Basavanagudi

Bangalore in the fifties was a relaxed, laid back town with little aspiration to cosmopolitanism. There was a rarely articulated divide, between the westernized cantonment area and the city areas with their predominantly old Mysorean culture. Double road (K H Road) was the dividing line as is still suggested by the crematorium on its eastern side. The cultural divide was quite stark, Veena and Carnatic music, long skirts and long hair, kho kho and tenniquoit in the schools on the south side and piano and western classical music, basket ball and hockey, knee length skirts and god forbid, shorts! on…

The Mahila Seva Samaja School in Basavangudi opened its brand new state-of-the-art badminton courts to the public on 15 February. The famous badminton player Prakash Padukone inaugurated the facility.Pic: Mahila Seva Samaja. Previously the school housed one single badminton court in its old auditorium, which was demolished to build two new courts in the sports and cultural complex of the school Members of the Mahila Seva Samaja, the school children and other ladies in the vicinity of the school have been utilising the facility as members since its inception in 1959. Of the two new courts, one is reserved for…

We all carry our family histories with us. Memories of mango trees, a large well in the backyard, a pudina patch, tyrannical aunts, loving grandmothers and ‘meese' thathas linger in the albums of our mind. Yet, some extraordinary lives demand more than a walk through the black-and-white photo gallery. Ambi's was one such. Amba Bai, a young woman, pregnant with her third child, woke up to widowhood one bright, summer morning of 1913. Her husband, Srinivasa, had drowned in the Kempambudi Lake (Chamarajpet), where he had gone for a swim. Her father, Krishna Rao, stood between Ambi, as she was…

Kadlekai Parishe (Groundnut festival), one of the city's oldest cultural events, takes place on the last Monday of the karthikaa month on the Bull Temple road in Basavangudi. This year it was held on the 3rd and 4th of December. From Top Left, clockwise: Woman removing the bad groundnuts from the good ones, Groundnuts sold in two measure of one litre and half litre, Piggybanks on sale, A family from Dharmapuri comes every year to practice the art of tattooing - a boy gets his mother’s name inscribed (pics: Rushalini Rajkumar) In the 16th century, it started off as a…

Many Bangaloreans dismiss today’s Bangalore as a mutant form of the quaint city of yesteryears. But many old buildings and watering holes have survived as steadfast witnesses to the city’s changing identity and magically present a bioscope view in sepia tones of the glorious Bangalore of the past. Indian Institute of World Culture (pic: Yashwanth Madhusudhan) Established in 1945, the Indian Institute of World Culture (IIWC) in Basavanagudi located on the road named after B.P Wadia – its founder, is not only a window to the city’s rich cultural past but also to the first efforts to promote cross cultural…