January 15, 2025

Burning the Old, Sketching the New: Sankranti, Cubbon Park, and Curious Connections

A week and a half into GCIL we finally had a free day, on occasion of it being festival day in Bengaluru. Sankranti is a harvest festival marking the sun’s movement from south to north, dedicated to the solar deity, Surya. The night before we went to a lovely celebration of the holiday at the Rotary Club of Bangalore. There, we wrote down all the things we wanted to leave behind in the past year: bad habits, grudges, the memory of how bad my stomach hurt the first week in Bengaluru, and threw them into a fire. The flame symbolizes the burning away of negativity and the warding off of evil spirits.

With all that negativity burned away, I slept in until nearly 11 am. After a leisurely little walk to get coffee and yogurt for breakfast we caught an auto to Cubbon Park. The streets were noticeably empty, bathed in golden midday light, like the city was napping in preparation for the festival. After being dropped off on a corner unfortunately far from the entrance, we swung by and said a quick hello to Gandhi’s statue in his separate park, and eventually stumbled into the right entrance. Cubbon Park is made up of sprawling green lawns, dotted with shapely gazebos, groves of trees, and natural rock formations. Cubbon was alive. Those empty streets had emptied themselves into the park, as if the wrought iron fences were some sort of magical barrier containing all of Bengalurus’s usual energy. For a moment, I felt like I was back in Seattle. Those first few warm days of spring when everyone crawls out of their cramped little dorms and floods the quad, sprawling on blankets, pretending to read. Cubbon is a historic place, established in 1870 under Major General Richard Sankey, then British Chief Engineer of Mysore State. Initially covering an area of 100 acres the park has since expanded to a ginormous 300 acres.

I sat down with my sketchpad while some GCIL people played hacky sack nearby. A small group of kids drifted over, drawn in by the hacky sack, then by me. At first they watched me silently from a distance and then slowly got closer and closer. “Drawing?” one finally asked. “Show?” It endeared me because this interaction has been mirrored a million times back home in Washington, kids shyly curious about what’s going on in my little sketchpad. Kids everywhere, it seems, are tiny diplomats. They don’t need much of a shared language, just enough to ask what you are drawing, how you got from the States to Bengaluru and, most importantly, if it was by helicopter or auto.

They analyzed my sketches with great intensity, pointing out which hacky sack players I’d captured on which page. They told me their names and how they didn’t have school that day. They were small enough that they spoke very little English and I speak even less Kanada, but we still bridged the gap. It reminded me of the slip I burned the night before in the Sankranti fire which had said “being closed off and apathetic to the world.” Turns out, the world doesn’t let you stay apathetic for long. People, tiny, curious, kind people keep showing up to remind you that connection, even through silly little drawings, is always worth it.

By,
Inessa