Island Hopping 1: New Select Hotel

A couple of days ago, as I slumped over a delicious breakfast of a flaky KP and a plate of beef masala, my mind at relative ease despite the obnoxious honking, bleating and blaring of horns and people outside, I came to the unfortunate realization that this city is no longer liveable. 

For months now, my mind has been damaged; ambulating in the wake of Bangalore’s hottest summer, crippled by toxic foam from its many lakes and putrefied by the flushed shit from its many overflowing open manholes. We have been kidding ourselves really, thinking that living here makes any sense anymore. It’s a lie we all live, knowing that we are a part of the problem despite not realizing it. Some of us, me included, are holding on, grasping to that little nostalgic thread of a Bangalore that was “better”, jerking-off a misplaced sense of elitist pride knowing that you were here before a majority of the folks in the city, the only “true bangalorean” in your peer group, but it’s all balls. We are actually a bunch of lost children with no identity, because a Bangalorean doesn’t really have an identity. An identity only exists when a city has a soul. This city has no soul. This city has traffic. That is your identity. No “Pub City”, no “Garden City”, no nothing. Traffic. That is the single most unifying thing in Bangalore. Traffic. The one thing that brings together the mal and the telgite, the tam and the Bengali, the Kannadiga and the north Kannadiga. Traffic. So what then is the solution? How does one really make an existence in this unliveable city somewhat liveable? The answer came to me sometime into my third crunchy bite of kerala parotta and a chunky piece of fatty beef. 

Islands.

That’s right, Islands. Your very own, tiny, escape islands in the city. Secret fortresses of solitude known to only you and a select aesthete few with the capacity to truly appreciate what your fortress provides. A place that you go to escape from all the hideousness this city dishes out to you daily. A sanctuary of sorts that houses your troubled mind and nurtures it back to normalcy for the next day or week. A sacred place, where you find the deity that brings you peace, maybe in the form of food, maybe in the form of a stiff 90 and chilled soda. Remember, your Island need not be a quiet place. Maybe it’s filled with a rambunctious entourage, brimming with a cacophony of tinkling and milling. Maybe it smells of damp and decayed clothes and sweat and vomit, but it’s still YOUR place, your very own spot, where you can shed your ego and your pretense, just be you, the same you from 10, 15 maybe 20 years ago. 

While New Select Hotel in Richmond Town doesn’t necessarily qualify as an Island, I did enjoy a lonely breakfast there at about 10 AM. It was a soothing meal, had in the confines of a rather decrepit shed, the air thick with soot from wood fire cooking stoves. The bubbling from a few vats of slowly simmering beef masala, bheja and khaima were the only things that provided a constant drone of sound through my breakfast, interspersed albeit, with the occasional clang and yell from the inside kitchen. Not a place you’d bring a book too, or stare out the window with a cigarette, but definitely one where you’d allow yourself a moments respite with a pretty decent warm plate of breakfast beef. What more could you ask for really?

So, on that note, what is your island?

Say me yours and I’ll say you mine, bob!

P.S.: Over the coming months, I have decided to document and overly romanticize my love for the Bangalore bar by revisiting a few favourites. Suggestions will be welcomed. A meet-up with a promise of a couple of drinks, even more so. Holler back, ya’ll!