THE SOUL OF THE BUSINESS
A PRIVATE   FAITH MADE DANGEROUSLY PUBLIC 
The Making of a Paper
 By SHOMA CHAUDHURY
 In Gratitude
 By TARUN J TEJPAL

An engaging anthology on Bangalore gives soul and sense to a city that has no time for nostalgia, says Roy Sinai

BEANTOWN BOOMTOWN Jayanth Kodkani and R. Edwin Sudhir, eds Rupa 339 pp; Rs 295

On the face of it, Beantown Boomtown is an oddball anthology containing genres as wide apart as bytes and beans — personal recollections, essays, feature journalism, business reports, fiction, translations and book extracts. But editors Jayanth Kodkani and R. Edwin Sudhir, both journalists, have succeeded in putting together a collection that reveals a path to the soul of Bangalore. No mean task in this Cinderella town, which till 10 years ago was regarded with step-sisterly disdain as soulless by India’s four major metropolises. And yet an underlying thread connecting the disparate group of writers — from RK Narayan to Winston Churchill to Yusuf Arrakal to DR Karthikayen (the head of the CBI’s sit, which solved the Rajiv Gandhi assassination) — weaves through this book. It’s a stream of consciousness about a city with no river to anchor its memories and history in. Spanning more than a century, this flow of words and observations reveals facets of the city’s soul, both past and present, again and again. Brought together in this most readable volume, they pen a portrait of the city, combining nuggets of history with anecdote and comment, to enable a better understanding of her motivations and potential.

Uzma Mohsin

Bangalore was always a city of outsiders who liked to remain to themselves

All the hype about Bangalore — the excitement and energy jostling noisily with the confusion and incompetence one sees living or visiting here, or reads about in the media — offers shards and slivers of impression and perception. This collection of writings provides context, detail and meaning. And this city of boiled beans, founded from a chance encounter between a king in disguise and a poor hut-dweller, then molded by successive rulers to evolve into what N. Kalyan Raman calls ‘a middling, moderate city, short on ambition’ is just a part of the story. The culture of the city evolved with communities living amiably together — Muslims and Anglo-Indians, Tamils and Kannadigas — but insulated from each other. Bangalore was always a city of outsiders who liked to remain to themselves.

This theme of the outsider/insider in Bangalore, and the absence of the urge to network, emerges with humour, irony, poignancy or business-like straightforwardness in piece after piece. The prose is clear and engaging and the variety provocative. The short stories, especially, bring out the loneliness and the coping mechanisms of the individual in this metropolis with a heartfelt and sad truthfulness. Shefali Mehta’s heroine, Maya, a housewife immigrant with no one to talk to, is driven to insanity, while in ‘Two Out Of Three Ain’t Bad’, Anita Nair’s heroine can’t quite overcome her own challenges to herself. Shinie Anthony’s split-personality heroine in ‘Plan B’ could very well be a metaphor for the city itself and its new army of multiple timezone call centre workers, described in an excerpt from Tom Friedman’s last book. They may not be as lucky as she, needing instead a battalion of psychiatrists to set themselves right.

The other commentaries and translations from Kannada included in the book provoke similar questions. In ‘Extra Sambaar’ Jayant Kaikini writes of Bangalore’s unwelcoming culture compared to Bombay, a theme echoed again in ‘Around Majestic’, by Irappa Kambhali. A city that is transforming so fast, with scarce time for nostalgia, can only find its identity in revising its vision of itself. It must purge its demons — and find new purpose. Sunil Khilnani offers modern Bangalore the hope of an Indian identity stepping out in the world. Bangalore can learn from Mumbai, trapped in a Maharashtrian chauvinism though it may be, to become truly just Indian.

Ironically, it is the new waves of immigrants to this city who have the opportunity to shape and forge a new culture for it, not by trampling on what exists but by understanding it and forging it into a whole.

The book is a must-read for anyone new to Bangalore or interested in learning about it. The diversity of genres, far from being distracting, helps unfold the Bangalore story with a melting pot of insights, ideas and understandings. The only thing missing in the book is an article devoted to its gardens and trees. Yes — the bougainvillaea, the mother-in-law plant and the verdant, lush surroundings make their appearances here and there, but having acquired an understanding of the wood, I missed the trees. Why, in this eco-friendly age, might we not find the soul of the city rooted on its pavements?