I recently revisited my parents’ copy of a Lonely Planet travel guide to India at home. This is a massive 1000-page tome of everything to do in the entire country, and a time capsule into what they thought was worth visiting 22 years ago.
This is fascinating to me because it’s immutable. In the present age of the internet, information is too cheap to meter. You would never use a print guidebook today because it’s 1. huge 2. expensive 3. already outdated the second it comes out. You’d much rather find places on Instagram instead. Before that though, when this was the best comprehensive source of this kind of information, you’d just have to trust the vision of the editors on their view of each place. Everything you end up seeing is subtly opinionated.
Naturally, I had a look at the Bangalore section. Here’s a few things I took away from it.
The city used to be small (kinda). Most of everything mentioned was centred around MG Road, Shivajinagar, Chickpet, Ulsoor etc. to the point that their one-page map of the city was literally just those areas. Now, the ‘things to do’ are very distributed, and the city centre is far from the only cultural hotspot.
Most of the places mentioned no longer exist. In-person travel offices, places to book your Tourism Department tour, flight, rental car etc. have pretty much entirely vanished from existence. Most of the lower-end hotels (which were largely clustered around Majestic) are also gone. It has a section on cyber cafés which I found amusing. I didn’t even bother checking if they were around any more. Apparently Café Coffee Day started out as a cyber café on Brigade Road, at the fee of 60 rupees per hour of surfing.
Something I paid particular attention to were the restaurants, bars and nightclubs. A quote from the start of the Karnataka chapter:
Its stark contrast with the rest of the state is most evident in the MG Rd area, where fast-food joints, yuppie bars, trendy clubs and glitzy malls are the ever-changing flavours of the day. Things that are taboo elsewhere – men and women holding hands, for one – are increasingly seen here.
Hell yeah. I love me some yuppie bars.
Many of them are, unsurprisingly, closed, though there’s a surprising number of names and locations I recognize. I looked up some of the names online to see what happened to them and ended up digging up some gold:
-
NASA: a trendy space-themed bar. From the book:
NASA is a trippy place decked out like a spaceship. Its laser shows may mess with your buzz.
I found a Bangalore Mirror article lamenting its closure due to financial woes. The Nando’s that was set to replace it in the article doesn’t exist either any more.
-
Purple Haze was a nightclub themed after Jimi Hendrix (who wrote a song called Purple Haze). Here’s a clip from the Unboxing Bengaluru podcast from the CEO of KIA airport on this place.
-
180 Proof was a bar on St Mark’s Road. I found an Economic Times piece on the Bible Society building it was housed in, and its many uses throughout the years - now the Hard Rock Cafe. It’s nice to know that this building I’ve idly noticed dozens of times in the car has a long and fascinating history.