Djurdjevic - Personal Photos - Around the World Trip

23 Jan 2011

Updated July 15, 2007

'Round the World, Again

New York, France, Spain, Germany, UK, India, Thailand, Japan...

BANGALORE, July 15, 2007 - Yesterday, you may have seen my quick Bangalore arrival report. Today, I bring you "Bangalore, An Inside Story." At least as "inside" as a foreigner can glean after spending half a day with a very nice Indian driver/guide roaming around the various neighborhoods this interesting "village" of eight million people. Yes, in India, as in China, villages tend to be rather large.

"About 10 years ago, Bangalore is was a village of only four million people," Rajkumar (my driver's name), a 30-something local native, said about the city in which he had lived most of his life. "When IT companies starting moving in, so did the Indian people from other cities" (in pursuit of jobs and better lives).

Dealing with all these ethnic groups helped Rajkumar learn seven languages. As if that weren't enough, he said he was studying French and the Kashmiri dialect now. And this living polyglot drives a hotel car in Bangalore for a living!

Bangalore, by the way, stands for "Clean City" in Hindu, according to Rajkumar (or in the local dialect, I am not sure which). I can't say that the city I saw today was clean (as you will see in the photo essay that follows), but it is a place with an ideal climate for clean living. Average daily highs are 26C (79F), except during the month of April, the Indian summer (literally), when the daily highs move up to 36C (97F). The air is dry and there is always a light breeze. It rains frequently so the vegetations is lush. In fact, the whole city looks like a giant park. Take a look...

The leftmost photo was taken in a typical street in the center of Bangalore. The one next to it to the right was of thousands of gorgeous mimosa trees that produce bright red flowers. This one was actually one of the smallest I have seen. There are some real giants around Bangalore. They are unique in that the roots of the tree protrude above the ground up to four or five feet. The two rightmost photos are from the city park that takes up over 40 acres.

This is where I also came across this cute scene... teachers taking their pupils for an outdoor class/picnic even though today is Sunday. Such dedication and love of learning. No wonder they are taking jobs away from lazy westerners.

Not far from the park is the Bangalore state parliament building (above). As you can tell by the architecture, the building dates back to British colonial days. As India is having its own hands full with Muslim terrorist attacks, the parliament is well fortified and heavily guarded. So when I walked past the barricades to take the second picture from the left (the four nearby guards got a little agitated). I went over to talk to them and reassure them. Within minutes, we were "old pals." When they heard that I was from America, they wanted to pose for a picture, so I took one of them pulling hard guard duty in the shade (second from right). It was funny to see them straightening out their caps and buttoning up their shirts.

Across the street from the parliament building is the state supreme court. It is also an imposing red brick structure that attests to the British architectural influence here. And it is also surrounded by lush vegetation, as you can see.

As we were driving away from the parliament and supreme court buildings, I noticed a crowd of people on the front lawn. "What's going on?" I asked Rajkumar. "Oh, (it's) nothing. It's Sunday, so people like to come here and picnic."

Hm... I don't know of many state capitols that can boast such affection of the people they are supposed to serve that the folks would choose to spend their Sundays around the legislature.

The rightmost photo is of the "mini-parliament," a modern structure designed to look like the original. The reason it was built? "They ran out of room in the old building," explained Rajkumar. No wonder governments take forever to get simple things done. Too big a bureaucracy. The French may have invented the word, but the British have perfected it and exported it to their colonies, where bureaucracies are still flourishing like the mimosas in Bangalore. :-)

How's the traffic in Bangalore? Everybody will tell you it's a nightmare. In parts of the city, it's quite easy, at least on Sundays, such as in that nicely treed street on the left. Then you get quickly "elbow-to-elbow" with your fellow travelers (two middle shots). At other times it takes 45 minutes to traverse a distance of just six miles (such as from my hotel to a place of a business meeting).

"I have been living in Bangalore for seven years now," says a businessman who moved from Hyderabad at just about the start of the IT invasion of Bangalore, "and I can tell you the quality of life here is now worse than it was back then. The population growth has been more than the city infrastructure can cope with."

