September 15th, 2008
After roughly 36 hours of airport-related living, I arrived in Bangalore on a Sunday morning. Sujata and Anurag had arranged in advance for me to be picked up by a friend of theirs named Yohann so that I could have a day to rest up on his organic farm outside of Bangalore. As a first introduction to India, I got exactly what I needed.
What sort of guy was I expecting to have pick me up at the airport? The closest I can come to describing my vision would be sort of an Indian Jude Law (mild-mannered, clean-cut, drives a scooter). I was wrong. Yohann arrived in his vintage jeep sporting a headband covering his long hair, wearing Adidas sweatpants and a graphic t-shirt. He was smoking a Gold Flake and before saying hello apologized for his appearance, as “last night’s party hadn’t quite ended”. Far be it for me to say this wouldn’t be exactly what Jude Law would be like if he picked me up at an airport, but I sort of feel like if Yohann had starred in the “Alfie” remake it would have sucked a lot less.
What was the first adjustment to India I had to make? I guess 24 years of living in Canada got me used to highway lanes. Highway lanes sort of make sense. You stick to your lane, the driver next to you sticks to yours. Sometimes the driver in front of you isn’t in a hurry, and then you switch lanes and go passed them. If I was building a highway, I’d probably include lanes. But clearly I’m ethno-centric because Indians drive twice as fast with twice as many cars on the road and instead of lanes they just honk their horns. And somehow, it works. This isn’t like Paris where Parisians drive in the Arc-de-Triomphe and act like it’s no big deal. Clearly Parisians only take the route involving the Arc-de-Triomphe to prove their superiority to young and impressionable North Americans like myself. They could easily just have avoided the hassle of heavy traffic and taken a side street. Now, I can’t be sure, but as far as I can tell most of the cars on Bangalore’s highways aren’t driving tourists. So this is how they drive to get from point A to B on a daily basis. And even if my car-insurance was not expired and I desperately needed to get somewhere quickly (hypothetically my non-existent wife had just gone in to labour and it had caught me completely off guard because I hadn’t known she was pregnant or something along those lines) I still would not drive on the highways of India. I guess ultimately this paragraph just proves that Indians are better drivers than I am. Thanks for nothing Young Drivers of Canada.
Back to Yohann. Yohann lives on an organic farm about 30km outside of Bangalore. The farm has been in Yohann’s family for at least two generations, and his current crop includes tobacco and cocoa. But like farms all over the world that are situated close to urban areas, the city is rapidly encroaching. This has become especially prevalent since the completion of the Bengaluru International Airport. Yohann’s farm is about 5km off the main highway between the City and the Airport, and when I asked him if he has gotten offers for his land he laughed and tells me “Every single day”. The importance of this is that Yohann’s farm was my first exposure to the plight of the modern family farm. Yohann no longer markets any of his products commercially because agriculture in his part of India yields no economic benefit.
Yohann and Priyam (his wife) haven’t given up on farming completely, as there are still chickens, goats, cows, and rabbits (I’m not entirely sure why) as well as the cocoa and tobacco crops mentioned earlier. However, on the far end of their property, they designed and built a Montesory school. Students from ages 4 to 18 bus in every day from all over Bangalore and are taught in an inspired open-concept school. Built in red-brick, the spacious classrooms surround courtyards centered around trees and gardens. Outside, study areas are hidden behind garden-lined brick walls with streams and ponds twisting their way throughout the school yard. My elementary school had eight portables covering our sports field in order to house all our extra students, and what was left of the field flooded every time the snow melted. That being said, my grade six volleyball team also won the former Borough of East York’s grade six volleyball tournament, so we were doing something right. Getting back to Yohann’s school, it definitely goes to show that while urban sprawl is a serious threat to family farms like Yohann’s, there are ways in which to creatively keep your land. Ideally Yohann and Priyam may wish they could still use their land for commercial agricultural purposes, but for the time being at least the school allows them to maintain their way of life and keep ownership over their family’s land.
I should also add that apparently Bangalorians (Bangalites? Bangalomes? Bangalers?) defy every stereotype of Indians I’ve ever been told. It’s possible that they actually spend time researching Indian stereotypes just so that they can break them. I’ve now met two separate groups of Bangalorians (if you are reading this and you are from Bangalore and the term “Bangalorians” was ever used in a derogatory manner, I don’t have internet access as I write this otherwise I would have looked up the proper term) and all they seem to want to do is smoke hash and play Neil Young songs on their guitars. Unlike back home though, when you’re having a beer in Bangalore and they’re playing a Neil Young song, it is not “Keep on Rocking in the Free World” every time. In fact, I don’t think I heard “Keep on Rocking in the Free World” once during the entire 21 hours I was in Bangalore. I just naturally assumed that I must have heard it after four and a half years of going to the Frankenstein’s Hot Dog Themed Bar in Guelph. Apparently a few years back Bangalore had a vibrant live music scene, but a group of “traditional” politicians catered to the supposedly elderly Bangalorian community and banned all live music. But, as the “Silicon Valley” of Asia, a huge majority of Bangalore’s population is under-30, and according to numerous proud-Bangalorians I have met, it is due for a youth-culture renaissance unlike anything the world has seen since San Fransisco back in ‘64. To be honest I’ve never really associated revolutionary cultural, sexual, and political movements with young professionals working for multi-national IT firms, but based on Yohann’s friends’ rousing rendition of “Heart of Gold”, it’s not out of the question.
I’ve heard that Delhi and Mumbai can both be pretty overwhelming for a rookie touching down in India for the first time. Bangalore totally blew my mind and gave me a good taste of Indian life (albeit for only one night), but it felt like a good transition. Most of the people I met worked for IT companies and were modern in pretty much every way, but it definitely was not North America.
