messy tales from bengaluru, a shutterbug’s nightmarish romance with 14°c and stranger souls
woke up to a city that’s running on coffee and confusion. bengaluru in 14°C feels like someone poured soup over their laptop and forgot to tell you. i just checked and it’s cool out there right now, hope you like that kind of thing. my camera battery died halfway through shooting the airport, so i ended up snapping food wrappers and weirdly patriotic street signs. guess that’s what happens when you’re a freelance photographer and also a part-time existentialist.
so there was this moment where i was staring at a puddle reflecting the monsoon-lit skyline. a kid yelled at me to take a selfie. why? because my face looked like a confused potato. great. then a guy in a salwar kameez started explaining how the bluetooth in his earphones was ‘broken’ but he was using it to stream gangnam style from 2013. i didn’t ask. i just kept shooting.
neighbors here are either aggressively kind or trying to forget you exist. if you get bored, Hyderabad’s just a short drive away. i heard that from a drunk guy who sold me dosa at 3 AM. or was it a hallucination? who knows. the weird thing is, everyone here seems to know someone who lives in Mumbai. it’s like the city’s a giant LinkedIn group. someone told me that the local coffee shop’s Wi-Fi is so slow, the barista once yelled at a guy for taking too long to load memes. i didn’t believe him until i tried it. my phone died. my patience died. we all died.
reviews here are 50% hearsay. I heard that one of the town’s best bakeries gets raided by rats at 2 AM. another person said the metro is haunted by a guy in a hat who plays jingles. I heard that from a woman who claimed to be a historian. honestly, either she’s telling the truth or she’s just mad about her failed burger platters. don’t ask me which.
now let’s talk about the weather. it’s not just cool-it’s aggressively Scottish. i tried to take a photo of a sunset, but the clouds looked like someone spilled ink on a watercolor painting. at least the humidity isn’t trying to steal my soul. 57% is nowhere near enough to make me regret wearing jeans. again. if you’re here for fashion, you might hate your life. vintage clothes pickers near me are judging my thrift_store-pajamas-with-a-missing-sock vibe. silently. judgingly.
i almost forgot to mention the blockquotes. imagine this: "someone whispered that the street artist near the market paints with melted chocolate. i asked. no, really. he said it was for a wedding. i didn’t ask why." or this: "i’ve heard the best way to avoid tour groups is to walk backward. apparently, people here have never seen a zombie apocalypse." classic.
here’s the map. kinda weird, right? bengaluru’s spread out like a giant plateau of chaos. the GPS thinks I’m a tourist, but I’m just a guy with a bag of snacks and a questionable life choice.
so yeah. bengaluru. it’s not a place-it’s an event. and somehow, through all the 14°C drizzle and questionable life choices, I got a few decent photos. maybe. probably not. who cares? this is a blog post, not a portfolio.
p.s. if you’re like me, you’ll spend hours editing photos while wondering if the local dog had something to do with the pizza place’s weird smell. leave a review on TripAdvisor. or don’t. I heard Yelp’s server exploded last week. probably.
tags: [travel, bengaluru, photography, messy, vibe]
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