Big City Small City

I crossed over yesterday and became a true Banglorean (as in the young, come here for a job sort) in spirit, atleast temporarily. After all that I crib about everybody in Bangalore heading towards Forum/Brigade Road-MG Road on weekends, I did exactly that yesterday and both in the same day as well. Spent the morning watching two movies at PVR (the Forum multiplex). Mangal Pandey was very disappointing, not that I had gone with very high expectations, but still it doesn't say much for a movie if you spent most of the first half waiting for the intermission, and the second wondering how much longer before the movie ends. The songs in the movie are especially useless and the women have absolutely nothing to do, so they could have easily got rid of both and made a shorter, much less painful mangal pandey, or so I think. Madagascar, the second movie I saw, was a nice change after this. Its not absolutely wonderful but good fun nevertheless and its just one and a half hours long which is always good.
The brigade road trip was for meeting up with some batchmates. Most of them didn't show up so the few of us who were there trooped off into a restaurant, ate, and came back.

Some of my earliest reading consisted of Russian folk-tales. There was a big book of those with one of my cousins whom we used to visit in summer vacations and I absolutely coveted it. Almost all the stories had a witch called Baba Yaga who lived in a hut which stood in the middle of the forest on chicken legs. Having legs the hut could move around and the door would turn away whenever you tried to enter it, so it used to be a tricky bit for the hero to figure out how to enter the hut during his quest to rescue the princess. There also used to be a self-unraveling ball of wool in many stories which the hero would take along, I don't remember the context there entirely though.

Russian book fairs used to be a big highlight (for me) of the Dussehra Mela in Kota as well, which incidentally was one of the things Kota was famous for prior to the coaching boom. The effigies of Ravan and his brothers in the Kota Dussehra Mela were amongst the tallest in the country and the fair itself went on for some 15 days. Much household shopping used to happen during the fair especially buying bed-sheets for some reason. And ofcourse there was the mandatory visit to the softy stalls. I use past tense here because I have no idea about the state of affairs for the past four years. Its probably still all the same although I wonder if it still holds the same importance in the small town life of Kota.