What do you end up remembering?

I don’t know how often I write about my life. There are extra make ups and decorations to add crafty perfection to my words but this is going to be a different post, everything I strongly felt about Bangalore. Three years! Three years’ time has left in me plenty memories for this lifetime, the city made me think, travel, explore, stand on my legs and dream. Day 1 when I landed on Bangalore, I was one totally alienated creature who kept a strange face and deep looks and people dared to even talk to me. I became another happy loner in Bangalore wanting to explore a new land and slowly I started to walk around, read and travel a bit. I’m one old school and a sentimentalist who loved the dusty book stores, unnoticed lanes, peacock feathers and some dark gloomy coffee and soon I found my space in my fashionable crowd. I never felt lonely, the city always gave me my space and time to meet my mirror reflections and shadows and have some genuine conversations.

Bangalore is a paradise for book lovers and I have stumbled across long sought after gems in my city with little notes on sides, some strange people’s memories painted on the pages and old phone numbers. Have you been to Select Book store? A dream destination for all ‘those types' who would love  to sniff yellow pages of a notebook, who silently cries when she find her favorite book, who can detect an interesting character in every person she meets. You’ll find witty and clever Mr. Murthy who writes letters to Ruskin Bond, who’ll take you to the time when Marx came India or can take a total 360 degree turn and talk about Ernest Hemmingway’s ‘Old man and the Sea’. Bangaloreans are in love with their Blossom bookstore on Church Street where souls meet and talk why only few people sympathized with Arthur Miller’s Willy Lowman, why Camus’ Sisyphus had to roll the rock all his life? And why Jhumpa Lahri’s Diasporas made them feel more rooted in their Indian soil. I don’t know why people never found this dusty mansion in off Brigade road. This is a must visit store for all book lovers. Go… get yourself lost in some poetry, classics, anthropology and philosophy!

Food..Food and Food! I’m one huge food fan and I love everything from  rasmalai   you get at one old congested shop at the end of M G Road to Spice of Italy’s lamb burger!  Go Frazer Town when it’s Ramzan and eat awesome beef roast and idiyappam, malai khulfi, chiken kabab and lemon soda. Momo Hut’s chiken steam momos and Meghna boneless chicken biriyani being the first things I’m gonna miss about Bangalore. How can I forget Empire’s shavrma , Chaat wala’s chicken chaat and egg buji  at the back of Forum?! And of course Koshy's!

I love my Bangalore sky with clouds flying off to their unknown destinies, desperate blowing winds, and the most awesome climate where Anthriums and Gerberas grew happily. I always wanted to live next to the sea and that’s the only thing missing in our Garden city. When time flies you can sit and watch from this obscure shore the many selves who reside in our unconscious self, many truths and many seasons…You might even be turned into another Billy Biswas who went in search of an ‘authentic being’. I don’t know what exactly Bangalore taught me but I learned “One lives in the hope of becoming a memory” .