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Jan. 3, 2010 On December 24, 2009, I made a one-hour flight from Vasco da Gama, Goa to Bengaluru, Karnataka, both being cities in India. My hotel in Panjim, Goa tripled room rates for the period from Christmas till New Years, in expectation of an invasion of European holiday vacationers. So I decided just to come to Bengaluru. Bengaluru of course is the city that was known until recently as Bangalore. Apparently, Bangalore was just the Anglicized form of Bengaluru, but it was used by Indians in India too, and not merely by non-Indians in or out of India, as I had supposed. Bengaluru is the medieval name of the city, so restoring it now seems artificial, but no one asked my opinion on the matter anyway. Mangalore, also in Karnataka, has retained its familiar name, I guess. Bengaluru is the capital of Karnataka, a state in southern India. With a metropolitan population of 6,000,000, it is one of the five largest cities in India and ranks 37th in the world, according to www.allexperts.com. The local language is Kannada, a Dravidian, rather than Indo-European, language. You can see the quaint, exotic writing on this banner at the entrance to a bazaar in downtown Bengaluru that I saw on Christmas day. http://www.flickr.com/photos/10024490@N05/4217614117/sizes/o/ Surprisingly, Christmas is an official public holiday in India, and December 26 was Boxing Day, which has to do with box lunches, not boxing. But neither holiday kept downtown Bengaluru from being wide open, nor did Sunday. The whole central city is one vast bazaar, teeming with throngs of people. My hotel, on Subedar Chatram Road, is right in the midst of all the commotion. There seem to be thousands of stalls and mini-stores over the better part of a square mile, with an immense variety of goods. Notable were dozens of stores selling silkens, silk being one of the major products of Karnataka. I saw several stores selling pistols, daggers, swords, battle-axes and other formidable weapons. Hard liquor is available in abundance too. Prices for some items are incredibly low. Adults' generic gym shoes go for as little as $2 a pair, and long-sleeved shirts with collars, pockets and buttons for only $1 apiece. I've found half a dozen cyber cafes. The one I am in right is now is exceptionally nice, with computers that have MSWord 2007, Photoshop, Firefox, Chrome and other applications that you don't usually find in the third world. Forty cents an hour resonates very handsomely with my Scrooge-like attitude towards money too. There's a book fair in progress right now, but these will be books in Kannada, for the most part. I don't even want to look, as I know I will be intrigued, and I don't want to get involved in such a secondary language. I'm still studying Hindi, and the Rajasthan Patrika, in Hindi, is available here among the heaps of Kannada newspapers for sale on the street. There are fewer restaurants than you might suppose, and I am chary of small, home-style cafes, which usually seem a little dubious from the standpoint of sanitation. Furthermore, I don't know the names of the dishes, and there are no cafeteria-type cafes at all. There is, however, a KFC nearby, so I'll just eat there for the time being. This morning, loudspeakers mounted on light poles on the streets downtown were playing captivating Indian music, sung mostly by female vocalists, to the accompaniment of orchestras of local instruments. It was very loud, as if some celebration were in progress, but I don't know which, if any. It's so good to hear something else than rap, rock and other junk music. I haven't decided how long I'll stay, but when I go, I probably will head for Chennai (Madras). ------------ About the author Thomas Keyes: I have written two books: A SOJOURN IN ASIA (non-fiction) and A TALE OF UNG (fiction), neither published so far. I have studied languages for years and traveled extensively on five continents. Visit my website here. Email: udikeyes@yahoo.com Comment on this article here! 
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