Roopa Pai’s Becoming Bangalore: Stories that Shaped a Hometown will see a special launch at the Bangalore Literature Festival this weekend.
Roopa Pai was in her early teens when she first read Gone with the Wind, American journalist Margaret Mitchell’s only novel, rife with idyllic, if somewhat ahistorical and whitewashed, imagery of the Antebellum South, portraying it as a great, fallen civilisation. One aspect of the book that struck her was the novel’s protagonist’s (Scarlett O’Hara) deep, abiding love for her family home, Tara, a love that keeps her going through some of the greatest losses, disasters and tragedies of her life.
“She would come home and pick up the red earth of Tara and say, I’m home, and I can heal,” recalls Pai, the author of over 30 books and the co-founder of Bangalore Walks, a city-based history and heritage walks and tours company. ”For me, Bangalore has always been that place. I just have a very deep, positive connection to this city.”
It is this profound, unwavering love for the city, one that managed to survive Pai’s 12-year-long hiatus away from it in the early nineties when she lived in different cities and countries, that was funnelled into a column she began writing in February 2021. “It’s the first time I’ve written a column,” she says, recalling how the editor of a national daily reached out to her asking her to write this online column on Bengaluru back then. “I have never written a fortnightly column before, so it was a bit of a challenge. But it was a challenge I liked because it was about Bangalore,” says Pai, who promptly agreed to it.
Column to book
Now, four years and almost 100 columns later, Pai is all set to release her latest book, Becoming Bangalore: Stories that Shaped a Hometown, a collation of 75 of these columns, all centred on the city she has grown up in and is deeply passionate about. Dedicated to “the city that raised me, and to everyone who believes in the singular power of curiosity, collaboration, and a capaciousness of mind and heart in building inspiring communities, cities and countries,” Becoming Bangalore is a delightful 300-odd page paean to Bengaluru, dipping and diving into stories, facts (and sometimes popular factoids), history, mythologies and memories of the city.
The conversion of these columns, published online, into a book happened rather serendipitously, going by Pai’s account. “I am a computer engineer, but I haven’t got around to enjoying reading on the web,” she says, with a laugh.”I’m traditional. I like books.” She had been toying with the idea of converting these online columns for a while, she says, even contemplating self-publishing “because I didn’t think a mainstream publisher would be interested in bringing out a set of columns on Bangalore” until she casually mentioned this to Thomas Abraham, MD, Hachette India in mid-2023, by which time around 60 columns had been published. That was how the idea of a book was born.
Becoming Bangalore, edited by Vatsala Kaul-Banerjee of Hachette India and illustrated by Priya Kuriyan (“I think of us a dream team,” says Pai), is all set to be formally released on 17 January, 2025. There will also be a special launch at the 13th edition of the Bangalore Literature Festival, where Pai will be in conversation with Atta Galatta co-founder Subodh Sankar on 15 December.
Many delightful stories
Becoming Bangalore is filled with delightful stories from the city’s glorious past, connecting it seamlessly to contemporary times, likely altering the way any inhabitant of Bengaluru will relate to the city.
For instance, did you know that Kempe Gowda, the founder of modern Bengaluru, was a chieftain under the Vijayanagara Empire whose capital Hampi was once “the biggest city in the world after Beijing.”? Or have you ever wondered how a city plumb in the middle of the dry, rocky Deccan Plateau is so full of trees that it has earned the sobriquet “garden city”? Also, why does a statue of Chhatrapati Shivaji continue to reign over Bhashyam Circle by the Sankey Tank, and what is the connection between the last ruling Maharaja of Mysore, Jayachamarajendra Wadiyar, and the German composer Richard Strauss?
Context: The then C.M. K.C.Reddy had an ambitious programe to eradicate Black Money
This book, which is divided into four major sections, each named after some of the city’s popular flowers, Gulmohar, Champaka, African Tulip and Pink Trumpet, offers answers to these questions, constantly reiterating the global outlook, innovative nature and inherent cosmopolitism of the city, something that Pai thinks of as “the spirit of Bengaluru.”
Despite the flak that the city has garnered on social media in the recent past, at its core, it is and has always been a “charmed little bubble of a place where any language, any culture” has been allowed to exist, where collaboration and the ubiquitous “adjust madi” is as deeply entrenched in the soil of the city as the roots of the trees, both native and exotic, that line its streets and avenues.
“I wanted to make that point that this has always been a city that has welcomed people from outside. Bangalore-ness is about absorbing, assimilating and welcoming,” says Pai. “Kempe Gowda opened the eight gates of Bangalore in 1537, and they have stayed open ever since.”
She firmly believes that this inclusive attitude towards migrants has only made the city better and will continue to. “The largest, grandest cities of the world have always been melting pots… if you give people soil to grow, it can only enrich the garden,” she says, pointing out that Bengaluru’s location, at the edge of Karnataka, closer to Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Kerala, has played a significant role in making the city “a place where people from everywhere came, assimilated and learnt to work with each other peacefully.”
Creating the book
Becoming Bangalore is the latest in a series of books focusing on the city, which include Askew: A Short Biography of Bangalore by T.J.S. George, Nature in the City: Bengaluru in the Past, Present, and Future by Harini Nagendra, The Promise of the Metropolis: Bangalore’s Twentieth Century by Janaki Nair, Namma Bangalore: The Soul of a Metropolis by Shoba Narayan and Past and Curious by Stanley Carvalho. “I feel like the city has reached some kind of critical mass. There are people doing a lot here, thinking about it a lot,” says Pai, who believes that this is also because the city is maturing into a kind of thought leader “not just for India but also for the world,” she says.
Additionally, the city has, over the years, developed multiple subcultures and “people of every subculture want representation and recognition,” she says. “There cannot be a monolithic Bangalore…there’s enough of a population, diversity and pluralism now here,” argues Pai, adding that though the lenses through which these various writers see the city are different, all these different stories come from a place of love, exploration and feeling of ownership. “Even the trolling that Bangalore has begun to receive online recently from new residents comes from them wanting to be included in the grand story of the city.”
Unlike many old-time Bengalureans, whose narrative of Bengaluru is often tinctured with regret and longing about the city it once was, Pai is refreshingly positive about its future. “I know of people who feel that some golden Utopia has gone away, and it often makes them sad or bitter,” she says. “But I think the city is still glorious.” While not discounting the problems besieging the city— traffic, pollution, overcrowding, potholes and so on —she thinks of it as “birthing pains. You have to go through this last bit when you mature from a small town to a true metropolis.”
Still the best
After all, while lovely, small towns cannot retain their people, says Pai. “People leave small towns to go and work somewhere else,” she says. “It broke my heart to have to leave my city, but I also had to go because I felt it was too small to hold me.” In her opinion, Bengaluru has only gotten better and will continue to attract the best minds and people to it because “it has retained its small town flavour of warmth and gentility and everything. But it also now offers opportunities so people don’t have to leave,” she says. “At the risk of sounding somewhat blinded by love, I think we are still the best place.”
source/content: thehindu.com (headline edited)