A City Enraged

There is a car I often see on Residency Road on my way to work. By dint of coincidence, it appears the car is almost always turning into Convent Road when I pass it. This affords me only a view of the back of the car. This car, which is all but nondescript in a city of over 2.3 million vehicles, represents the first open English language vocalization of Bangalore’s rage. On the back of this car, displayed in full view on the bumper, is a sticker that reads: “Bangalore’s Full, Go Home.”

While at first it may seem a frivolity to assume a bumper sticker captures the zeitgeist of an entire generation, it may turn out to be far more revealing if you examined the process of how the sticker got there in the first place. For starters, the sticker is not available on the market – you can’t walk into Car Castle on KR Road and ask the guy behind the counter if he has the ‘Bangalore’s Full’ sticker in Day-Glo – so it would appear that the person who put it there went to the trouble of having it customized to his needs. If indeed that were the case, it should be apparent that the anger the sticker represents is not only the consequence of time, but of thought. It took physical shape because over time, the quotidian annoyances of casual run-ins with unfamiliar faces and foreign tongues grew into a significantly darker sentiment: one that has as its bedrock, a clash of cultures. 

That this anger is an expression of a cultural conflict, as opposed to confrontations over, say, basic economic needs, is a trait unique to the urbane, English speaking Bangalorean. This is not the distillation of fears that the outsider is eating away at jobs, or that when a local worker lines up to get in on a construction job, he finds the line populated by faces that seem to have migrated overnight from beyond the Vindyas. The rage that those four words on a bumper sticker represent is created more from the abrasions left by unfamiliar languages, customs and practices than by disappearing performance bonuses or rapidly accumulated pink slips. 

How real is this rage? In my mind, it is real and immediate. The only reason why it doesn’t appear real or immediate is because, being the anger of a relatively elite class of people, it has yet to metastasize into a larger, political agenda – one that organizations like the Kannada Rakshana Vedike have claimed their own in representing the indigenous working class. But that’s not to say it is muted or irrelevant. In what I see as an alarming movement, discussions about an invasion of the others, the dilution of what was once uniquely Bangalore, the abhorrent vulgarity of a people unused to sophistication or niceties are increasingly the norm amongst people I once thought were Libertarian to the marrow. 

Consider these three instances from my recent memory – involving a career woman, who is single, a senior marketing executive at a software firm and a very talented musician. All three were born and raised in Bangalore and have memories firmly entrenched in relatively ‘old’ Bangalore pin codes: Malleswaram, Indiranagar and Jayanagar. They belong to a generation that thinks in English and curses in Kannada. They are post-graduates and aesthetes, know their Derrida from their Neruda and are intimately conversant with not just other Indian cultures, but with many global traditions. The first instance of an expressed anathema occurred during dinner with the marketing executive. He drove into the city from the International Tech Park and was visibly irritated with the traffic and noise. “I know I have this company that I work for to thank – for the car, the driver, the apartment and all that. I know we did 40,000 crores in software exports last year. I know all this has helped create jobs for all those guys in their white Indica taxis. I know this is progress. But you know what? I’ve been thinking about this for a while now. I’d much rather not have any of this. Seriously, I don’t want the car or the driver. I can do without McDonald’s and Inox. If these people with their loud jokes and their ‘hanh ji’ and ‘behen chod’ and cabbage breath would just pack up and go back to Jat Land, I’d be happy. I don’t have an identity left anymore, man. I don’t know what it means to be a Bangalorean anymore,” he said. And not a single one of those words was without hatred. He really, truly meant everything he said.

Like bumper stickers, number plates of vehicles have long been identifiers of culture and belonging for Bangaloreans – ‘it’s a KA 05 plate, he’s from south Bangalore’ or ‘KA 03… looks like she’s an Indiranagar girl.’ And that identifier has quickly become a racial slur. In the second instance where the rage of a city was expressed, the musician friend of mine introduced me to a whole new term from the lexicon of hatred. The conversation that night was about Bangalore’s architectural identifiers and how Bangalore Central, the mall, stands for everything that’s wrong with the influx of ‘the outsiders.’ Before it became a glass and steel mausoleum to consumerism, Bangalore Central was Victoria Hotel – verdant, calm and a Sunday lunch fixture for many Bangaloreans. Now that it was a mall, created to service the needs of ‘the outsiders,’ it had come to represent to my musician friend, all that was wrong with the new Bangalore. “Just look at them,” he said, pointing to the hundreds of Saturday shoppers at the mall. “Ten years ago, we’d have been sitting there drinking beer and talking cricket,” he said. “But now, these DL 3Cs have come here and ruined everything,” he spat, instantly turning the number plate identifier into a racial slur that has become a part of the city’s vocabulary. 

I didn’t really want to include the third instance of Bangalore’s bigotry, given as it is rather frivolous, but on second thought, because it has a social context to it, I decided to leave it in.  About a month ago, a career woman friend of mine asked me out for drinks to celebrate (and later bemoan) her recently acquired single-status. After the first three whiskies quelled the celebratory mood, she suggested that I find her a man so that the natural order of the universe could be restored. As is the norm with these things, I scrolled through my phone book and came up with the name of a witty, handsome and successful DJ who had recently moved to Bangalore from Delhi. “Do you want to see me spend the rest of my life in misery?” she asked, ignoring my attempts to list the man’s virtues. “How could you think I’d even want to be seen with a Northie?” she asked, adding, rather tangentially, “And what the fuck is he doing here anyway? We have tons of DJs of our own. He should just go back to Delhi and play his Bhangra at Elevate or something.”

These were merely three instances from the recent past. I’d wager every single one of you that reads this piece has encountered similar instances on several occasions – instances where rage, bigotry, elitism and a petty form of jingoism jostle for space with learning, intelligence, sophistication and tolerance. This is a Bangalore that only wants to live in the moment, steadfastly refusing to look at a past that has seen a stream of settlers come in from various cultures to make this city their own. Instead, this Bangalore veers towards failed multi-cultural models, where every single cluster of traditions is clannish and suspicious of the other. Where each petty ‘us’ refuses to yield and dissolve into the larger, more inclusive ‘we.’ 

Indeed, I wouldn’t be half surprised if, in the not-too-distant future, you could walk into Car Castle on KR Road and buy the ‘Bangalore’s Full’ bumper sticker off the shelf.