itinerant — a Bangalorean's blog on people and places, here and everywhere

The Dutch Period Museum, Colombo

March 11, 2010

It is on Prince Street in Pettah, the marketplace in what was once the Fort area, and is no more princely, being daily overrun by plebeians for decades now.

I had taken the hotel car, and we went slowly, slower than walking, seeing colored balloons, dress pieces for men at 200-rupees-each piled on the street side, [...]

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Sigiriya from the top and the bottom and from afar

March 5, 2010

For eight centuries before Kashyapa the activity in Sigiriya was monastic. Then for the next eight centuries, it was again a home for monks. After that it was abandoned and the bricks crumbled and the timber rotted and something that approached a pharaoh’s doing didn’t stay intact for as long except for the foundations, and [...]

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art and soul

February 25, 2010

The tree in the outdoor section of Dome Cafe is wild in detail, and wild on the whole. From its twisted trunk its limbs are further twisted on their own axis, and also in relation to one another. Such a tree—rapt in a dance that takes, perhaps, a few years for every move—they have bound [...]

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notions of immortality

February 17, 2010

The walls come down the hill like two aged arms of the young Fort Canning Centre. People were shooting the Canning Centre, and the two plain two-hundred year old cupolas built by the architect Coleman, and the greens between the walls—with small and large cameras. None came up to the two old walls to see [...]

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when I was red…

January 28, 2010

An item today in The Hindu suggests the way to laughter, which is to look beyond anger to the absurdity of the situation. I glanced at the story and read only the big-lettered nut graf on my way to work and forgot all about the idea when we entered the gate, where, for two months [...]

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back to being Rip…

January 20, 2010

I’m reading Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Finding the Flow, along with Natalie Goldberg’s Wild Mind and Tim Robinson’s Stones of Aran. All together: Wild Mind when I wake, Finding the Flow in the car, and Tim Robinson at bedtime. Alain de Botton’s book on the Pleasures and Sorrows of Work arrived from Amazon yesterday, and I’ll open [...]

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a coffee-table story of Angadi

January 13, 2010

There isn’t an outlet that serves a decent cup of coffee in Malnad. The little shops that make it use instant-coffee powder; but if you are desperate for good coffee, knock on the door of the coffee-planter. His woman will serve it with a fluff of froth with a wee bit of powder on top, [...]

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the eye and Madurai

January 6, 2010

I spent an entire day at the Aravind Eye Hospital, founded by Dr. Venkataswamy thirty years ago, and which many say is the second great temple in Madurai. In the book From Here to Nirvana, which is a Lonely Planet kind of guide to ashrams and temples, the Aravind Hospital is one prominent destination. The [...]

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the Hoysalas: brigand chiefs who became kings

December 27, 2009

In my last post I told you that all the public walls of Bangalore are painted over with scenes of ruins of our historical monuments, and larger-than-hoarding depictions of our beasts and birds and beaches. I am sitting in the Cafe Coffee Day by the highway at Hirisave, a hundred and ten kilometers west of [...]

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this foggy clear December

December 21, 2009

This December, as in every December, I approach Electronics City seeing the sun through the fog, and mistake it for a morning moon—I see it so absently. I wonder that the moon is so large, and after a while I realize there is no rabbit on it, and so it is the sun in its [...]

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a divine smile called Hassan

December 17, 2009

The ride into town
Turn right to the north on NH-48 and then at the square which comes up turn left to the west. The road (Bangalore-Mangalore Road) goes straight and curves fine to the right after a while, and then it is straight again for the few furlongs into the town center. On either side [...]

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the Bhagawan’s eyes

November 29, 2009

Every introduction to Bangalore speaks of the four towers of Kempegowda that marked the corners of the capital he founded four-hundred years ago. But these small things are not towers—not in the way the Jin Mao or the Sears or the Qutb Minar are towers. Kempegowda’s Towers are small gopuras, tiny things built on dome-shaped [...]