He said the new airport is being built, due to open next April, that will finally replace the old relic at which I arrived yesterday. The old airport was designed to handle 1.5 million passengers per year. Now, it is straining and groaning to put through 8-9 million people.

As we drove by this magnificent mosque, the prettiest one I have ever seen as well as the largest, I asked my driver if there were many Muslims in Bangalore.

As if to prove the point, Rajkumar took me to an open air market in a Muslim neighborhood (above). "This is where poor people shop," he said with some derision. "This is the only unsafe neighborhood in Bangalore," he added. "If something happened and we called the police, they would not come here." He told me stories of cars like ours being vandalized while just driving through, as we were doing.

Well, nothing happened today. But this visit into the "slums" of Bangalore (which are nothing compared to the slums of Mumbai), did give me an opportunity how various religious sects live together. Within steps of each other, I saw a Catholic church (rightmost photo), a mosque and a Hindu temple.

Assuming that he was of the Hindu religion (see a Hindu temple on

the left, or a simple street chapel on the right), I asked him how the majority of Hindus deal with that. His answer surprised me.

"I am not a Hindu; I am a Christian," he said proudly. "We converted from Hinduism to Christianity."

"Hinduism has many Gods... over 400 of them. To a Hindu, a cow is God; a bull is God; a rat is God... and I just could not accept that. I like what the Bible teaches. I like that there is only one God."

"Ah... many. About 50% of the people are Christian. Most new converts, like me."

I was stunned. I had no idea there were that many Christians in India. Yet as we drove around the city today, and I began to notice church steeples (like the Holy Trinity Church - right), the unexpected became plausible.

Guess the preceding wall sign sums up the need for coexistence of different religions in Bangalore (Christianity, Hindu, Muslim - left to right).

And then there are the atheists. At one point, I caught a glimpse of the communist "hammer and sickle" logo painted on a wall. I knew that India was once loosely aligned with the Soviet Union, but did not know that there were still any communist sympathizers left here. On the other hand, the sign could be a leftover from years ago.

A local businessman told me that India is now much more closely aligned with the U.S. "because all our people connections are to our relative and friends in America."

As had been the case everywhere I have been in India, rich and poor, new and old, are all intertwined in close proximity to each other. Take a look...

Here's an ultra modern bank building (leftmost photo) and then old shacks right next door and across the street. In the back of them, you can see the new Bangalore rising up from the ground (second from left). Or take a look at the ultra modern "Oakyard" apartments that stress environment protection and keeping Bangalore green, and then right in front of them we have basically homeless people living in makeshift tents.

Another strange sight for a Westerner would be the wooden scaffolds that are used to build tall spires of a new mosque (left photo) that is being constructed right next door to those modern apartments. And for those rich folks who live there but do not want to battle the Bangalore traffic, they can always get their hair done at the neighborhood hair salon (middle photo).

One of the cuter sights I have seen in this mixed neighborhood is that bunny rabbit asking the locals to protect the environment by depositing trash in his bag (second photo from right).

The most unusual scene, on the other hand, was probably that of a dog sleeping peacefully in the middle of a busy intersection (rightmost photo). It lends a new meaning to the old expression, "let a sleeping dog lie." :-) By the way, the dots you are seeing on the car windshield are of the light rain that was falling at the time. It did not last long.

They may be hard to find, but there are cultural gems hidden in the maze of Bangalore streets. The 400-year old Bull Temple, for example, is one of them.

I have seen many temples erected by various religions around the world, but none are as colorful or rich in content and color as the Hindu temples. The three above photos are not even of the main temple. They are "pre-temples" that whet the appetite and lead the visitor to the main event...

The above are the pictures of the entrance to the main Bull Temple. You'll have to a look at the details of hundreds of sculptures that decorate the entrance gates to appreciate the advanced forms of art that India had four centuries ago. The rightmost nook is an altar of sorts, at least judging by the fact that people would stop and say a prayer here.

And now, here are some shots of the interior of the Bull Temple. You can see here why it is called that. A giant bull sculpture carved out of granite is the main God being worshipped here. (Guess the Wall Street types had better come on a pilgrimage here, especially when bears start to rule the street). :-) As for that "bull" in orange on the right, on my way out, a Hindu monk in the temple gave me a handful of fragrant jasmine flowers and painted a red mark on my forehead as a blessing. My driver later told me that Indian men keep that mark on their foreheads as a sign that they had visited a temple that day.

