A R C H I V E
India-Letters #3: Bangalore Nightlife
May 25, 1999 Dear Friends, I'm just back from an early dinner. It's been a surprise how late people typically eat here. Restaurants don't even open until 7:00 and don't close until 12:30 or so. In fact, many young people here in Bangalore have dinner after going out for drinks, rather than vice versa. Which brings me to the general focus of this letter: what two young foreigners can do for fun in Bangalore, India after the sun goes down. I'll take you on some of our explorations and adventures, and then I have a guest columnist, Meeta Kapadia, who will share the most successful (and crazy) of our outings. But first, a little bit about Bangalore. THE SILCON CITY OF INDIA Bangalore is best known within India for being the country's unofficial high-tech capital. And true to that moniker, the city sports many Indian infotech companies (including the now NASDAQ-traded InfoSys) as well as regional offices for scores of multinational companies like Oracle, Novell, and others. Filtering down to everyday life, cybercafes can be found on nearly every block of the hip Brigade Road area, and you're bombarded by invitations for web design and programming classes in newspaper ads, on billboards and on telephone pole fliers. This city of 4 1/2 million people is also is a big college town, with I'm-not-sure-how-many-but-in-the-high-tens-of-thousands students studying here. Combine the student influence with the relatively high density of foreigners and IT professionals with visions of the real Silicon Valley dancing in their dreams, and you've got the best climate possible for western style-fun in India. But as you already know from my previous letters, the whole city isn't like what I'm going to describe in this message. The city is a major city in India, with it's pollution, rich, poor & middle class, it's vegetable markets, autorickshaws, crazy traffic, cows roaming the streets, government bureacracy and more. And like most major cities in India, the most popular form of entertainment is the movies. And so that's an appropriate place to start my stories... GOING TO THE MOVIES The movie listings here break down movies into categories by language: English (being the "universal" language), Hindi (the "national" language), Kannada, Tamil, Telegu & Malayalam (all regional dialects.) Currently showing English: Psycho (the remake), Disturbing Behavior, Shakespeare in Love, Patch Adams, & A Bug's Life. Now, I had seen "Shakespeare in Love" in the States, but Meeta hadn't yet seen it, so we decided to hit the symphony theater one evening, where we got balcony tickets for 50 rupees each. Before heading inside, though, our hungry stomachs commanded us to purchase a piece of corn on the cob (grilled while we waited with chili powder applied) from a street vendor and smuggled it inside. Up a few flights of stairs in a crowd of people with sounds of Hindi & English flying everywhere. We entered the theater and showed the usher our ticket (reserved seating at the movies here!), and found our seats. I took the chance to look around and found myself in a theater larger than most back home with 85% of its 1000 seats filled, and in immaculate condition. Buckets of sand lined the rail between the front row and the stage & screen. "For putting out fires," Meeta explained. We ate our corn during pre-film commercials (delicious!), and settled in to watch the Oscar-award-winning flick. I was not too surprised that the nude scenes were edited out, but when the movie stopped in the middle and the lights came on, that threw me. Apparently, every movie is shown with an intermission. Indian-made films, which are made with an intermission, and foreign films alike. The audience, made up of a diverse group of Indians, seemed to love the movie, and were certainly more vocal during the movie than audiences in the States. A man a few rows up answered then placed a call on his cell phone during the second half of the movie. The endgame of the film, with Gwyneth & the obnoxious husband heading off to Virginia, reminded me that the US and India share a common history as colonies of Great Britain. Our independence came almost two centuries earlier, but it was interesting to note that my relationship with Shakespeare's writing could be approximately the same as a young Bangalorean's. ON MY WAY OUT: A CURIOUS SCENE On the 15-minute walk from my flat to the downtown area, you pass a small temple, with three shrines open to the outside air and various people worshipping or tending to the shrines. The other night, on my way out about 8:00 PM, I saw watched a drive-by worship take place. A rather chunky Indian gentleman sped down the street on his motor scooter (2-wheelers are very popular here) and screeched to a halt on the right side of the road near the temple. Without getting off his bike, he lifted his goggles, closed his eyes, mumbled a few prayers over his sounds of his idling engine, and then lowered the goggles and sped off. The whole process took about 90 seconds. Efficient... GUEST COLUMN: MEETA ON WEDNESDAY'S EXPEDITION Our first Wednesday here, Luke and I decided to test out this "pub culture" for which Bangalore is renowned throughout India. India's other big cities, such as Bombay and Delhi, host discos where one can go to drink and dance but only in Bangalore will one find actual pubs where you can go to meet friends for a drink, watch a World Cup cricket match with some buddies, or have a beer after dinner. So, off we went, down Residency Road where we had seen a place called "Pub World" several nights back in passing. When Luke and I entered this fairly crowded place, we were quickly ushered into the "Families Only" section where we noticed all the women (and the men in their parties) were sitting. Our best guess is that this is to avoid any hassling. (I'd wager that Indian men aren't as well versed in pick-up