations from the Indian team were high.

A granduncle who was a member at the KSCA had got us tickets, and my father and I went to see the game. I remember waking up early, and first going to my father’s office on his scooter. I remember him taking a few printouts in his office (a year earlier he had got a big promotion, and so had both a computer and a printer in his private office), and then leaving me there as he went upstairs to drop it off in his manager’s (the finance director) office.

Then we drove to the ground in his scooter. I don’t remember where we parked. I only know there was a massive line to get in, and we somehow managed to get in before the game began. I also remember taking lots of food and snacks and drinks to eat during the game. While entering the group, I remember someone handing over large “4” placards, and cardboard caps (the types which only shaded the eyes and were held at the back by a string).

Anyway, back to present. I searched for the game on YouTube, and duly found it. And having taken the day off work on account of my wife’s birthday, I decided to watch the highlights in full. This was the first time I was watching highlights of this game, apart from the game itself that I watched from the B stand.

Some pertinent observations about the video, in no particular order:

  • The outfield was terrible. You see LOTS of brown patches all over the place. When you see Paul Jarvis come in to bowl, you see a very reddish brown all over his trousers – you don’t really see that colour in (even red ball) cricket now
  • There was a LOT of rubbish on the outfield. Random paper and other things being thrown around. Remember that this was prior to the infamous 1999 game against Pakistan in Bangalore where the crowd threw lots of things on to the pitch, so I’m not sure there was anything to prevent things from being thrown on the pitch
  • The India shirt was sponsored by some “Lord and Master”. I don’t remember at all what that is. Never seen its ads on TV (and I watched a lot of TV in the 1990s).
  • There was a hoarding by the Indian Telephone Industries (state owned telephone manufacturing monopoly that collapsed once the monopoly was broken) that said “allrounders in communications”. I found it funny.
  • There were lots of hoardings by the local business Murudeshwar Ceramics / Naveen Diamontile. The business still exists, but it’s interesting that a local player got hoarding space – I guess TV wasn’t yet a big deal then
  • There was a hoarding by “Kuber finance”. I found that interesting since we’ve almost come a full circle with “Coinswitch Kuber” ads during the 2021 IPL.
  • The Bangalore crowd looked MASSIVE on TV. and the Sky Sports commentators kept referring to how big a crowd it was. Coming soon after Test matches in Calcutta, Madras and Bombay, this is “interesting”.
  • Every time the camera panned towards the B stand in the highlights reel, I tried to look for myself (I was 10 years old at the time of the game!). No success of course. But I do remember stuff like Srinath getting his 5-41 bowling from “our end” (BEML End, going away from where I was sitting). And Sidhu fielding right in front of us at third man when India was bowling from the pavilion end
  • I remember leaving the ground early after India collapsed (from 61-1 to 115-7). I remember my father saying that there would be riots once the match finished and we should get out before that. One of my school classmates who also went to the game said he watched till the very end and I was jealous of him.
  • The highlights showed Mexican waves. I clearly remember enthusiastically participating in those
  • This was 3.5 years before the famous Kumble-Srinath partnership in Bangalore against Australia but from the highlights I see that Kumble and Kapil Dev had started one such partnership in this game. Again I remember none of it since I had left the ground by then.
  • I’ll end with a poem. I had written it on the day of the game, on the back of the “4” placard I had been given while entering the ground, and waving it every time it seemed the camera was facing my section of the crowd.

Graeme Hick
You’ll get a kick
From a mighty stick
And you’ll fall sick

He ended up top scoring in the game.

Railways and the military: an evening spent in ToK

Sometime this afternoon, when both the wife and I figured it was impossible for us to nap, she said that she wanted to “go on a drive to a part of town she hasn’t seen”. After some thinking I said that we could go to the “cantonment area” or the “towns” (Frazer Town, Cox Town, etc.), which we knew are not too far off from town, but where we had hardly been to.

Sometime back I had tried to imagine “symmetries” around the centre of Bangalore, whatever that means. It had started when I wondered which other areas in Bangalore are similar to Jayanagar, where I live. Having ruled out Banashankari and Rajajinagar, other areas I’ve lived in, because they are “too far from the centre of town”, I started looking at other areas that are nice and residential but not far from the MG Road area.

