Redefined in India

Reconnecting with life outside the big city comforts Vani Rangachar on a trip home to an almost unrecognizable Bangalore

Saturday, July 15, 2006

Reconnecting with life outside the big city comforts Vani Rangachar on a trip home to an almost unrecognizable Bangalore

On our visits home to Bangalore when I was a child, my mom toted giant jars of Skippy so my siblings and I could have peanut butter sandwiches. My grandmother bought her vegetables fresh from a cart that a skinny, muscular man pushed through the street, and milk was sold, still warm, by a man who milked the water buffalo in front of her house. When we went touring outside the city, it was only to visit ancient temple after ancient temple. These were some of the sureties of my India.

But during a trip here in March, after an absence of six years, I realized that many of the certainties of childhood were gone - vanished in a tech and outsourcing boom that has proved an economic boon for the city. The people, my family, were all dear and familiar to me, but the city? Almost unrecognizable.

Bangalore has become hip, fun and effervescently energetic, riding high on the shoulders of prosperity. But this city of about six million is not a tourist magnet. It's the capital of Karnataka state and primarily a business center, and it's hard to spend more than a couple of leisurely days here.

Its traffic jams are legendary. Average speeds in Bangalore are 16-18 kilometers per hour, according to a March report from the Insbreastute of Transportation and Consultancy. Things have gotten so bad that the chief executives of Wipro and Infosys, top tech companies here, early this year threatened to take their businesses elsewhere if the government didn't improve the mess.

If you're in Bangalore, it's likely you're here on business, or you're like me, a visiting nonresident Indian (or NRI, as the acronym-loving Indians call us). When the nonstop city wears you out, it's time to get away.

And that's what more and more middle-clbutt Bangaloreans are doing.

There are more vacation spots and activities to try outside the city than ever before. Witness my cousins: while I was visiting, one was leaving for a weeklong stay on a houseboat in Srinagar, Kashmir. Another was headed on a white- water-rafting trip to Dandeli Wildlife Sanctuary in the southern part of Karnataka state.

Shravan Gupta, director of Travel Tours, an agency with 10 offices in Bangalore and other southern India cities, credits the improved ease of travel. "With the low-cost carriers and a lot of highway improvements, a lot more places are accessible," Gupta said.

For visitors, that means more places to see and stay.

I traveled 35km from Bangalore northwest to Shreyas, a yoga retreat started in 2004.

It was a stressful 1-hour drive (even though I borrowed my cousin's driver), during which we had several near-collisions on a garbage-strewn road jammed with people, trucks, rickshaws and cars.

Maybe it was the journey that made my arrival at Shreyas feel so welcoming. Inside the gates, coconut trees rustled in the breeze. It was quiet enough to hear bird song.

Two men clad in white kurtas and loose pants greeted me at the entrance. One placed a garland of flowers around my neck; the other handed me a cool, wet washcloth to clean off the road grime.

Shreyas, owned by a widely traveled financier, Pawan Malik, is an artful melding of Indian and international, spiritual and high-tech. Vegetables, herbs and flowers are grown on the 10-hectare property, and the cuisine is vegetarian, wholesome (no alcoholic drinks) and innovative.

Soon after my arrival, the manager asked whether I had any health issues or dietary needs. I am diabetic, so my meals, which were delicious, included a mushroom soup without cream, a spinach curry with baby corn, chapatis made without oil and a salad of sprouted mung beans.

Its dozen rooms and cabin-tents have broadband Internet connections but no TV. (For the desperate, there's a room where you can watch DVDs.) The area by the lap pool has wireless Internet access; I was offered use of a laptop if I wanted to check my e-mail.

Shreyas had an almost religious attention to detail in service and decoration. After dinner, an employee led the way to my cabin-tent by flashlight. A granite basin filled with floating chrysanthemums and marigolds occupied a corner of the courtyard of my room. Rose petals were strewn across my candle-lighted dinner table.

The landscaping on the former coconut farm included artfully placed statues of Hindu gods. Temple-like granite columns framed pbuttageways at the main building. A library held volumes by Deepak Chopra, Kahlil Gibran and Paramahansa Yogananda.

Shreyas "is run like an ashram, without delving into religion," said Malik, who used to live in Japan. "I was influenced by Zen retreats we used to go to. We don't have anything like that here."

toward his staff. Members of the staff joined me in the twice-daily yoga clbuttes, and I lunched with manager Rucha Sukhramani. I could have helped them tend the farm, if I'd had the energy.

A similar spirit of give-back-to-the- community spurred the development of Kapila, a 6.5-ha wilderness retreat on the edge of Nagarhole National Park, a five-hour drive southwest of Bangalore.

Its founder, TG "Tiger" Ramesh, who made his fortune in the Indian tech industry, is "bullish on tourism," saying it is one way to solve India's poverty and preserve rural areas by raising incomes and creating more employment.

"Tourism is the only way we can help them," he said.

He's also bullish on wildlife preservation and hopes his initiative will deter poaching. He plans to expand his Cicada chain to 15 such resorts in key wilderness areas throughout India.

Kapila, which opened in October, lacks Shreyas' high-style patina, and that's part of its allure, although it could do a few things better.

It's in a sylvan setting on the banks of the Kabini River, and its eight rooms are decorated with Indian-made furniture and antiques. Victorian rosewood cabinets and tables occupy open-air hallways. There was no pool, and swimming in the river was prohibited. The one amenity in the bathroom of my spacious room overlooking the river was a fragrant travel-size bar of Mysore Sandalwood soap. No shampoo or conditioner, however.

Meals, which were good, bountiful buffets with Indian and Western selections, were included in the price of my stay, but soft drinks, bottled water and beer were extra. The key activities - safaris, boating and kayaking - carried add-on fees, and signing for the extras became irritating.

But I couldn't complain about the preservation mission of the place or the enthusiasm of its staff. Nearly all its workers are hired from neighboring villages, where Kapila funds education, medical and development projects. Staffers were friendly and eager to please, whether bringing tea or coffee in the early morning before a safari or ridding my room of a marching column of ants.

Adjacent to the resort is the Nagarhole park, which is home to more than 250 kinds of birds and two of India's big cat species, tigers and leopards. But they don't rule the forest here. Elephants do.

The park is home to more than 800 pachyderms during the hot, rainless months of February through May. On the three safaris I went on, I saw plenty - moms gamboling in the water with a newborn, tuskers mock-charging us, chomping bamboo, throwing dust on their backs, ambling through the forest.

I saw other creatures too, thanks to Harsha, the staff naturalist who like some Indians goes by only one name. Without him I would have missed the shadowy gaur, a wild ox, about to cross the dirt track, the Malabar squirrel jumping on branches and the chattering langur monkeys high in the treetops. He turned me into a full-fledged birder, adding more than two dozen species to my list.

What eluded us were the big cats. We came close, stopping several times to listen to the warning calls of the deer. But it was the tourists in a jeep from the neighboring Kabini River Lodge, which is run by the Karnataka government, that spotted the leopard sprinting across a clearing.

Oddly, I wasn't disappointed. By leaving the big city, I had reconnected with my homeland and found the pieces I had thought were missing.

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