Abhinav Agarwal: Bangalore

Showing posts with label Bangalore. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 31, 2013

Motilal Banarsidas, Bangalore

I had reason to be in Jayanagar a few months back, with 15 odd minutes to spare. I was across the road from the Motilal Banarsidas bookstore, and my feet found their way, along with the rest of me, to the store. I have been to the store a few times before, and every single time have exited the store with a book in tow - that is also the story of my ingress and egress from most other bookstores I frequent, come to think of it. I had posted photos of the store in 2007 (blog post), so I am not going to write about its history or stuff...

Since I have started reading Dr. Bibek Debroy's translation of the unabridged Mahabharata, I have been fascinated more and more by this book, An Index to the Names in Mahabharata by S. Sorensen, 8120820118, 9788120820111 at Mlbd Books. For a book written more than a hundred years ago, it is a stupendous work that has not been rivaled or surpassed. As far as I can tell, there is no other book of its kind attempted since. If you may be wondering why should there be a book on the names in the Mahabharata, then you should take a close look at the unabridged epic.

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Sunday, December 15, 2013

Canada, US, India - Indulging a passion for photography

Three photos, three countries, same year.

The first is from the Canadian city of Fredericton, which also happens to be the capital of the province of New Brunswick. I have a couple of posts on the town, where I spent two months. A most interesting period of time I spent, in what was one of the most eventful years of my life thus far. Spending January and February in Canada means braving lots of cold weather. Cold as in 20 degrees below zero degrees Fahrenheit. Yes, that's close to -30C. Cold as in wind chills of upto -45C. It is a whole different world of cold at those temperatures. Like hell-freezing-over kind of cold. But it makes for gorgeous photographs.

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Sunday, June 2, 2013

Bangalore Comic Con, 2013

The 2013 edition of the Bangalore Comic Con (@ComicConIndia) was held at the Koramangala Indoor Stadium - the same venue as last year, on June 1 and 2 (today is the last day). Unlike last year's event, which was the inaugural edition, this second event was perhaps an order of magnitude larger in attendance - it seemed like every school and college student was there. I felt like an outlier in terms of age - till I saw Vinay's photo from the event.

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Saturday, May 18, 2013

Blossom Book Shop, Bangalore

The Blossom Book House, on Church Street in Bangalore, is my kind of a bookstore. Aisle upon narrow aisle, shelf upon shelf stacked with books, not an inch of space devoted to cute displays, but books, old, new, the really old, shiny books, dusty books, books you have never heard of, books you will never read, books you never imagined you would see in any bookstore, least of all in a used-bookstore in Bangalore - The Starr Report for instance. See this Wikipedia article in case you don't know.

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Oxford Book Shop, MG Mall

I had read or heard that the Oxford Bookstore at the 1 MG Mall in Bangalore was huge. That was the attraction for me to visit it. I was wrong. The bookstore is not that big, though the ambience is nice, the bookstore is quiet, and there is a coffee store right inside the store for you to enjoy a cuppa whilst the children browse the aisles. There is a small but nicely done up kids area, and on small wall a set of beautiful coffee table books put up.

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Sunday, October 28, 2012

DC Books, Bangalore

I had a few hours to kill in Koramangala earlier in the week, thanks to a shopping spree planned by the ladies. Now, spending three hours at a mall is as much fun as listening to any of our TV media stars pontificate. However, to see if there were other ways of spending the time, I asked people for recommendations on bookstores in the area, apart from the usual suspects like Landmark at the Forum Mall, Sapna Book House, and Crossword. Sameer (@zenx) suggested DC Books. They are "among India’s top five literary publishing houses of India" and started "in 1974 by Dominic Chacko Kizhakemuri" (link). They have an outlet in Koramangala and I decided to pay them a visit with the kids.

Their store is on the ground floor of a house, and while they do have shelves stacked with books, their store seemed to serve more as a warehouse and distribution center than a retail outlet. Which is fine by me. I want the books, and do not care much for the display.

They have books in English and Malayalam. They are located out of a house, and one bedroom is devoted entirely to Malayalam books.

There were a couple of people in the store, mostly busy in inventory work, but were courteous and friendly, and did not mind that we spent more than an hour in the store, flitting between the "verandah", the living room, and the dining room, browsing books, sitting down on the floor to read some others.

In this photo below, you can see the bedroom at the end - which is their Malayalam-specific room.

