Articles by Palahalli Vishwanath

When I was looking recently at some old books at home, I came across a guide book on Bangalore. It was published in 1956 by Satyaprakash and Company. In the preface, it says " The necessity of a proper guide book to the city of Bangalore need hardly be emphasized. The importance of Bangalore ...is greatly increased. This city of 'long distances' is growing industrially and commercially.." I have tried represent the city of that time and have included some photos and quoted lines from the book. Bangalore in 1956 The most interesting part of the book is the map…

Pandit Ravi Shankar's farewell to Bangalore a while ago brought back old memories of the great musician's concerts I attended in Bangalore and elsewhere. The first time was a late evening concert in the Town Hall in the late '50s. I was supposed to escort my sister and her friends back home after the concert. I reached a half hour before the concert was supposed to end. The side doors were kept open. I was in college. I had put on a Gandhi cap (we used to wear it for the PT classses) and that too with a hole in…

Following are the excerpts from a manual, which BBMP could be preparing for pedestrians: 1) For crossing streets, never assume that you can use the zebra crossings. The primary purpose of those crossings is for vehicles to come to a stop. The pedestrian is only an afterthought. Vehicles have full right to occupy the zebra crossings. Any pedestrian violating these rights of vehicles may be arrested. 2) BBMP has been magnanimous in providing separate signals   for pedestrians in some intersections. Again, please understand that the traffic signals are primarily meant for vehicles. Do not complain that these signals are on…

Travel in air-conditioned (AC) buses in Bangalore reminds me of the early days of plane travel where the atmosphere was quite rarefied. People usually dressed for the occasion, prim and proper. The chatter of railway journeys was absent (even now it is the same). As for the AC buses in Bangalore, it is not that people boarding these buses dress up for the occasion but it is just that normally they are better-dressed than the ones traveling in ordinary buses. The only sound you hear in AC buses is either that of the AC or the conductor! The AC buses…

If there was one city in  the newly independent India that was a real moviegoer’s delight, it had to be Bangalore.  In the early ‘50s, cinema theatres in Bangalore used to  show films in many languages - Hindi, English, Tamil, Telugu and Kannada. Few years later, Malayalam and Bengali movies could also be seen in morning shows. In that sense Bangalore was probably the most cosmopolitan town in the country. Such a varied taste in films was a reflection of tolerant  and eclectic mindset  of the natives. May be this was also the way the foundation  for a pan-Indian city…

"Bangalore's culture resides in the two great extensions of Malleshwaram and Basavanagudi" was the encomium heaped on Basavanagudi by no less a person than Dr. Vikram Sarabhai himself, the father of India's space programme, with whom I had the fortune of sharing a car ride in the mid 1960s, when I was a graduate student. Basavana-gudi means Bull Temple. Actually, the whole extension takes on the name of the temple which used to be very simple then. There was a water tank behind the temple where we used to go for immersion of Ganesha idol once a year. Today, the…

Bangalore is referred to as the Bean Town (benda kaalooru in Kannada) by parts of the English Press. Legend has it that a king called it by that name when he strayed into a village selling boiled beans. While this name is basically a fun name, some of the sobriquets it has acquired do no justice to either the mood or the history of the city. Some journalist with an overdose of imagination saw some retired people going for a walk in a leafy suburb and termed it a pensioner's paradise. IT spokesmen, who like to believe that it all…

This is a son’s tribute to a great lady who would have been 100 years old this year- a well known social worker of Bangalore in the last century. Jayalakshamma was born in Hassan 100 years ago, the youngest in a family of four. She was pretty, dark and short. At the age of 12, she was married off to an idealistic youth, P R Ramiaya who had run away from Mysore to Benares when he was in school. He was about to complete his Master’s in Chemistry when the pied piper from Porbandar called upon the youth of the…