Tag: indiranagar

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”).

Trip To Indiranagar

The first time I recall going to Indiranagar was in 1992, when we purchased a used car from someone who used to live there. While walking from the nearest bus stop to the house of the previous owner of our car, we had taken a longish route, as my parents admired all the “beautiful houses” in the area.

Six years later I went to school in that part of town. The “beautiful houses” were still there, and I used to walk past them on my way to school from the bus stop every morning. While I found the culture of the place to be quite different from that of Jayanagar (where I lived), I found the part of town to be nice, and liked going there (though not necessarily for school).

And it was another 6-year gap after school before I resumed my visits to Indiranagar. This time round, it wasn’t as regular as going to school, and most of the time the agenda was eating. Indiranagar by the mid 2000s had a lot of wonderful restaurants serving a nice variety of cuisines. Some of these restaurants were also rather fancy, and so when I met up with college friends living in Bangalore from time to time, it was usually in one place of another in Indiranagar. I continued to find the place nice.

Marriage and child and change in profession have all meant that visits to Indiranagar have become less frequent, and most of them nowadays are work-related. I spend time in coffee shops there. I take the metro to go there. I occasionally walk around a bit from meeting to meeting, but don’t notice the surroundings around. Some eateries there continue to be nice, though there are a lot more of them nowadays than before.

Something snapped today when we went there for lunch.

Lunch was at “Burma Burma” which the wife had rather hyped up over the years, and where it is reportedly incredibly hard to find a table. The drive to there was smooth, the car was handed over to the valet, and off we went inside to our table. The service was excellent, but the food was so-so. I’ve never eaten burmese food in my life so I don’t know if Burmese food is supposed to taste that way, but it tasted extremely Indian. Moreover the food was “low density” – I ate until my stomach was full but still didn’t feel like I’d gotten sufficient energy.

It was after the meal that I realised how much Indiranagar has changed, and not for the better. Immediately after we got out of the restaurant, I ran after the valet to tell him to leave my car where it was (on a side road) since I had “other business on the road”.

I wanted to check out the newly opened Blue Tokai Coffee Shop, also on 12th main. The walk to get there was horrendous. It was only 200 metres from Burma Burma (made a bit longer by our walking for a bit in the wrong direction), but it was impossible to walk anywhere but in the middle of the road. Footpaths were fully occupied by trees, dug up drains and parked vehicles. And there was a continuous line of parked vehicles right next to the footpath.

It was as if the 12th Main (the same road on which I would walk to school) area has been redesigned such that you drive from shop to shop, giving your car to valets who will then proceed to park it in some side road.

Oh, and Blue Tokai is a non-starter. It’s a small space on the first floor with acoustics so bad that one loud group in the place can render the whole place unbearable. It didn’t help that they took forever to take our order, and we decided to decamp to the (tried and trusted, for me) Third Wave Coffee Roasters on CMH Road.

And that meant another walk, though we eschewed 12th main this time, and then a short drive. Both of us noticed that the roads of Indiranagar seemed narrower than what we remembered – maybe the multitude of restaurants there means valets keep parking all through the inside roads, and double parked roads can be narrow indeed. And the area around CMH where Third Wave is located isn’t particularly nice either.

It seems to me that Indiranagar is not posh any more. In a way it was so posh at one point in time that everyone sought to set up shop there, and all the shops meant that the area has lost its character. The “beautiful houses” are being torn down one by one, replaced by commercial buildings full of restaurants, cars parked by whose valets will flood more and more of the inner roads, and make the entire area unwalkable.

I’m pretty sure most of the posh people in the area have left, having sold their houses into the real estate boom. I just wonder where they have moved to!

PS: The coffee at Third Wave was incredibly bad as well. It’s not usually so – I keep saying that they’re the best coffee shop in Bangalore. The milk today was scalding hot, and the barista poured so much of it in our cups, and without any of the finesse you associate with flat white, that it was completely tasteless.