lines here, given that contact with women in kept to a minimum.) We sat in the boring family section for about five minutes before moving to the bar, or "fountain" as it's called here. A note about Bangalore pubs... themes seem to be the thing here. We had stopped in at another place called NASA a couple of days before. "Out of this world" begins to describe the corniness of the sci-fi theme, complete with neon, and rocket-shaped table stands! There, too, Luke and I had to sit in the "Families Only" section. (Can you tell I'm a little bitter about this?) Anyway, Pub World also had its share of themes, four of them! There was an English pub setting for the families, a German-feel "Der Keller", downtown Manhattan, and a Wild West section for men-only. We stuck to the fountain. A television screen was showing a pre-World Cup cricket game (we already had a sense of the excitement about cricket here) and, watching, Luke and I couldn't make heads or tails out of the game. Luke leaned over and asked a young, hip-looking man whether he could explain them to us. Before we knew it, we were talking, laughing, and sharing a pitcher of beer with Aji and his friends J.P. and Meghna, three college students in Bangalore from various places around India and the Middle East. Our first friends in town. We drilled them on the scene here: what were the fun pubs and good places to eat, and soon enough, we found ourselves accepting their invitation to go dancing that evening at a place called "The Club Inferno" or "The Club" for short. But first, there was something we were forgetting. Ah, yes, dinner. 10:30 pm and we walk with our new friends to their favorite restaurant in town, The Hotel Imperial. Kind of a divey place with stained tablecloths (the waiter cleared the freshly-dined-at table where we sat down, took the tablecloth to the corner, shook it off, and returned it with a grin) and four floors of tables, packed with people. The food turned out to be completely dee-lish and totally affordable. The five of us ate for around Rs. 100 (US$2.50). We've been there again two times since that night! After dinner, we met up with J.P.'s friends, Marie (the girlfriend of the DJ of The Club) and Vishal, and off we went. The Club is located about 14 Kilometers outside of town and Aji told us that weekend nights see over a thousand people in attendance. They even hold "raindances" every so often which simulate the monsoon rains and draw even larger crowds of young Indians and foreigners. Tonight, a Wednesday, would likely only be a few hundred. For Rs. 150/head, you get a two-story discoteque, an outdoor, lit, street-style basketball court, a swimming pool, and a restaurant, plus coupons good for drink and food... I'd never seen any club like this even in the States! By this time, it was around 1 AM and the place was starting to fill up. The DJs change music from hip-hop, dance mixes, rave, and R&B at fixed hourly designations. When we weren't dancing, we headed out to the basketball court. Luke swears he had even more fun playing pick-up basketball than dancing! Finally, around 5am, the DJs played their last song (Madonna's "Holiday"), and we headed home. The sun was rising and our guard, eyeing us a little warily, opened the gate so we could come home and collapse. After that fun and exhausting adventure, I can only wonder what else this crazy city has in store for us! -- Meeta Kapadia, Special Correspondent IN THE NEWS I got a surprise when several of the local pubs that we were now familiar with, at least in name, showed up in this morning's newspaper (Times of India, Bangalore City Edition, 24 MAY 1999). I'll type out the short article, because I'm not sure I could really explain it otherwise... ***Police arrest 43 during raids --Crime Correspondent Bangalore: The city police, in simultaneous late night raids across many live bands, arrested 43 persons including 27 women on Saturday. The raids were carried out at Blue Fox, Princess, Black Cadillac, Melody, Friend's Home and other prominent places. Police said these places were serving liquor and allowed women to sing in gross violation of excise laws. TOFU? Not all of you may be interested in this, but I'd betray my excitement were I not to mention it. We ate at a restaurant called Shogun the other night, that featured bean curd on the menu. I hadn't seen tofu in any store or market since I've been here, so tipped the waiter extremely well and asked him how I could get some. The restaurant is supplied by a Chinese man living in Bangalore. I've got a phone number and the good will of the waiter, so we'll see what happens. My fingers are crossed... NEW FRIENDS & OLD We stopped back into Pub World a few nights back, and ran into Marie, J.P. and Vishal and a fourth friend of theirs. It's exciting to get a bit of a social circle going here. We even met two more people: two engineering students from Madras, in town by the 6-hour bus for the weekend. I had an interesting exchange with one of them, Sundar. I'll leave out the 'What's and repeated phrases stemming from the loud music and vastly different versions of English we were speaking. Here's how it went: Sundar: Do you plan on coming to Madras? Luke: Yes, I'd like to. Sundar: If you come, come to the zoo. It's about 15 km outside of the city. Luke: OK... Sundar: I live there. Luke: You live in the zoo? Sundar: In a corner of it. Luke: I see. Sundar: It's a great zoo. One of the best in all of Asia. If you come, ask for me, and I'll show you around. At this point, he took out a business card and showed that his father was the Deputy Conservator of Forests for the zoo. As a result, he lived at the zoo... - That's it for now. This may be a little light on traditional Indian culture for some of you, but we'll get back to that. Your thoughts, replies and feedback is a great part of checking e-mail, so keep those responses coming. All my best, Luke