Bengaluru beyond the traffic and flooding

A talking point this past week is how corporate heroes Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw and Mohandas Pai have taken a U-turn to shower praise on Deputy Chief Minister D K Shivakumar. Just the other day, they were posting on social media about how badly Bengaluru was being governed. When they met Shivakumar, he told them, considering their comments become international news, they shouldn’t shame the city that helped them grow. “If you forget the roots, you won’t get the fruits,” is what he famously said. All of which brings us to three aspects of Bengaluru life that consistently draw media attention – bad traffic, flooding, and language conflicts.

Bengaluru is many things to many people, but the national headlines are grabbed by a handful of business leaders, mostly upset about one of the three things above. The conversation among old-time Bengalureans is predictable, too. They wonder why every time Mumbai faces a flood-like calamity similar to the ones in Bengaluru, the headlines only talk about the ‘spirit of Mumbai’. Why is the focus trained, they wonder, on only the positives – for instance, on how quickly that city got back on its feet? Why Bengaluru does not merit similar affection is a favourite topic across the board.

One argument old-time Bengalureans advance is that the city is dominated by people hailing from other cities who reserve their fondness for where they came from. So where are the untold Bengaluru stories? For some less aggrieved and more nuanced narratives, you will have to dip into the world of Kannada writing. Vivek Shanbhag’s fiction, for instance. His writing about Bengaluru spans at least three decades and traces the transformation of the city since the 1990s. In Huli Savari, you find people from interior Karnataka facing a severe culture shock in corporate Bengaluru, and then coming to terms with its subtle machinations. In Ghachar Ghochar, which has travelled across the world in a superb translation by Srinath Perur, you find a middle-class family switching from a regular job to business, finding affluence, and discovering how it changes the nature of human relationships.

A more recent work, Sakina’s Kiss, tells the story of a software engineer who has participated in the transformation of Bengaluru and now finds dark humour in what once terrified him. His politics has shifted subtly, and he enjoys watching loud, ridiculous TV debates to annoy his wife. In Nataraj Huliyar’s recent short story, Preparation, you find a rationalist professor facing off with nationalist colleagues, learning about his vulnerability, and then finding ways to overcome his fear.

The multitude of languages spoken in Bengaluru must similarly be responding to the pulse of the city in the fiction they produce. An earlier generation of writers, including U R Ananthamurthy, P Lankesh, and Poornachandra Tejaswi, wrote fiction of a high order, but their concerns did not cover the transformation of post-’90s Bengaluru. Among the books in English documenting Bengaluru are Askew (2016) by T J S George and Multiple City (2008), edited by Aditi De. They represent perspectives of people who have lived in the city long, and enjoyed a warm, far from adversarial equation with it.

Siddalingaiah’s three-volume autobiography Ooru Keri introduces us to some of the most eccentric Bengalureans. One builds a huge temple, imagining he was an emperor in his previous birth. Another finds himself dead on paper, and jobless as a result – he has shared his ESI card with a colleague who uses it and dies in hospital. A professor forgets the English word ‘jump’ in a university classroom, and gets his students to prompt him by jumping from a high platform.

News stories about Bengaluru will continue to shout and scream, with the usual suspects driving home the same points. If you want to look for Bengaluru stories beyond the headlines, look elsewhere.

(The writer often sees high art in kitsch and vice versa.)