Lost - In bangalore

I am a typical indian who doesn't mind going to that far off corner in the town to get the stuff at the wholesale rate. This time it was a pair of badminton rackets. The idea of losing some weight by playing a few round of badminton has been running around in my mind for a while now.

I set off to one of the most crowded places in Bangalore. This place doesn't have a particular name but is in general the area around "Avenue Road". There are quite a few places among the labyrinth of roads which have names ranging from "Sulthanpet" to "Bhangarpet". It is almost impossible to distinguish one from other, for one can see only shops and more shops. Most of these shops are "Wholesale" vendors, who don't mind entertaining an odd retail customer. The retail customers are few and difficult to come because the whole place is stuffed and its quite difficult to even walk in this ocean of vehicles and human beings.

Life shows a different face here. The shops are so close that it is hard to breathe fresh air. Forget the luxuries of an AC or in somecases even an ceiling fan. Business happens are a blinding pace. The shops are arranged in a fishbone shape. The main street which keeps getting narrower as it goes inwards away from "State Bank of Mysore" is called Avenue Road. Each of the perpendicular streets specializes in a particular item. The first lateral streets are stationary and books, then it is changes to bangles, Invititation cards, Clothes, Hardware, Electrical items, Glass items, Wood and so on. We could lay our eyes on some "eye-catching" beauty in these streets. We realized that most of the building have shops in the ground and 1st floor and have residential quaters in their upper half. Most of the shops belong to business communities from North India. The girls from these communities have been blessed with ample amount of beauty. Even though the whole thing of walking through the crowded streets is painful, these girls do provide us with some respite. 

After parking our bike in one of these dirt ridden messy dark alleys, we started to look out for our shops of interest. After looking through a multitude of shops and then going around asking for directions to sports shops we ended completely lost with almost no way to figure out which alley had our bike. Karthik and I had to rack our brains and try to remember the streets and shops which we had passed in the last hour. We almost were feeling like kids who had lost their way and had to trace it back using breadcrumbs. The difference being that we didn't have any breadcrumbs. It was a mix of hit-n-trail, excellent guess work and then some mind mapping that got us back to the street where our bike. It was almost a great relief to be on our bike and get out of this maze of shops, life and livelyhood.