And that thought process had taken me to the “towns”  – Frazer and Cox and Richards and all that. I hadn’t thought much about it then. And I hadn’t wondered much about what sets these “towns” apart from Jayanagar. Today’s drive gave me the answer.

There are two defining features of the “cantonment” or “towns” area – the military and the railways. As we journeyed east from Frazer Town (the one part of this part of Bangalore we are vaguely familiar with) all the way to Kammanahalli, and the outer ring road, and Banaswadi, and then back towards Indiranagar (more on that later), we kept encountering large swathes of military lands, and railway lines.

Along the way, we saw roads and areas we had only heard about but never seen. For the most part, we didn’t use Google Maps, but just kept driving along the big roads we could find. So we saw Frazer Town. We saw what we first thought was Banaswadi, but later figured is some Ramaswamy Palya or something. And then suddenly, we decided we had heard about Kammanahalli, but never knew where it was, and decided to drive towards that. Halfway up a railway bridge, we saw a signboard to a detour that would take us to Kammanahalli.

And so we went there, and drove through it. Nothing spectacular. And then I had this “flash of inspiration” that this part of town wasn’t actually very far from Indiranagar, and so we could return home via a dinner stop in Indiranagar. So I entered the address of my office (which I haven’t been to yet, but which is in Indiranagar), and let Google Maps take over.

It took us to the Outer Ring Road. And seemed to suggest a route that was going through KR Puram. “Ring roads are boring to drive on”, I declared, and seeing a detour that was “7 minutes longer” I went off the outer ring road. This took us through Banaswadi, and the drive was great (the road was great).

In any road trip, there is a point where you think you are having so much fun by exploring. And then soon after you suddenly feel tired and exhausted, and start wondering what the hell you were thinking when you decided that this drive was a good idea. Soon after we had passed Banaswadi, we had this moment. And this had to do with the railways and the military.

We had driven past Banaswadi, and encountered the Baiyyappanahalli station (with 16 platforms) that is still being renovated. This was the time when we were still feeling excited, that we were seeing parts of town that weren’t too far, but we had normally not seen.

And then we hit a mud road, and a dead end (literally. Not a T-junction). “I don’t get a good feeling here”, my wife said. I turned around and took a nearby road. This took us to a railway gate.

It is the highlighted route here. The red section near the railway line. It’s interesting that Google has coloured it red, because the section just doesn’t exist now. Maybe as part of the work done to revive the Baiyyappanahalli metro station, a new railway overbridge is being built there. That means the road itself has been closed.

This, we figured after we had crossed the railway line (this happened after a 10 minute wait for the Mysore-Kochuveli Express to pass). We crossed the line and found that the road didn’t exist after that. Everyone was going left there, but the road didn’t look good so on a whim I turned right. The road was decent.

What I hadn’t anticipated was that the other defining feature of cantonment Bangalore would come in our way – military areas. No sooner had I turned right after getting past the railway line that Google suddenly upped the time and distance estimates to Indiranagar. Soon there was a military gate to the left. “Trespassers will be fired upon”, said a board nearby. We drove on.

The size of the military area there meant that we had to go all the way back to Ulsoor Lake before going to Indiranagar. On the way, we passed a funeral procession that occupied the entire road (with lots of singing and dancing and flower throwing). We had a close shave trying to pass an auto rickshaw at an especially narrow stretch of road. At another point, we had to wait for two minutes for a cow to give us right of way.

And then, somewhere along the way, as we neared Assaye Road, I said something like “Ok, we are getting back to civilisation. Close to town now”.

The daughter, seated next to me, and supremely bored as we went round and round without stopping, asked “had we gone to a different state, appa?”.

“Yes”, I replied. “We had gone to ToK” (a tongue in cheek expression pioneered by Thejaswi Udupa (link possibly paywalled now). It can stand for either “Tamil Occupied Karnataka” and “Telugu Owned Karnataka”).