21st Century Mysurean
Published in Varthaman, Edition I, February 2019
Kukkarhalli Lake
It’s a Sunday. You wake up. The sun is sleepily rising in an amber painted horizon, its rays dance on your half open eyelids, streaming in through the big French windows and you think of the days when you were younger and the shadows of dusty shapes and checkered grills that adored holes in the wall of an old, traditional Mysore home you grew up in, rhymed on them. You get to Kukkarhalli Lake in a two-wheeler. You haggle to park it, sneakily move the scooter next to it after yours has grazed its footrest. You put on your earphones and break into a jog weaving through hundreds of others who are trying to do the same, all at their own varied paces. You think of all the great people, you’ve been told about who have apparently been awed and inspired by the lake. You turn a corner and spot the place where Kuvempu once sat and wrote a poem or something. You don’t seem to remember what, but you don’t doubt the supposed fact for a second. The view in front of you, even after so many years, gives the tale its credibility. You photograph it with your smartphone, very millennially, trying to avoid all the notifications that are ebbing for your attention. The slow ebb of the lake in the phone’s camera holds your gaze. The photo makes the virtual frame; literature that inspired it, reserved for the mind to recall if it has time, later.
Growing up in 21st century Mysuru, you not only grew up amidst a city that was evolving and modernizing gradually, but also amidst the glorious tales of Mysore of yesteryears, told and retold by your parents and grandparents. A Mysore embroidered in silk, gold and sepia in tales, autobiographies and imagination by the likes of R.K. Narayan, C.D. Narasimhaiah and others. A Mysore that was calmer and quieter; simpler and quainter. The troves of art and literature and people who walked its gulmohar lined streets now thrive only in galleries and libraries, that you haven’t visited, and in recollections of people in their quiet bursts of nostalgia. “This area used to be a forest thirty years ago”, “Oh! How Mysore has changed from my last visit”, were and still are frequent expressions of surprise that greet your ears when a visitor drops by.
You grew up to the happiness you felt when McDonald’s first opened in Mysuru and aren’t really acquainted with what your parents associate their happiness with – masala dosa and filter coffee. Your trips to the book houses of Mysore have thinned, now that online supermarkets bring them to your doorstep. Traditional houses of Mysore, are now being converted into cafes, draped in fairy lights and serving fancy continental food while little attention is paid to the true essence of their heritage, which seems to be lost in translation between the old and the avant-garde. The markets with their history and asymmetrical weave of shops, stones and shouts are now threads of heritage for tourists to tread on, with bright lights, neat aisles and glass doors sharing their original purpose and raking in a bigger share of local customers. You remember the opening of malls and the days when you walked the streets and back streets of Devaraja Urs Road, scouring shops after shops, fade and take a back seat in your memory. With TrinTrin docks at every other road, its first flyover recently inaugurated, and the traffic steadily increasing, modernity is slowly but surely encompassing the city in ways both old and new.
Your mind plays a myriad different stories and anecdotes of Mysore’s past as you reach the end of your jog. As you make your way out to haggle your two wheeler free, to go home to cereals and a protein bar, you look around at all the people who still smile and stop to talk to their friends and colleagues and old neighbours and classmates. You realize that Mysuru does shrink in size the longer you live. You wonder how many of them will now go to tiffin rooms to eat dosas and drink filter coffees, probably made from an iBrew, and then continue on to bookstores and newsstands.
“I have lived for fifty years in Mysore and resisted temptations to success elsewhere; they have seemed illusionary in the Mysore context. The vacant space around, the still unchanging skyline, the crimsoned East in the morning and the many splendored sunsets, the red, red gulmohars which, eclipse the ‘flame of the forest’…the magnificent architecture of our buildings keeping with the dignity of our Palace…- their sheer humanity has possessed my being”, writes CDN in his autobiography, titling the chapter, “Mysore: Where Fabled Past is Lived Present.” As the decades fall, Mysuru, you realize, embraces its new just as well as its vignette tales. Even as it slowly sheds its celebrated facades, gets cleaner every year, all for a tag, the trees from days of yore still bloom, the Palace still lights up and the Chamundi Hills are still seen from any corner of the city. The quaintness is always cyclically restored, even if it is just for a moment.