Reflection

It is chilly winter time in Bangalore: people are wrapped up in shawls, thick jumpers and woolly hats and Maya, Andy and I all have full blown colds. Oh, I should also mention that it's 28 degrees. Am I being serious? Yes. Are we going to get the shock of our lives when we arrive back in the UK next week? Probably. But at least we already have colds!

To change the subject entirely, I wanted to take you on a little journey down a road near to where we live. The way that our area, Indiranagar, is laid out is long main roads, known as 'mains' interestected by 'crosses' and cut across in the middle by a huge busy road called One Hundred Foot Rd. Several weeks ago, a rickshaw driver took me a way I'd never been before to get to my destination, down the bottom end of sixth main. It was interesting because I know sixth main on the other side of One Hundred Foot Rd, but the bottom end of Sixth main couldn't have been more of a world apart from this, and I decided there and then that before we left India, we'd all walk the length of sixth main to get a better feel for it.

So off we went on saturday morning, Lily and Maya on our backs, attracting all the normal stares and wide smiles. Here are a few of the things we walked past down the first half of the road (the part I was unfamilar with):

small shop fronts with hanging bananas,
scruffy dogs wheezing in the shade,
women carrying huge tubs of water back to their homes,
chickens pecking in the dirt,
paper mills and flour mills,
clothes strung up in front of ramshackle houses,
people doing puja at small shrines and temples......


and then we crossed over 100 Ft Road on to the other side of 6th main, the familiar side, and this is what we passed:

a French boulangerie,
an Italian gelataria,
an IT solutions office,
expensive looking bejewelled saree shops
and even a pottery cafe.

And I thought to myself, well this is Bangalore, isn't it. This single steet is a microcosm of this city. I know that it's common for developing world cities to have one foot entrenched firmly in poverty and another in new money, wealth and enterprise and a dual economy with a Hugo Boss outlet next to a man selling mangoes off a cart. But Bangalore seems to particularly represent such a dichotomy: this is, after all, glam IT city which Barack Obama is allegedly (according to the tabloids here) 'scared' of because of all the IT whizzes overtaking the techincal expertise of his own citizens. Yet, like any large developing world city, it's growing at a rate faster than it knows how to handle. Bangalore is bursting at the seams and it's sometimes not a pretty sight, though this is something that Andy has come more into contact with than me through his work.

Ok, hands up, this hasn't been about Maya at all this posting. But here we are, here's my Maya bit: if you look at picture 2, you may be thinking, my God, how much longer can this child really be carried for in a saree? This is a good question, and the answer is, she can't. Maya is three and a half and she's getting a bit heavy, even for superman Daddy and so this journey down 6th main was Maya's very last expedition in a sling. But what a great last expedition.

ps - As an aside, we ended our walk on saturday morning at the park we often go to at the top end of sixth main. It wasn't till after I'd taken the photo (picture 4) of Andy and Maya that I realised what was sticking out of the yellow rickshaw. Since I'd just written a blog on rickshaw drivers, it made me chuckle (double click to enlarge it) - I wonder if it was my boozy, drunken friend having a quick forty winks before ensnaring his next victim....