10 Dec
I have been drinking coffee for as long as I can remember. Maybe I started drinking at the age of three. Maybe even earlier, maybe later. But I clearly remember that back when I still had half-day school (i.e. kindergarten), after my afternoon siesta, I would sit down with my grandmother (another major coffee drinker) [...]
Posted in bangalore, food, personal, retail by: skimpy
4 Comments
08 Dec
Last Wednesday I saw a chain-snatching live. It was late in the evening and traffic was moving at a snail’s pace on Good Shed Road (formally called TCM Royan Road). I was on my way to the in-laws’ place in Rajajinagar. There was an unusually large number of auto rickshaws on the road (may not [...]
Posted in arbit, bangalore by: skimpy
8 Comments
06 Dec
In Bangalore, you have two kinds of residential layouts, BDA Layouts and Revenue Layouts. The former are layouts that have been created by the Bangalore Development Authority (BDA) or its predecessor the City Improvement Trust Board (CITB). These agencies acquired land from villages which were then on the outskirts of Bangalore, planned layouts with sites [...]
Posted in bangalore, fundaes, infrastructure by: skimpy
No Comments
21 Oct
One of the advantages of being jobless is that though you’re poor in terms of money, you’re rich in time. So you have all the time you want to do things that give you random kicks, such as riding the new Bangalore metro on the second day of operation. The reason I chose to go [...]
Posted in bangalore, descriptive, infrastructure, travel by: skimpy
1 Comment
18 Oct
Ever since D V Sadananda Gowda became chief minister of Karnataka not so long ago, we residents of KR Road have been subjected to the holdup of the KR Road-SouthEnd Road signal several times a day. The convoy for which traffic is held up is huge, leading us to believe that it can’t belong to [...]
Posted in arbit, bangalore, politics by: skimpy
1 Comment
07 Oct
A long time back I’d cribbed that in places like Bangalore where not too many people are willing to experiment with food, non-standard cuisines end up being insanely expensive. This was perhaps during my first trip to New York last year, when I’d been amazed to find extremely high quality food at nondescript places for [...]
Posted in bangalore, business, food, fundaes by: skimpy
1 Comment
27 Sep
Every few months or so a bunch of (mostly) Bangalore-based liberals go up in massive outrage all over the interwebs. On each occasion, the trigger for this would have been a bunch of cops raiding some bar, and imposing a new set of rules. The last time this happened, it was about cops randomly checking [...]
Posted in bangalore, business, fundaes, politics by: skimpy
No Comments
19 Sep
In a little street called Narayana Pillai Street, off Commercial Street in the Shivajinagar area of Bangalore there stands a building called “Ganesh complex” which can be called a tailoring hub. There are some ten to twelve shops (forgive my arithmetic if I’ve counted too low) all of which are occupied by tailors who stitch [...]
Posted in bangalore, business, economics, retail by: skimpy
1 Comment
22 Aug
Lingaraj was a driver who used to work for my father. He had a unique way of dealing with traffic jams on two-lane roads without a divider down the middle. He would instinctively swing the ambassador into the right lane – meant for traffic in the opposite direction (the jam ahead meant there was little [...]
Posted in arbit, bangalore, business, finance, infrastructure, investment banking by: skimpy
1 Comment
24 May
Vidyarthi Bhavan has its weekly holiday on Friday Mahalakshmi Tiffin Room doesn’t open for business on Saturday Brahmins Coffee Bar is closed on Sunday Upahara Darshini used to be closed on Mondays, though in the last few years they’ve been open 7 days a week Dwaraka and the Gandhibazaar branch of Adigas are closed on [...]
Posted in bangalore, food by: skimpy
1 Comment