Cubbon Park: The fulcrum of Bengaluru’s life

When Roopa Pai was commissioned by her editor to write a hyperlocal book about some neighbourhood in Bengaluru, she wasn’t sure which one to choose. After a lot of thinking, it came to her: Cubbon Park, a “place that has held me and my memories from the time I was a kid, all through my growing up years and even now,” said Roopa at a recent lecture about her book, Cubbon Park: The Green Heart of Bengaluru, at the Indian Institute of Science.. “It was my Midnight’s Children moment,” she said. Like Saleem Sinai, the protagonist of Salman Rushdie’s award-winning novel whose life is inextricably linked to the events unfurling in a newly independent India, Roopa realised that Cubbon Park as not just the fulcrum of her life. In that freewheeling talk at IISc, peppered with diverse facts, startling revelations and vibrant stories, Roopa brought alive the past, leapfrogging from how Bengaluru became the State’s capital to the vicarage at the Isle of Man where Mark Cubbon was born in 1775, Tipu Sultan’s fantastic Mysore rockets and how the Vidhana Soudha came into being, among many other things. I was born in the St. Martha’s Hospital along the edge of the park, was taken there as a child for painting competitions and movie screenings and popcorn and cotton candy and rides on the Putani Express, did my engineering at UVCE, again on the edge of the park, spent many fun afternoons at the Century Club inside the park, where my parents were members, took my own children there when we returned to Bangalore after a dozen years away, and now that the children are grown and gone, take my dog there twice a week.