juice @namixavier - Twitter Profile

9 days ago

I was born in Bangalore in the late 1970s at Gunasheela Nursing Home in Basavanagudi. It was in the home of a Telugu Reddy family. My father was a Sindhi from Bombay, and he met my mother watching the film Sholay in Bangalore’s Kapali theatre. They fell in love, eloped to Bombay, and my mother and grandfather only reconciled when I was born and my mother brought me back home. Bangalore was always more home than Bombay— where I mostly grew up. My mother went to Baldwin Girls, as did my grandmother. My uncles and cousins went to Baldwin Boys. I kept coming back to Bangalore through my childhood, until boarding school took over. In keeping with tradition, I too went to Baldwins! Some of my happiest memories are of escaping the boarding-school walls and heading to Rex Cinema on Brigade road. Once I pretended to be an adult to watch the newly released Pretty Woman. I was caught, of course, and got into trouble with my warden. Then there were the enormous trees. As children, we chased squirrels beneath them. One still stands in my cousins house in Jayanagar. It is more than 150 years old. I touched it the other day and remembered the laughter of all those cousins running around it. Bangalore is also the food. Nagarjuna meals, Vidyarthi Bhavan/MTR dosas, varieties of biryanis. Thanks to the weather, everything digests better here. Also, it is a city you can walk in, the thermostatic cool weather and the beautiful flowering trees ensure that! I used to put on a jacket and stroll down MG road feeling impossibly cool. I did it as a teenager. I see other teens do the same today. It is holds memories of the old cantonment, of my late grandparents in Shantinagar, our Anglo-Indian neighbours— the Morris’s, cricketer Syed Kirmani living 4 houses down, and the British graveyards nearby, where, as children, we would go armed with notebooks and try to find the oldest graves. It is here where I find inspiration. In ‘95, at a pavement bookstore outside Cauvery, I found the book The Power Of Your Subconscious Mind. I read it & began to believe I could manifest anything. I then began my career in film. Within 4 years I won the Filmfare Award for editing Satya. I returned to Bangalore after losing my father almost 4 years ago. I had lost the desire to write and had what many would call writers block. But Bangalore brought me back to life. I managed to crack the story of an original series that will premier on a leading platform this year. Unlike other big metros that I know, Bangalore is a city that gives back much more than it takes out of you. This city became Bengaluru in 2014. But in my heart, it will always be the Bangalore I’ve known for nearly 50 years. 🌸