City of Contradiction

The warm smell of sandalwood and the blare of horns fill the air with the essence of Bangalore.  In the three months that I've been here, the best way I can describe Bangalore is a city of contradiction.

Traditional and modern, it's an old city but the fastest growing metro city in India.  A mix of religions, mostly Hindi some Muslim, a little Buddhist and a tad of Christians thrown in on the side.  It's a city of agriculture and technology.  

The first couple of weeks of being here, it's a little overwhelming and shocking.  Everything looked so  dirty and trashy.  Cows meandering down busy roads or eating out of garbage piles is a little suprising at first.  Garbage litters the beautiful country-sides and lakes are foaming with soap. 

But many people are here to "clean" the city.  I have seen women with thin little stick brooms sweeping the streets, piling the trash high for someone else to collect in baskets and throw onto a truck to go somewhere for final dumping.  These very women are so poor some don't even wear shoes, yet as a street sweeper they are wearing beautiful sarees, sometimes even embroidered with sparkling threads and beads.

These women sweep the streets and clean the yards. 

I have seen slums right next to an estate or beside a high rise, modern, office building.  Right beside the 5 star hotel where we stayed there was a small river of "gray" water, which simply put, is stinky sewage water.  The smell will almost knock you over as you cross over the bridge.  But the hotel has discreetly covered it from view with a wall of beautiful foliage and fragrant flowers.

And the traffic...with the way people drive and their incessant honking around here, one might think the city was full of New York city taxi drivers all having a bad day.  But the honking is not used to express aggression, its a means of letting the other drivers know you are there - which is kind of important when you have 5 lanes of traffic smashed in a 2 lane road.  In reality, I've never met friendlier people in all my life.  They will not tell you "no";  Instead they do the famous Indian head bobble and tell you "no problem".

Bangalore is growing so fast and there is construction everywhere.  They have the fastest growing middle-class so affordable single family apartments and homes are going up everywhere.  But with that comes infastructure problems: traffic is a mess, drainage can't keep up with the heavy rains, and the roads are horrible.  We drove past a knee-deep hole in the middle of the road -- but instead of warning signs or traffic cones they just filled it with debris, shrubs, and bits of concrete, and the handful of cars that end up falling in.  It eventually gets filled up.   

A strand of Jasmine in a braid.

Despite the sewage water smells, and garbage strewn about, Bangalore is called the "garden-city" for a reason.  You know how I love gardens and have a fascination for plants.  I constantly ask the names for everything so I can see if it grows in our zone back home.  Owen informs me when he sees a great climbing tree.  They are abundant and in full bloom with these bright orange clusters of flowers.  There is a shrub here that no one can recall the name of, but it has gorgeous white blossoms.  The coconut trees and palms line the streets.  Women even wear strands of fragrant jasmine in their braids. 

Eventually you see that the city has a rhythm and a flow, if you try to resist, you'll be frustrated but if you go with the flow you begin to see the beauty of it's land and the love of it's people.