While we were there, a Flipkart employee also walked in, printouts in hand, large bag in tow, sat down and started going through his printout. I asked him if he was picking up books for delivery to Flipkart customers. He replied that he wasn't, and was in fact there to take delivery of books to take to the Flipkart warehouse. I suppose that Flipkart may be proactively procuring books to stock at its warehouse, in anticipation of orders for these books that sell regularly.

We finally left the store with three books in tow. If you are in that part of town, I would recommend the store for a visit. It provides for a different experience from both the mega bookstores like Sapna as well as the smaller ones that stock magazines, pens, stationery, and some books.

The store is located at the intersection of the "80 Feet Peripheral Road" and "1st Cross", and contrary to what Google Maps shows, they are located right on the main road.

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Landmark, Orion Mall, Bangalore

Landmark, the Chennai-based chain of bookstores (and now a part of the Tata conglomerate) has been struggling, at least in Bangalore. They had opened their second store at the Garuda Swagat Mall, but had to close it down owing to differences with the management of the mall. They have opened their newest store in Bangalore at the Orion Mall in Rajajinagar. This is located on the ground floor and opened in September 2012, and has a different layout for the books section than its Forum Mall store. In October 2012 they also changed the layout of their Forum Mall store also to match the Orion Mall layout.

View Larger Map of Orion Mall

While the floor space devoted to books has shrunk dramatically from what used to be the case till a few years ago, the new layout is designed to be more appealing, more "contrasty" (lots of bright white and yellow lettering on black), and more discounts - you can see "3-for-2" stickers pasted all over the aisles. They have also tried, and I would say successfully so, to arrange books more thematically, and that attracts more eyeballs to those books.

Photo taken while seated on the floor, dog-tired, waiting for the family to finish up.

They have also added a wall of "bestsellers" that are categorized into "Fiction", "Non Fiction", "Management", "Kids", and so on - again with several of those bestsellers available under the "3-for-2" discount scheme.

It will be interesting to see how their books business compares with Crosswords, which has been focusing more on its books business as opposed to Landmark that seems to be adopting a strategy of selling books at often steep discounts as a way to attract shoppers to spend on other, possibly higher margin, items in the store, like perfumes, chocolates, and the like.

Sunday, October 7, 2012

Crossword Bookstore, Koramangala

Of all the myriad pleasures that life sends our way, one of the more enjoyable one has to be the discovery of a bookstore. One such bookstore I, we discovered recently is the Crossword store in Koramangala. This is not a new store, and has been around for close to a couple of years. However, since we had not had occasion to travel by that road in some time, it had escaped attention. Coming back from a friend's party one weeked, a Saturday, I espied this store, bright, shiny, welcoming. However, it was late that day, so Sunday turned out to be the day to visit this store.

The Sunday we went turned out to be a good day, since the store was not crowded - a dozen or so customers were strolling the aisles. Parking was not a hassle - and keep in mind there is not much by way of parking available outside the store, unless they have parking in the basement - which I could not spot. The store itself is large - perhaps the largest Crossword bookstore in Bangalore, larger than the one they have in JP Nagar, larger than the one they have on Bannerghatta Road, the Airport. I had tweeted their handle, @Crossword_Book, but didn't get a response.

The children's section is also large, spacious, and a couple of sofas and stools can be put to good use. Indeed, you can spot parents and children there, poring over, reading, flipping over books. There is a Cafe Coffee Day store inside the store next to the children's section.

The other reason I liked this store is the curation - yes, I don't think, and I may be wrong, that all Crossword stores get the same selection of books to carry; that would be not only impractical because all stores are not the same size, but also because each store should and must carry books based on the human intervention and judgment. In that respect, the Koramangala store impressed me with not only with the selection of books, but also with the placement and choice of books to highlight.

Their India shelf had the usual suspects listed, including Nilekani's "Imaging India" and Shashi Tharoor's "Pax Indica", but also the well-reviewed "Beyond the Beautiful Forevers" by Katherine Boo.

We stepped out of the store after more than an hour, richer by two Amar Chitra Katha 3-in-1 collections and one Judy Moody paperback, i.e., kids' books.

I should add that there are at least three bookstores I know of that are larger in South Bangalore. One is the Landmark store at the Forum Mall. While the Landmark store sells a whole lot more than just books, their books section is quite large. The second and third are the Sapna Book Store. One is their store in Jayanagar, which, while cramped, offers a very large collection of books - both academic as well as others, while their other store is in Koramangala, and is billed as India's largest book showroom. I have been there and had blogged about it last year (link).

