March On Christite

I returned to Bangalore last weekend, after a month of overtime and working weekends and years of not having been.  Firstly, the flight was not comfortable despite being SQ, mainly because my neighbouring passenger was an old lady with no sense of personal space. Forget letting me place my arm on the shared armrest for a short while (which I eventually wrestled out), she spent the entire flight looking into my phone and into my screen, the latter for a movie that is available on her personal screen as well. The last straw was when the movie, a Singaporean one called I Want To Be Boss which honestly was not my cup of tea at all (or maybe I wasn’t the right audience) cracked a ..not family friendly joke and this grandma on my side starts laughing. Call me conservative but that’s not an experience I’m up for, so I quickly shut the movie and pretended to sleep, hopefully making a point.  

In a much better turn of events, I arrived at another best friend’s apartment to freshen up before heading to my alma mater, Christ University, in Bangalore.  Breaking my nostalgia, the security guard who immediately recognised me, told me that I can’t enter without wearing a shawl or jacket over my Uniqlo tee. So much for reliving those Indian formal dress code-filled years. It gave me an opportunity to step out to nearby areas, and so much has changed! Forum mall is now Nexus mall, the gym near college (where I learnt how to use a barbell) and the shawarma / smoothie shop below it are gone, the Cafe Coffee Day (where I squandered a bit too much of my monthly pocket money) is also gone and even campus has new buildings and cafés. In the sea of eager students wrapping up their assignments and attendance hours, I seemed to spot familiar faces, students who looked almost like my classmates. Or maybe I was just experiencing déjà vu. I could hear Kannada, Malayalam, English and Hindi, all of which I understand and two of which I (sometimes) pretend not to, for entertainment purposes. My old professors, who were young chaps when I studied, have become family men with greying hair, although still just as hardworking and cheery. One of the profs. observed that he would find it quite difficult to live alone abroad, and I realised it has been almost ten years of me living away from home. While that has its benefits and faults, somehow, it has shaped my personality and the person who first entered the same campus in 2016 was quite different, but also much younger, so who knows!

Later, I roamed around in Koramangala, distracted yet again by that book shop in 5th Block. I grabbed dinner and dessert in Indiranagar with my childhood friend, wading over a crowd of well-dressed youngsters who’d shown up for a DJ I hadn’t even heard of. I grabbed brownies at Cocoa Comaa, a bakery I’d followed online, run by a young woman whose journey and dedication is quite inspiring. I ate Ghee Podi Masala Dosa at Rameshwaram Cafe, which was worth the visit. I met my best friends from IIMA, who were located in Bangalore due to work, the kind of friends, where you can go right back to conversing like you’d spoken to them a short while ago, rather than the years it had been. In between all this, I attended the wedding that was the reason I had flown to Bangalore in the first place. 

The weekend turned into an emotional roller coaster, where big elements of what had been my entire life for each period of the last ten years, flashed by me in three days. The wedding ceremony itself was so beautiful; there were many teary eyes looking at the happy couple exchange their flower garlands. It felt like the final episode of a show’s season, coming right on time as we near the end of 2025. I did struggle in the beautiful Terminal 2 of Bangalore airport, because unlike in 2016, I have no clue what the next ten years will look like. I don't even know what next year will look like. What I do know is that I should really really get back to those barbell squats.