Slightly less than two hours away from Bangalore, on the Doddaballapur Main Road, is a beautiful, vast, enchanting, soothing, quiet, meticulously maintained, manicured and landscaped expanse of trees, plants, and clean, unpolluted air known as Angsana Resort and Spa. One of four locations worldwide, the Bangalore Angsana resort is a great place to get away for the weekend. Not only is it within easy driving distance (in case you just want to go and return the same day), it is also a wonderful place to stay over for a night or two.

Angsana offers luxurious spa services, conference facilities, a hotel and a restaurant. The drive itself is nothing to write home about. For quite a distance you are stuck in the city and the immediate outskirts are just as bad in terms of road conditions and traffic. Once you get closer to the resort it’s a pretty good drive. The roads are quiet, farms and fields and villages greet you as you drive past.

Once you enter the gates, you are transported into lush surroundings about a half a kilometer away from the gates. What strikes you is the calmness of the surroundings. The restaurant is the only space in the resort that is abuzz with activity. Every place else inside the resort coaxes you to be lazy, slow, and to enjoy the surroundings. And there is a lot to enjoy – a vast variety of trees and plans are eye candy for sore polluted eyes.

The restaurant is nothing to write home about. Although the surroundings are comfortable, the food leaves much to be desired. The menu offers many vegetarian and healthy choices for the conscious, but it is lacking in taste and flavor. The grilled cheese sandwich arrived soggy and uncooked, the chicken was flavorless.

The spa facilities on the other hand, are excellent. It offers skilled services in a beautiful, relaxing and soporific ambience, all things to look for in a spa.

The Angsana resort is a cool place to head to for a special celebration. You’ll come back to the hustle and bustle of the city much refreshed, albeit a tad poorer in the pocket.

Six classes later (four more to go in this set), I’m glad to report that I’ve acquired a semblance of grace (even though I do say so myself). Much credit goes to the teacher, Mridula, who is patient, obviously skilled in the Latin dance forms and her enthusiasm.

Salsa seems to be taking off in Bangalore. Just this week, I saw at least two articles in the newspapers I read about Salsa and the India International Salsa Congress scheduled to be held this month between the 16th and the 20th in Banglore.

Promises to be a great fun-filled event. Salsa officionados are invited to show off their dance moves, learn from other exponents, exchange ideas. Bottom line, participants are encouraged to have fun! Even if you don’t know your Rumba from your Samba or your New York from your Hand to Hand, go, see, be awed.

You never know, you might just be moved to shake your booty!

For those unfamiliar with Rangashankara, it’s a fairly new theater space in J.P. Nagar in South Bangalore started by Arundhati Nag. The seats (benches) are arranged in a semi-circle around the stage and the room gives off an intimate feel. There’s a handy cafe in the ground floor and a sizeable lounge that hosts exhibitions.

Arundhati and Jagadish Raja, two theater veterans in Bangalore are all set to launch Jagruti a 200-seat playhouse. Rakesh Mehar writes in The Hindu today,

…all programmes here will run for a full month, instead of the usuak three or four shows. “And in that month, we will organise a range of fringe or platform, activities in the various other spaces such as workshops, lecture demonstrations, readings and so on,” says Arundhati….”So if a Greek play is running in the main auditorium, then the cafe will serve Greek food, and the bookshop will sell books on Greek art and culture, and even Greek tourism.”

Sounds mighty interesting. For a while Bangalore was home to two popular venues for theater productions, Chowdiah Memorial Hall and Ravindra Kalakshetra, then came Arundhati Nag’s Rangashankara, an intimate theater space in J.P. Nagar in South Bangalore that showcases a wide variety of plays. Now Jagruti.

Located near ITPL, Jagruti will open early next year.

Half the fun is in watching your food being prepared right in front of you, out in the open. My favorite is the moong dal (split green gram) concoction with tomatoes, onions, coriander leaves and some spices.

Once you get your food (in paper cones or plaintain leaves) you stand around with your friends in a gaggle, and eat – on your feet. The food is cheap, the variety is great and of course, the company is as good as you keep.

The carts hang around till around 10:30 at night. Parking is tight, so get there early (around 6:30). Remember to take lots of small denomination currency notes.

To get there, from Lal Bagh West Gate go towards JC Road and make the second left after the circle in front of Lal Bagh West Gate.