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Head-on Collision

Admit it, the title of the post made you look, didn't it? It's the morbid fascination with the macabre that we harbor, hidden mostly, but latent, dormant, and waiting to surface at all times, that makes us go rubber-necking on highways.
There is a traffic police post on Bannerghatta Road, opposite the Gopalan Mall, and which is therefore also the site of many a dented and accidented vehicle that have been towed or driven here, waiting for the police investigation to be completed, before these vehicles can be taken to their final resting places. It is here that you get to see some frisson-inducing spectacles, like this one. There have been worse, I am sure, but this one is no less hair-raising. A white mini-van and a black hatchback in what looks like an almost full-frontal collision. Not at very high speed though, because the windshield has not cracked for either vehicle.

Saturday, July 23, 2011

Idiots on roads - 7

This photo sends a chill down my spine whenever I look at it. So I choose not to look at it, mostly. I spotted these mangled remains of the car in 2004, while on Bannerghatta Road on some shopping errand. What got the goosebumps to bump up was seeing that the front of the car had been so completely mangled up, like it had been run through some giant pounding machine. I can only imagine with dread the accident that would have caused a sturdy car like the Ambassador (Wikipedia link) to be so crushed and mangled. And what about the driver and occupants? Chances of anyone surviving such a horrific accident are slim, to say the least.

So who are the idiots here? Knowing how accidents happen on Indian roads, one can surmise the possible candidates:

Speeding. By someone.
Drunk driving.
Driving on the wrong side of the road.
Running an intersection at high speed. This crash looks more like a side impact, judging by the second photo, so a severe side-swipe cannot be ruled out.
Driver falling asleep.
Slippery road conditions.
Mechanical failure.
Animals on road, causing the driver to lose control or hit an animal that sends the car careening out of control.

Take your pick. There may or may not have been an idiot here, but chances that one or more were indeed involved.

The light brown facade in the background is that of an apartment complex - Mantri Paradise I believe. There is a "Fabmall" department store also visible in the background. The chain went bust a few years ago, and was bought over by the Aditya Birla Group and rebranded as "More".

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Sunday, July 17, 2011

Royal Meenakshi Mall, Bangalore

There seems to be a new mall coming up in Bangalore every other week. South Bangalore did not have as many malls as some other areas in Bangalore, though that has started to change over the last one year or so. There is Bangalore Central in JP Nagar, Gopalan Mall on Bannerghatta Road, a huge mall is coming up along with a co-located Gateway Hotel not half a kilometer from the Gopalan Mall, and a few months earlier the Royal Meenakshi Mall came up, on Bannerghatta Road, a few kilometers south of these two malls.

Croma is one of the anchor stores in the mall, on the ground floor.

Barista Coffee is there, as is Costa Coffee.

The Nike store, adjacent to Croma.

As you can see, the atrium is quite spacious.

This is a Reliance store that had not yet opened.

A wide shot of the atrium reveals Hyper City on the left.

As an aside, a high-rise residential project from Mantri builders, Mantri Pinnacle, is coming up behind the mall.

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Saturday, June 11, 2011

Idiots on roads - 6

This photo was taken more than seven years ago, in 2003, in Bangalore. A city as large as Bangalore, with as many vehicles as in Bangalore, is bound to throw up opportunities for such photos on roads.

In this photo though, I am not sure who the idiot is. There are several candidates here. And I will attempt to enumerate these worthy candidates.

1. The truck driver, who may have been tired, lazy, driving rashly, or for some other reason...
2. The civic authorities, who choose to dig up roads, for mostly no apparent reason, then leave these roads dug up for months on end, and when they do fill up these trenches do not properly asphalt them, precipitating such accidents.
3. Telecom or the electricity supply company or the water supply board or some other distinguished civic or private body. Private telecom companies are notorious for digging up roads without authorizations, for using sewage pipes for laying fibre optic cables, and more.
4. Some other careless driver that precipitated this accident.

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Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us)

Sunday, May 15, 2011

Taj Gateway Hotel, Bannerghatta Road, Bangalore

There is a new Taj Gateway Hotel (Taj Hotels Resorts and Palaces - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) coming up on Bannerghatta Road, at the intersection of the JP Nagar Outer Ring Road that connects with the Kanakpura Road and then meets up with Mysore Road. Going by the state of the construction, it appears it will be at least the end of 2011 or the first of 2012 before the mall and the hotel are fully operational.

Apart from the Taj Hotel, there is also a mall that is gong to be co-located with the hotel, which will boast a bowling alley, a multi-plex by PVR, and stores by Spar (Spar India) and Lifestyle, among others. This promises to add to the growing number of malls on Bannerghatta Road. The other malls are the Gopalan Innovation and the Royal Meenakshi malls that have come up in the last six months.

