Bengaluru musings – Flying in a blue dream!
*Ah! A star before the story even begins! Not cool! Not cool! I know! But kya kare, I tried getting to the point directly, but realized, I could do no better than write a line or two. Why? Because, it’s been so long since I last scribbled three months back. Again, that was a post that began another three months back. **You might be thinking why is this fellow giving a crazy stat about his laziness? I do it for two reasons, one; to remind myself, how lazy I have been and two; After that long break, I am just warming up!!** *
About a year into Bangalore, yes, it was still Bangalore back then, I thought of starting this series to jot down little things I came across in my everyday life, giving me insights and probably making me a begin to feel a part of the city. But it didn’t take off and the post lay in the drafts, catching its fair share of dust for three long years plus a couple of months, until I found time to dust it off and rekindle it again.
March, 2011 – I came down to Bangalore to live a dream, working in a BIG4! In doing that, I embarked on a lot of new journeys simultaneously, taking baby steps across them all. Among other things, I was staying away from my family for the first time in my life. out all by myself in a new place. I was working as the face of an elite organisation, in a field I had no prior knowledge of. That meant, I had the scope for a very huge learning curve, which in turn meant a lot of stories to talk about.
26 March, 2015 – Four years later, 21 days later, as I walked into a mall for a little grocery shopping, I realized, even after having traveled across the length and breadth of the city covering over 60-70% of the major areas, *no, you can’t ask me if I have traveled to an x area and judge my stats based on it :P* this city still felt like a stranger. That is when I remembered, about this old post, I had once thought of writing, about this new muse in the form a city. I won’t deny that the post is very disoriented, but, I didn’t want to disturb the essence of the original thoughts in it, if any 😉
Now that I have bored you with enough jigsaw pieces and having cleared the entangled thoughts in my mind through you, lemme kick-start the series with a little story – Flying in a blue dream.
Diagonally across my house, there is small grocery store, and each day, I see this old man, probably in his late fifties or early sixties, wearing a dhoti, a gandhi cap and a navy blue jacket, sit outside the shop. Most days, he would be seated on a chair, but on days when the shop was closed, or even otherwise, he was found squatting on the floor. I have seen him sleeping there too. Every time I cross by, he waves, and I wave back. We have not had a real conversation so far and I don’t even know his name. In a city where you don’t know your neighbor, things like this, go on show that deep down the core, we are all social. Maybe some day, in the near future, I will find time to spark a conversation with him, and probably get a picture too…