As is so often the case in Asia, where religion seems to be taken a lot more casually than in the West, ordinary life's needs and religious services mix are never far from each other. The above shots were taken at the entrance to the Bull Temple, where lively street market trading goes on from dawn to dusk.

Next on our itinerary was the Tippu Sultan's Palace and a Hindu Temple next to it.

The temple was closed, so we could not go in. But from the distance, it looked as if it were carved out of ebony. The carefully manicured grounds around it and around the Tippu Palace were simply breathtaking...

As for Tippu Palace itself (above), it was also ornate, but you could tell that it was relatively new (younger than even the American Revolution, though only by a few years). More importantly, there was something cold, dark and foreboding about it that made me want to leave it faster than I got in.

Our next destination was an enormous temple (see above). Luckily for my weary legs, looking at all those steps, the Isckon Temple was closing for a special event just as we arrived. So we only got see it from the outside.

Sometimes little temples seem to spring out at you out of nowhere just as drive along ordinary streets, such as the one in the rightmost photo above in a fairly slummy area.

By contrast, my driver took me next to a marvelous art store. The place is being run by some people from Kashmir (notice the owner's fair complexion as compared to the Indians?). The guy speaks nearly accent-free English, and has sold a lot of artifacts to visiting Americans, especially the well-to-do IT people. He showed me even the address of one lady from Scottsdale, Arizona, to whom he recently sold and shipped a sculpture of one of those hand-carved and hand-painted elephants. A small world. But I spent the longest amount of time perusing his wool and silk rugs, all hand-woven in Kashmir, one of only two places in the world that such genuine works of art are still being made (the other being in Persia, or today's Iran). Their beauty was absolutely astounding. Some of them take up to 2.5 year to make (yes, for just one carpet). So you can imagine that the price tags are accordingly quite high.

As you know by now, the Hindu religion has over 400 Gods. But did you know that there are over 150 Goddesses among them? This Sri Cirle Maramma Temple is dedicated only to the female Gods...

...about 150 of them are on gracing the tallest temple tower you can see in the above shots. You can also see my driver, Rajkumar, by the way, in his gray uniform in the middle two frames, looking away with his back turned to the female Goddesses. I thought it was also very interesting that right next door to this temple is an Innovation Center of an IT company (rightmost frame). By now, you're probably getting the idea, as I was at this point, that the IT Gods are more prevalent in Bangalore than even the Hindu ones. :-)

The power of the female Gods is amply illustrated through the above scenes. In the leftmost photo, a female God slays a male devil. The second scene from the left implies that the role of a male is merely to support the female so she could stand on his head. Literally. (Boy, wouldn't the feminists love that image! Talk about a symbol of female domination three dimensional living colors).

If you take a closer look at the right two images, you will also see some stark naked female Gods, one of them looking in the mirror as she applies make-up to herself. Can you imagine anything like that gracing the prudish Christian temples... oops, churches? Artists who created them would have been probably burnt at the stake in the Middle Ages for such "insolence." And in today's prudish America, letters to the editor of the local media would have demanded that they be removed as offensive displays of nudity in public.

Once again, that's why I love visiting Asian temples. They are so much more natural and closer to real life than the western variety.

I saved the final shots in this "Bangalore, An Inside Story" travelogue for the Bangalore Palace (two left photos). It was built by the same king who constructed the magnificent Mysore Palace, about 150 km (2.5 hours by car) southwest of Bangalore (right photo). If I were here as a tourist and had more time, I would have gone there for sure. For, I have heard that it is one of the most beautiful sites in India, if not in the world. The king reportedly divided his time between the Mysore and Bangalore palaces, using the latter (smaller) palace basically as his weekend home. Some weekend home, huh?

Thought it would be appropriate to close this travelogue with an "only in India" curiosity. Take a look at the above photo. You will see a cow mingling with pedestrians on a sidewalk. Not an unusual sight in Bangalore. "Only in India," as I said...