Christmas is surprisingly important here. I had no idea. I figured this country had enough religious tension between the Hindus and Muslims, but I’ve found there really isn’t much tension at all in Bangalore. The attitude seems to be that they’ll celebrate any holiday as long as it’s cool. Plus, apparently there are tons of Catholics in the south. Again, who knew?
The general stores are all stocking Christmas stuff, and there are plenty of fake trees and Christmas decorative things available streetside. The children who sell cheap toys to stopped cars at stop-lights are now selling Santa hats instead. At SPAR a few weeks ago, I wound up in line behind a woman buying about $200 of stuff. I only had a couple of things, and she apologized to me: "Sorry, Christmas gifts!" The Taco Bell plays Christmas music, too (digression: Tulsi loves Taco Bell, and I won’t turn down a chance to go, so now the pop refill guy knows who I am. I’ve tried to explain why being a known regular at Taco Bell is NOT a good thing, but it’s falling on deaf ears).
Anyway, back to this Pub Crawl. We met at a bar at the top floor of a mall, but since we showed up a little late, we quickly left this bar full of Santas for our first stop on the steps of the mall. We got some good dhol-led caroling in before a security guard showed up. He was pretty polite about asking us to beat it, but I still got to yell "GRINCH! GRINCH! I CALL GRINCH!" He got the joke, too, but we’d had our fill here anyway. There wasn’t much traffic at the mall.
From there we proceeded on a route of a few blocks, handing out candy to kids and stopping at several points to keep singing. They passed out lyric sheets, but still nobody could sing the verses to anything. You can only sing the chorus to Jingle Bells so many times before that gets really old. Plus we didn’t do the prologue to Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, but the expats made up for that by knowing the lines that kids add on (...you would even say it glows, LIKE A LIGHTBULB!). Along the way a few Indian girls stopped me to get a photo. I like to think they singled me out. Santa can be White, Black, Hispanic, Minnesotan, whatever. But Indian? That’s a stretch.
Along the way a family of beggars joined us. This was, I think, the mom with baby, two young sons, a young daughter, and one daughter who was probably 13-14. They came for the candy, but stayed for the fun. It was obvious that this was the coolest thing that had happened to these kids in months. The dhol beat made everything a little bit Indian, and they danced to that. At one point a few people just started singing a popular Indian song with the dhol, and the kids went CRAZY at that. At one point, we passed a bakery, and the owner came out and gave us two small cakes. We kept one to eat at the bar, but the other went to the beggars.
When we all gathered at the bar, I met the guy who’d organized this. Turned out he’d lived in Chicago for much of his life, and missed that Chicago spirit of "living for the moment." He particularly missed spending Sundays watching football, not caring about anything else, and drinking all day on St. Patrick’s Day. Here, he said, people get too hung up on all of the other things they have to do and never just enjoy what’s right in front of them. Nobody could concentrate on one thing long enough to watch more than one football game, let alone three on a Sunday. The goal here was just do something awesome and unforgettable, and hopefully to add some in-the-moment cheer to the people we met. I’d say mission accomplished.
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