This sounds like a great way to see Bangalore, even if you are not a tourist! I love just riding on the trains and buses in any city – I think the rides give one a great feel for a city. But given the traffic situation in the city and the pollution, I would recommend riding these buses on a weekend.

For more information, call 2558 0660.

If you are in the mood for good, reasonably priced Continental cuisine and are looking for cozy place to enjoy it in, Herbs and Spice is the place to be. From the furniture to the layout to the decorations, everything reads simple and utilitarian (even the menu is written out on a big blackboard spanning one entire wall of the restaurant), but the ambience will surely make you comfortable. When we visited the restaurant, most of the patrons seemed like they frequented the place – they were familiar with the menu and with the owners (as were the owners with them).

The restaurant serves all the usual fare you would expect to find in an Italian restaurant – the pastas, the pizzas, the salads and the soups, but the dishes are made flavorfully. Each one of the five of us was happy with whatever we ordered – the steak, the roasted tomato and red pepper soup, the yummy salad with green apples and walnuts, the spaghetti with the pesto sauce, and penne with marinara sauce. The restaurant also serves quiches which I haven’t found in many other Italian restaurants in Bangalore.

But if you go to Herbs and Spice, and even if you don’t eat anything else, you must eat the desserts and the one that I heartily recommend is the Walnut Meringue. In fact, make a trip to Herbs and Spice just to enjoy the succulent richness that is the meringue because you will need an empty stomach to appreciate it and once you eat the meringue, you will not have the space or the appetite to eat anything else any way.

Address: 221, 7th Cross, 1st Stage, Indiranagar (off of CMH Road).

Phone: 98450 44549

It never occurred to me that Bangalore did not have it’s own T-shirt. Well, I’m not here as a tourist. Perhaps that’s why I did not feel it as a shortcoming. I did not need a T-shirt to remind me of my time in Bangalore.

Well, if you are a tourist, or even if you’re not but would like to wear a T-shirt with Bangalore emblazoned on it, you don’t have to look very far for one.

Sandeep says he stumbled upon the idea after realising that Bangalore lacked a “belongingness” campaign. And he is not into commercial exploitation of the concept, as he is selling the T-Shirts from a single store. The shirt is priced at Rs. 150 and 20 per cent of the sale proceeds goes towards charity to two organisations — Samarthanam Trust for the Disabled and Newlife Children’s Home. “T-shirts are commonly sported by men and women and have a wider reach,” says Sandeep. For details, call 9945687099 or 22997099.

The Hindu.

So go on, what’re you waitin’ for?

Justice Hegde has pledged to clean up the Lokayukta’s office (which itself is accused of corruption) as his first order of business.

According to this report in Deccan Herald,

[the children were] either dumped by their parents or ‘sold’ by them to their employers, who used them for domestic and professional help. They were rescued by various voluntary organisations and produced before the CWC. Made to work for long hours, fed poorly and abused on and off, the faces of the rescued children showed no emotion when they were given the [compenstion in the form of bonds to be enchased in six years].

Using children to work in homes in the city, is, I am sad and disgusted to say, a rampant practice. These children are usually transplanted from villages, brought to the city by their own families and left (more likely “sold” for a few thousand rupees) in a household where they are expected to work from early in the morning until late at night, often doing back breaking work such as washing clothes by hand, mopping floors, etc.

Most of these children are young girls (boys often end up in factories or quarries) who suffer abuse at the hands of their employers, physical as well as emotional. It is very upsetting to see these girls taking care of their employers’ children and often they are not much older than their wards.

What is ironic is that there is no culture of children, even teens, of these employers doing any sort of work, i.e., they do not baby sit or take up summer jobs, or help in the neighborhood, etc. The employers coddle their kids. They are taken care of, someone is at their beck and call – to pick up clothes after them, clean their rooms, make their beds, pack their lunches… But the employers don’t bat an eyelid when hiring children as domestic help or employees for their factories, farms or quarries.

These children should be in school, studying, preparing themselves to get out of the kinds of financial messes their parents have gotten into. What motivates the employers to hire them? That the children are cheap labor? That they have tiny fingers? That they have nowhere to go? I really don’t know.

At least stories like the one in the newspaper give one a glimmer of hope. Various NGOs were responsible for locating the children and bringing them in front of the CWC.

The Makkala Sahaya Vani (Children’s Helpline) can be reached at 1098 (in Bangalore from a landline). Please call if you notice children being worked in homes or in places of work.