Bengaluru we finally meet

The Konkan rain trail is as familiar to me as a visit to my favourite restaurant. I know which compartments have the charging points for my cell phone, which tunnels not to stick my head out of the train in, and which river indicates my nearing Ratnagiri.

Its easy to get so familiar when I make regular trips back and forth between Goa and Mumbai to visit family.

So one can understand that after spending most of my years travelling this side of the Sahayadris, my bus journey to Bangalore was a real shocker. I don't understand how someone who aced geography in school could have forgotten that India has such a diverse terrain.

So much so that after we had left behind the winding ghats and moved into the Plateau region with it's erratic spread of giant boulders dotting the highway, I was sure I had taken the wrong bus and was on my way to some hovel of the south.

"Sir, are we going to Bangalore..er... Bengaluru?" I asked the bus helper who answered back with a look of amusement. Probably wondering why I would get on to a bus without knowing where it was heading. I managed to act like I travel this way often...easy peasy pudding and pickle.

The nail biting and glaring at road signs to check where we were gave it away however.

To my good luck, suddenly all the sign board writing turned to noodle like squiggles and I knew I was entering Kannada territory. I was definitely in Karnataka.

As I eased back into my seat... I noticed the coconut trees in this area we're iron rod straight, like their trunks had been endowed with rigid spines. Then again, these trees seemed to be growing almost equidistant from each other and while their leaves moved their bodies stayed mummified. Maybe they were mummified palm trees.

My idea of large scale horticultural designing got flushed down the drain, when, as we arrived at the crescent of one particularly high rise in the road, I realised that those rows and rows of 'palm trees' dotting all the rolling hillocks for miles around were wind mills and not vegetation.

Open mouthed I craned my neck out of the window, glimpsing right till the horizon went blurry, at these magnificent electricity generators, topping each and every high rise.

A nature lover, I am used to cooing at baby snakes and marvelling at old banyan trees, but for the first time I was teary eyed looking at this wonder of man. Others stand in awe at the old Goa churches, or the forts of Cabo de Ram, here was I, speechlessly staring at towers of metal, lazily moving their arms in the breeze. Probably generating the electricity needed for Bangalore to keep it's its computers running.

Never a more suprising welcome has any city given me, and this image of power houses were the first in my mental album of photos from my virgin trip to the IT city.