Private Bangalores and Dreampop

S.K. Meenakshi

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When I think about Bangalore even as a native person to this place, my mind is flooded with overstimulating images of traffic, air pollution, hive-like apartments, gated communities, puddles, potholes, congested roads of Avenue Road, the overcrowded BMTC buses that work on their own unpredictable schedule, and the long, drowsy commutes that I take to reach my university almost every day. Even though the discourse surrounding Bangalore is valid, I can't help but think of this alternative version of Bangalore that I've created, personalised, soundtracked, and rendered as a sensory musical experience. A Bangalore that exists solely in my mind, soundscaped into a dreamy haze for a few hours a day. 

It takes me two hours to reach my university and travel back home every day. I travel via the airport bus (KIA-14), belonging to the few privileged people in this city who can access this expensive, air-conditioned transport that is also structurally exclusive. Almost everyone I've come across in these buses is high-class, earphone, laptop users who are lost in their own private bubbles. Frankly, I am one of them too. But my privacy, my disinterest in engaging with other fellow commuters stems from my desperation to imaginatively reframe, remodel and distort the images flashing by the bus windows into my own poetic narratives. Alas, the faults of a poet-writer! 

For me, this slice of a world through the bus window is no less precious and important to my understanding of the larger city, or even the larger country. So I've soundscaped it. Turned this collage of images into poetry, essays, short stories, and into a musical dreamscape. Yes, the city is inaccessible. Yes, the city harbours all kinds of divisions, contradictions, and a palimpsest of histories and memories. But no, I'm not here to talk about Bangalore. It's been thoroughly written about. 

I'm talking about the bangalore that I've created in my imagination to escape the larger Bangalore for a few hours a day. The Bangalore I've created to soothe me, to lull me to sleep, to enhance and dim and blur away from The Bangalore. My Bangalore is my own private delusion to escape into. No doubt hundreds of Bangaloreans and migrants invent their own forms of Bangalore to deal with the larger Bangalore every day. However, my private, dream-distorted Bangalore is something I navigate mostly through music. 

My private commuting in Bangalore is one that comes alive with Dreampop. I look out of the bus window, let my thoughts scatter, fight, spill and eventually quiet down as I listen to Beach House, Slowdive, Mazzy Star, and Cocteau Twins. Suddenly, the overcrowded city assumes the shimmer of sunshine, pastel tones, neon edges, and a slowness, a drowsiness as though it's endlessly a Sunday afternoon with all the families dozing inside their houses. A sensory bangalore that soothes you, rather than clanging against your senses. Every minuscule detail becomes enlarged, every worker in ragged clothes becomes unmissable, every glass-cased showroom becomes an artificial looming, and every tree, whether pink or green, becomes Instagram worthy. 

I nap for a few minutes, I wake up, I look out some more and learn more about this city than any newspaper could teach me. I feel as though I've transcended Bangalore as well as rooted myself back into the city more deeply. The whole world disappears, turns into vapour, except for the world framed in the bus window. One grid at a time, I explore this lesser-known, mundane, uninteresting Bangalore one song at a time. It's kind of ironic that I needed Western Dream Pop artists from another side of the world to encourage me to pay attention to my own world. That is the only way I can confront my ever-expanding world is to create a fictive, musical one framed by a bus window. 

I often wonder…will my imagination and curiosity hold up if the music stopped playing? Will I still look at Bangalore with its loud drills, its cacophony of cars, vehicles and horns, and its endless multilingual chatter? That's a kind of music too. The soundscape of Bangalore when you travel on foot without air-conditioned buses. 

But there's a charming quality about a dreamed-up Bangalore too, no less important than The Bangalore. Afterall, cities are filled with dreamers. Every dreamer adds to the palimpsest of Bangalore. Every private Bangalore reveals a nook, a corner, an alleyway, a lane filled with running kids and kites that The Bangalore often forgets about. Every dreamed-up Bangalore has already died, is dying or poised for the gentrification of our imaginations too. So dream a hundred Bangalores into being. 

I dream of mine with music.