After roughly 36 hours of airport-related living, I arrived in Bangalore on a Sunday morning. Sujata and Anurag had arranged in advance for me to be picked up by a friend of theirs named Yohann so that I could have a day to rest up on his organic farm outside of Bangalore. As a first introduction to India, I got exactly what I needed.
What sort of guy was I expecting to have pick me up at the airport? The closest I can come to describing my vision would be sort of an Indian Jude Law (mild-mannered, clean-cut, drives a scooter). I was wrong. Yohann arrived in his vintage jeep sporting a headband covering his long hair, wearing Adidas sweatpants and a graphic t-shirt. He was smoking a Gold Flake and before saying hello apologized for his appearance, as “last night’s party hadn’t quite ended”. Far be it for me to say this wouldn’t be exactly what Jude Law would be like if he picked me up at an airport, but I sort of feel like if Yohann had starred in the “Alfie” remake it would have sucked a lot less.
What was the first adjustment to India I had to make? I guess 24 years of living in Canada got me used to highway lanes. Highway lanes sort of make sense. You stick to your lane, the driver next to you sticks to yours. Sometimes the driver in front of you isn’t in a hurry, and then you switch lanes and go passed them. If I was building a highway, I’d probably include lanes. But clearly I’m ethno-centric because Indians drive twice as fast with twice as many cars on the road and instead of lanes they just honk their horns. And somehow, it works. This isn’t like Paris where Parisians drive in the Arc-de-Triomphe and act like it’s no big deal. Clearly Parisians only take the route involving the Arc-de-Triomphe to prove their superiority to young and impressionable North Americans like myself. They could easily just have avoided the hassle of heavy traffic and taken a side street. Now, I can’t be sure, but as far as I can tell most of the cars on Bangalore’s highways aren’t driving tourists. So this is how they drive to get from point A to B on a daily basis. And even if my car-insurance was not expired and I desperately needed to get somewhere quickly (hypothetically my non-existent wife had just gone in to labour and it had caught me completely off guard because I hadn’t known she was pregnant or something along those lines) I still would not drive on the highways of India. I guess ultimately this paragraph just proves that Indians are better drivers than I am. Thanks for nothing Young Drivers of Canada.
Back to Yohann. Yohann lives on an organic farm about 30km outside of Bangalore. The farm has been in Yohann’s family for at least two generations, and his current crop includes tobacco and cocoa. But like farms all over the world that are situated close to urban areas, the city is rapidly encroaching. This has become especially prevalent since the completion of the Bengaluru International Airport. Yohann’s farm is about 5km off the main highway between the City and the Airport, and when I asked him if he has gotten offers for his land he laughed and tells me “Every single day”. The importance of this is that Yohann’s farm was my first exposure to the plight of the modern family farm. Yohann no longer markets any of his products commercially because agriculture in his part of India yields no economic benefit.
Yohann and Priyam (his wife) haven’t given up on farming completely, as there are still chickens, goats, cows, and rabbits (I’m not entirely sure why) as well as the cocoa and tobacco crops mentioned earlier. However, on the far end of their property, they designed and built a Montesory school. Students from ages 4 to 18 bus in every day from all over Bangalore and are taught in an inspired open-concept school. Built in red-brick, the spacious classrooms surround courtyards centered around trees and gardens. Outside, study areas are hidden behind garden-lined brick walls with streams and ponds twisting their way throughout the school yard. My elementary school had eight portables covering our sports field in order to house all our extra students, and what was left of the field flooded every time the snow melted. That being said, my grade six volleyball team also won the former Borough of East York’s grade six volleyball tournament, so we were doing something right. Getting back to Yohann’s school, it definitely goes to show that while urban sprawl is a serious threat to family farms like Yohann’s, there are ways in which to creatively keep your land. Ideally Yohann and Priyam may wish they could still use their land for commercial agricultural purposes, but for the time being at least the school allows them to maintain their way of life and keep ownership over their family’s land.
I should also add that apparently Bangalorians (Bangalites? Bangalomes? Bangalers?) defy every stereotype of Indians I’ve ever been told. It’s possible that they actually spend time researching Indian stereotypes just so that they can break them. I’ve now met two separate groups of Bangalorians (if you are reading this and you are from Bangalore and the term “Bangalorians” was ever used in a derogatory manner, I don’t have internet access as I write this otherwise I would have looked up the proper term) and all they seem to want to do is smoke hash and play Neil Young songs on their guitars. Unlike back home though, when you’re having a beer in Bangalore and they’re playing a Neil Young song, it is not “Keep on Rocking in the Free World” every time. In fact, I don’t think I heard “Keep on Rocking in the Free World” once during the entire 21 hours I was in Bangalore. I just naturally assumed that I must have heard it after four and a half years of going to the Frankenstein’s Hot Dog Themed Bar in Guelph. Apparently a few years back Bangalore had a vibrant live music scene, but a group of “traditional” politicians catered to the supposedly elderly Bangalorian community and banned all live music. But, as the “Silicon Valley” of Asia, a huge majority of Bangalore’s population is under-30, and according to numerous proud-Bangalorians I have met, it is due for a youth-culture renaissance unlike anything the world has seen since San Fransisco back in ‘64. To be honest I’ve never really associated revolutionary cultural, sexual, and political movements with young professionals working for multi-national IT firms, but based on Yohann’s friends’ rousing rendition of “Heart of Gold”, it’s not out of the question.
I’ve heard that Delhi and Mumbai can both be pretty overwhelming for a rookie touching down in India for the first time. Bangalore totally blew my mind and gave me a good taste of Indian life (albeit for only one night), but it felt like a good transition. Most of the people I met worked for IT companies and were modern in pretty much every way, but it definitely was not North America.
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