Bhubaneswar Changing Guard

Amidst the startling contrast of old world charm and new age highrises, Subhayu Mishra discovers that life in the city is still laidback...

If places, like people, had zodiacs, Bhubaneswar would be a Gemini. In its old quarters, antique sandstone temples with a finesse of needlework soar over decrepit houses. Lanes squeeze through, the sky is sketched with electric lines, phone lines, clothes lines and streamers. Enormous bulls lounge, turning to traffic islands: temple bells keep diurnal time.

Three kilometres away Baskin Robbins is selling at Rs. 36 a scoop. With 31 flavours, it's not difficult for nirvana-experiencing school kids to know that they will be lighter by over a thousand bucks before completing the whole course. A BMW is trying hard to ease into the traffic from the parking lot of Big Bazaar. The divider flagged with neon signs splits asphalt down the middle.

It isn't confused, this city. It isn't in the throes of dialectics; there aren't even cross-cultural currents flowing over its undulating profile. The nucleus - if etymology means a thing today - started in a mango orchard which one of the greatest Gods of the Hindu pantheon, Narayana, traded with Shiva, his fiery counterpart, for a place in Varanasi. The breeze in the orchard, which was somewhere around the clutch of temples in the old part of the city, cooled Shiva's legendary anger and he decide to lounge here. However apocryphal the story be, the city does indeed receive in the afternoon a life giving breeze that fans its folks out of their uneasy siesta through the long, oppressive summer.

Bhubaneswar oscillates between this boil in April and May to a nippy cold in winter. The annual bout of rains is sometimes laced with strong winds but the lie of the land drains water off and soon, the city looks scrubbed and sparkling: the leaves are verdant and ready to speak in winter flowers. This is your best time, between late October and early February. The festive season though laden with colours, can get a bit boisterous. It winds up with the passing of Durga Puja in October and you can enjoy the respite till Basant Panchami in mid-February starts the din again.

Three spinal roads run roughly from north to south like tramlines giving rise to a grid of lesser roads and lanes that chequer the city. Labyrinthine government buildings and residential houses, mercifully, lie spaced out in quadrangles marked by the framework of roads. There is a rising tide twice a day, as so unfailingly happens with a city of 'nine-to-fivers' of an assortment pedal rickshaws, Vespa scooters, auto rickshaws and elegant sedans on Sachivalaya Marg and Janpath - the arterial roads - in tandem with the diurnal temple bells. But this is just a skimming similarity. The modern clinical look returns the gift of time and obliterates the sense of history that hangs so palpably in old Bhubaneswar's quarters. Indeed no other Indian city is a witness to such profusion of temple architecture. Seven thousand temples were built between the 2,000 years ending in the sixteenth century. Hopefully 500 of these survive.

'Nagara' architecture that marks this frenzy of Oriyan temple building repeats itself to perfection. In a sprawling yard, the Lingaraj temple is a soaring 45-metre structure - the epitome of both religious devotion and mature sculpting. A host of votive shrines, obviously of a later period, cluster around the main temple but the crowd throngs into the sanctum sanctorum of the pre-eminent shrine to bow before Lord Shiva who lends one of his 100 names to the city. If you can move your transfixed eyes from this epicentre of fervour, there is the beautiful 10th century Mukteswar temple nearby: a fabled arch, with elephant cornices, reclining nymphs and twining creepers, marks the entrance.

As the plane descends to land at the renovated 'Biju Patnaik Airport', your eyes pleasantly scan over a swathe of green - the Chandaka reserved forest giving way to the sharp geometry of a planned city. Even with its trappings of power that a state capital inherits, its urban life and its urbane pockets like 'Bhubaneswar Club', the city had never come to terms with the multicultural, multi-linguist outside world until now. A 250-acre technology park where Infosys and Satyam's ESOP-enriched employees exchange footnotes of computer language has been a trigger for spiralling Bhubaneswar. Five-star hotels have mushroomed including the laid-back Mayfair Lagoon, which serves delectable cuisine. The hotel building frenzy, though not in beauty, certainly matches the profusion of the temple building in Bhubaneswar's history. A tapering lane that ran into Xavier Institute of Management has widened with glass-panelled professional institutions on either side. Scrub jungles where jackals howled, only a decade back, are selling for the price of gold. Thankfully, people remain pacific. They are also, a little harshly put, the antithesis of achievers but for a trip it's comforting to know that you won't catch a glinting knife from the corner of your eye much less the aggression which spills at the drop of a hat in bigger cities.

Big Bazaar, where parking can be a nightmare on weekends, also has Cafe Coffee Day within stone's throw. Shanghai Express serves the best Chinese in town outside of Lemon Grass at Mayfair Lagoon. Theme pubs haven't arrived with waitresses in leather boots but it doesn't look far out with the government taking sole responsibility of distributing liquor in the state. If you haven't heard of Oriya cuisine and sweets (which has remained in the Bengali shadow) you are in for an epiphanic experience. To put matters in perspective, there are about twice the number of sweets here as in Bengal - most of these made with cheese, ghee and jaggery. Fish-eaters can forget counting the varieties and preparations. Chilika lagoon, alone, has more than a 100 varieties of edible fish besides prawns and crabs that trap the aroma of the sea. A spread of salt and sea-water fish is on the cuisine but Oriyas lean towards freshwater varieties.

Saris rival the Oriya craving for fish. 'Sambalpuri', 'Cuttacki' and 'Khandwa' saris have brilliant understated designs with exquisite loom-work. The cheaper places to buy are state handloom shops but you can feast on variety by looking around. Applique from Pipli - a town 13 kilometres towards Puri - has blunt designs set off against bright backgrounds. Filigree - from Cuttack, the neighbouring city - has its piece-de-resistance in a chariot though the work extends to a slew of decorative pieces. But this is my own 'old jungle saying' - never leave without the 'Patachitra'. This art embodies mythology in earth colours on palm leaf and started at a nondescript town near Puri, sixty kilometres away. It pays to remember two rhyming names - 'Utkalikaa' for handicraft and 'Boyanikaa' for Saris.

Most of the must-see is on Bhubaneswar's fringes. Dhauligiri, a memorial to emperor Asoka's conversion to Buddhism is on a hillock looking out into the plains of the Daya river, where the bloody battle with Kalinga was fought and won. Khandagiri and Udaygiri, an apiary of caves built between the 1st and 2nd century BC by Kharavela for wandering Jaina monks, is seven kilometres west. The beautiful natural zoo, Nandankanan is 13 kilometres northwest of Bhubaneswar with its famous collection of white tigers and a botanical garden. A day's trip from the capital takes you to the beaches of Jagannath Puri and then to Konark's Sun Temple along a picturesque marine drive.

If you are not too tired for an adrenaline rush, the NICCO Park, though a little rudimentary, is steadily improving with ice-skating rinks. The 'Pathani Samant Planetarium' - named after a genius who could approximate the height of a hill with a stick - can show you stars even on a cloudy day. 'Ekamra Kanan' is a horticultural treasure on 512 acres with lakes, greenery, rose gardens and cactii collections. The much smaller Indira Park is, however, at the centre of the city. It is here that the elderly lounge, the young jog, lovers hug and poets dream. Which brings me to the book fair I had been to. In the dying cold of a late February, I browsed through a thousand pages, walked into three hundred and twenty seven stalls syncopated by tea-sipping ceremonies with friends and bookworms.

In a sense Bhubaneswar hasn't grown. You can actually peel off, like onion skins, its glitzy hotels, eating joints, its budding malls, low-hipped jeans and cell phones, the software sheen and lip-ware gloss to find a city relaxing on the highlands.