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Sunday, February 27, 2011

Bangalore Elevated Tollway

Back in 2005 and 2006 there were complaints galore from commuters who worked in Electronics City in Bangalore, a 300 acre electronic industrial park that is one of the largest and oldest such IT parks in the country. The commuters complained that the four-laned road to the park had become so congested that a 10 km drive from The Silk Board junction to Electronics City in rush hour could take upwards of two hours. The government, in response, decided to build an elevated tollway, 10kms long that would allow commuters to get on this tollway right after the Silk Board junction which would deposit them right outside Electronics City, without any stoplights, any intersections. A four lane dedicated corridor. This tollway was completed in early 2010. For a month or so no toll was charged, which was also the best period to get on the tollway for a joy ride.

Per the Wikipedia entry on the tollway:

The Bangalore Elevated Tollway is a 9.985 kilometers (6 mi) long elevated, tolled, access-controlled expressway in the city of Bengaluru, Karnataka, India. The project is a part of the BETL (Bangalore Elevated Tollways Ltd), project as part of the National Highways Development Project and the Elevated Highways Project. It was initiated in early 2006, and was inaugurated on 22 January 2010.^[1]

Per the expressay's web site , this road has been built by "a Consortium of Soma Enterprise Ltd (Soma), Nagarjuna Construction Company Limited (NCCL), and Maytas Infra Limited (Maytas)"

This photo has been taken looking north; facing the Silk Board junction. The Innova minivan and two wheelers seen in the photo are heading south, towards Electronics City.

What is interesting to note is that there is no break in the median. There is this metal barricade runs through all the way. While this has obviously been done to discourage people from getting silly and dangerous ideas about making u-turns and causing dangerous accidents. The downside is that it also becomes difficult for emergency vehicles to approach the scene of an accident or emergency from the other side of the tollway.

This is where the elevated expressway starts off on the north end, just after the Silk Board flyover:

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You can view some more photos at the tollway site's photo gallery.

Wednesday, December 8, 2010

Strand Book Stall Annual Sale 2010

Every year the Strand Book Stall holds an annual sale in the month of December. For the past few years they have tended to start the sale in the last week of November, on a Friday, and continue for three weekends (see my post on last year's sale -Strand Book Stall's 2009 sale).

For one year, in 2005 or 2006 I think, they had the sale inside the Chinnaswamy Cricket Stadium, in the rooms of the cricket association. You got to see ornate portraits of famous Karnataka state cricketers like Gundappa Viswanath, Erapalli Prasanna, Anil Kumble, Rahul Dravid, and others, and from the windows you got to see the lush green carpet-like field of the cricket stadium. Unfortunately, that sale was not repeated at the venue the next year, because the powers-that-be did not like the mass of book lovers thronging the exclusive domain of the cricket association's members. So, for the next two years the sale did happen at the stadium, but in one of the narrow rooms at the periphery of the stadium. Over the year-end break I will try and post photos from those sales.

For the last year or two the sale has been happening at Basava Bhavan, near the Chalukya Hotel. This year is no different, and the sale continues till Sunday Dec 12.

View Larger Map Map showing Basava Bhavan. It is triangulated by Palace Road, Sankey's Road, and Millers Road

Coming from Raj Bhavan Road, you need to make a right on to Sankey Road, then an immediate right at Sankey's Road, and then again an immediate right on to Miller's Road. The entrance to Basava Bhavan as well as parking can be found on this road.

The sale is split across two levels of the hall. This is the photo of the top level. As you can see they have made arrangements for extra tubelights to light up the place, because, you do need light if you are going to browse through tens of thousands of books and flip through them. Thoughtful.

This is the lower level, with books on cookery, design, and three full rows of books on children and for children.

Classics can be had for Rs 150.

This stacked arrangement of books makes it very hard to read the titles of the books on display. Given the shortage of space it is understandable, but nonetheless, to go over the titles you need to crane your neck sideways and then start shifting in one direction. And then hope that the books have all been stacked in the same direction, else you have to crane your neck the other way to read the title, and then crane it back, and so on. Not good.

Power: Why Some People Have It and Others Don't
The Cluetrain Manifesto: 10th Anniversary Edition
The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World
Three Billion New Capitalists: The Great Shift of Wealth and Power to the East

The books themselves do not seem to be arranged in any particular theme, beyond the very broad themes of fiction and non-fiction. Within non-fiction there is a wide assortment to be had, sometimes right next to each other. A book on the psychology and science of shopping is right below one on microfinancing, which is adjacent to a book on Six Sigma.