By Deepa Bhasthi

There used to be a bus that left early in the morning from near Town Hall in Bangalore and showed a bunch of tourists around the city, a day package (oh how I detest those package tours! Shudder!!). I believe they show you around the parks, museums (run-down) and well, I don’t know. There isn’t anything much you can see around Bangalore. But I believe that to be true of every city. Apart from the huge colonial style public buildings, don’t most cities look the same? With their shopping centres, the malls and glass doors, there isn’t much to distinguish one sanitized mall in one city from another in another metropolis.

So when a couple of Couchsurfers (wonderful concept, now that.) asked me what is very ‘Bangalore’, I told them we do the café thing a lot. You know, the one where you have a date, meet with friends, blow off steam, read a book, sulk, people-watch or just hang out at a café. I for one have done all this. Don’t you love the word hang-out? There is an air of having done a lot when you are essentially sitting around and just time-passing. I also love the word time-passing.

So in a long sweeping statement of generalization, here is where I say that we in Bangalore hang out in cafes a lot. We curse the overpriced bad coffees and stale sandwiches, but the lure of a café is one that we let ourselves be irrestistable to. Like this evening, I told a friend that we could do our catching up at K.

K is for Koshy’s, that ancient relic from the city’s nostalgia pages. There really isn’t anything great about the food or drink there; the waiters are famously, mostly, sullen. But it is the ‘atmosphere’ (pardon me, ambience is the more sophisticated word), plus the sheer convenience of location that makes it so popular. My friend, the cultural geographer, says that K’s has geography going for it. Plus, the musty smells and the various cacophonies are very conducive to all sorts of mad ideas, as we discovered today. But mad ideas are not what I am writing about here.

So the usual K crowd kept floating by our table and the next. I am not part of the regulars, but know some well enough to nod hellos at a few tables. Another friend joined by, another round of intros ensued and there was more networking and observations (gossiping and bitching about; my friend prefers the said euphemisms!) that went around. There was maddening traffic, but of course at 7 pm, when we came out. This friend and I were to go to another café, where else, but ended up at Java City in the next street, which also has geography going for it. Plus a really fat dog that sleeps below the steps, not too friendly, particularly nasty towards the transgender beggars. So we café hopped there, feeling oh-so-chic about being one of those people who café hop.

JC, as the regulars there call it, has its own set of regulars. Didn’t I just use regulars twice here? Ugh! I don’t know any of them to nod my hellos, though I do know that one is a Kannada actor, a one film wonder who is balding and growing fatter behind his laptop and nicely painted guitar. We ‘observe’ and wonder what he does for a living, to be sitting there every day, the whole day. I know that because here was where I sneaked in between assignments for some ‘me’ time; the old office was just down the street.

If I had to list the reasons why I am still in this city, counting off on a single hand, mind you, I would write number two before the café culture. Number one? The weather, duh! I love the sheer number of cafes all over town, from the mucky café chains to the truly good ones. I love how you can sit in one the whole day and brood or write or amuse yourself with the sorts that walk in and out. In my sixth year here, I could give you a list of cafes with what each of them are known for, from the teen hangout to the most discreet to the most noisy to the best coffees to the quietest: most important.

I always imagine Paris to be so. Not that I have been there yet. But I do read a lot and after a heavy dose of French cinema in Film Studies class, need I say I am rich in terms of imagination? I imagine Parisian streets to be full of wrought iron chairs and slim tables, with women in red heels and men in suits, with writers and poets and artists sipping coffee and delicately cutting up a sugar doughnut, with a flamboyant owner and quirky regulars, with music and a high-pitched laughter, with joie-de-vivre for being young and alive. We might be a little short in the chic-ness department, but us café regulars, we have our writers, our quirks, our laughter, our youth. We live our days behind those doors, one cup of coffee at a time.

Related post :Java anyone?