Month: August 2007

Well, we did it. Unbelievably, amazingly so. We moved. Right now, I’m sitting in our ‘cozy’ (Bay area euphemism for tiny) apartment somewhere in Bezerkly, Caaalifornia. We moved from the city that was home for so many years, home both real and imagined, home both bliss and bane. Bengaluru.

We moved for so many reasons, all practical, well-thought out, but it doesn’t help the goodbyes. Bangalore was getting really rough on my asthma (wait, the increasing pollution was actually one of the *causes* for my asthma), and the craziness of the chaos, the traffic, the change in lifestyles, in attitudes, in the Bangalore spirit, was moving beyond we-can-manage-this-because-we-love-the-city to we-might-love-it-but-we-can’t-cope-anymore. Even our time with the Koramangala Initiative (a citizen’s forum in Koramangala) made us feel that without sustained political will, well-intentioned citizens’ efforts can feel frustrating rather than empowering.

Also, it’s been ten years of working for both Ashwin and me, and we felt the need to reflect on those ten years, and to challenge ourselves in different ways for the next ten. So Ashwin chose to go back to university (‘school’ as they call it here in the usofa), and I chose to finish that darn, never-ending doctoral thesis of mine.

All good reasons. Still hard to say goodbye. So I’m going to resort to what I know to be true: misquoting Bob Dylan always works. Goodbye’s too sad a word, babe, so I’ll just say fare thee well.

Besides, as the Governor of our newly inhabited state (Arnold Shivajinagar) is fond of saying, I Will Be Back. And he’s just following namma Bharatiya samskruti, where you never say ‘I’m leaving’, you always wave tata and say, ‘Bartheevi’, ‘Aashbo’, ‘Varen’, ‘Aathe hai’. We’ll be back. Bartheevi, Bengaluru.