LEISURE

Experimenting with food is tricky. As dubious as the idea sounds, it could sometimes draw great experiences. Years ago, we ventured into a strange bylane off stuffy Avenue Road at 11.30 PM in the night. While most of Bangalore slept, this little gully would wake up and savor its food. Carts selling sweets, south Indian fare, and Bhajjis appeared out of nowhere to feed the working class. From creatures of the night, driving around with late night radio to giggly college kids wanting to sample the unusual to weary men and women working in surrounding businesses, street food was everyone's…

On the 29th of March, I went to Lalbagh to join the joint Max Mueller Bhavan /  Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH) -organized Heritage Walk. Having taken many people around Lalbagh, I wanted to know if there was anything I had missed learning about....here's some of what I saw.We all met at the 3-billion-year-old (give or take a few hundreds!) sheet rock on which one of Kempe Gowda's towers stands, and marvelled at the range of pre-history to history; we then walked towards the Glass House, where the Lions of the Ashoka Pillar are etched into…

Tat Tvam is a young Bangalore theatre group; and "God", by Woody Allen, was their first production. They are a group of amateur artistes; many of them are IT professionals, but a few of them are students, too. For a first production, "God" was a fairly ambitious project to choose, and they did manage to do a good job of the production."God" is a half-absurd,half-metaphysical play, and the locale and the characters change with bewildering rapidity between ancient Greece and Manhattan!In the words of Miracle Entertainment, the group that had earlier staged this play:"Set in an empty Greek amphitheater, this…

Runners For Life, a community of people who run to get fit announced their new event ‘Feet on the Street', a 5km run to be held in the city. The organisers will share a portion of the proceeds from the event with Dream A Dream, a local NGO working with some of Bangalore's most vulnerable children including orphans, street kids and other children in slum communities. The format of Feet on the Street is unique. These are monthly runs. It is not a track and field event, but will be held in a central location, Cubbon Park. In addition to…

It was good to see flights take-off once again at the old HAL airport last Sunday. Only, the planes that had a smooth takeoff and landing were made of paper. And the pilots were college students dressed casually in jeans and T-shirts. Redbull Paperwings contest underway (pic:PD) Red Bull, the energy drink maker, had organized a paper plane flying contest for college students in India for the first time, as part of a worldwide contest, held first in 2006. The qualifying rounds that were conducted in five major cities - New Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Bengaluru and Chennai, over January-February, attracted…

Some of my European friends visited India last year and we met. I was eager and waiting to hear every detail about their brief stay in India. As we ran through photo slides of Rajasthan, Delhi and Mumbai, I heard everyone say "India is magnificent". A little later, small irritations surfaced: from why "people stare" to the "so persistent beggars" and the "unbearable traffic" and the "lack of pubs". It was New Year's time when my friends were in Delhi and it had not been easy for them to find a pub. They could not imagine spending their time in…

We went on the heritage walk on Avenue Road, organized by INTACH, this morning (watch Citizen Matters for a detailed report on how the shopkeepers of Avenue Road engaged with the walkers..a first-time combination!) and we took a bus back home. On the way home from the bus stop, we were amazed to see an entreprenurial iniatitive...a push-cart with pani puri! The young man, Raju, said that he was from UP and had come here to make a living. Since neither of us was in the mood for a full lunch after the excellent "prasad" of pulioygare and mosaranna provided…

Most of us agree that our tree cover is depleting alarmingly, and we cluck about it....but St Mark's School has done something...er...concrete, to choose an inappropriate word!They have planted 9 badam trees in front of their school in J P Nagar 3rd Phase.They had plenty of excuses NOT to plant trees. The Mini Forest, with lots of trees, is right opposite. There's hardly any footpath in front the school. But they went ahead and planted the trees anyway.And in a short time, the trees are providing shade on the hot street...Long live schools like St Mark's, which put their trees…

Since I was not sure if I would be able to go to the plays tomorrow, I decided to attend the press conference that was organized by India Foundation for the Arts (for which the plays are a fund-raiser).I wanted to hear what the actors who are going to be staging the playlets would have to say about the plays, which they have staged before, in Bangalore, way back in 2002.Both Ratna and Naseeruddin talked about how contemporary they found Ismat's ideas, and how Naseeruddin was inspired to stage her stories. Naseeruddin was very scornful about large production; " I despise…

It all started two weeks back, when I received an email from Lokesh about a proposed ride for Jawa / Yezdi bikers on 25th January 2009 to the "Big Banyan Tree". I spoke to my wife about this ride a week back and she agreed to postpone a few important tasks that she had planned for Sunday, letting me go and enjoy my day with buddies, wondering, what these crazy guys do with their bikes every now and then. Line up of beauties at the beauty err beast pageant After so many years of marriage, while continuing to own this…