Reminiscences of an old Bangalore boy Premium

Deepak Sridhar's book One & Half offers an inside view of Bengaluru, capturing its essence through anecdotes and nostalgia.

In the introduction to his latest book, One & Half, Deepak Sridhar calls the city his muse, recounting things that he considers unique to it: the crisp breeze you feel on your shirt at 8 p.m., the occasional shade from a tree twice your age or the warmth from the ghee melting on your dosa. As someone who has spent nearly five-sixth of his life in Bengaluru, the now Canada-based Deepak, who, in his bio, describes himself as a corporate lawyer, Biryani delivery boy and full-time “Bangalore bar uncle” considers himself a true-blue Bengaluru boy.

The book, in many ways, is a testament to this fact, offering a very inside view of the city through the decades. From the average Bengalurean’s complicated relationship with the Queen‘s English and autorickshaws to the city’s vibrant music, start-up and tech culture, the ubiquity of wristband-wearing uncles striding through it on their morning walk in the 90s, the aggressive school spirits of students from institutions like Josephs, Cottons and Sophias and the immortal legacy of the actor Rajkumar and his progeny, One & Half is filled with small, minute details and anecdotes that have shaped and segued into the fabric of Bengaluru.

Part memoir, part commentary with plenty of inside jokes thrown in, the book is, as Deepak writes, “my small tribute to this ever-changing city that millions and millions of people, including me, call home. He also admits in his acknowledgements that while both the city and he have changed a lot over the years, no other place has been as generous with the benne on his dosa or little moments of joy. “Please accept maadi.” 

For Deepak, who grew up in a house filled with books and always read a lot, “the idea of writing something was baking in my head,” he says. But it took a while for him actually to get to it. COVID and the ensuing limbo it induced worldwide appear to have been the catalyst that triggered his writing journey.

Cut to March 2020. Deepak and his wife, who were living in Delhi back then, had planned on moving out of India and were all set to leave by May that year. “I quit my job because we thought we were leaving the country,” recalls Deepak, who was supposed to spend a couple of months back home before leaving for Canada, little knowing that those two months would stretch into two years.

“Almost three months after we moved, we figured nothing was happening,” he says. Around this time, his wife signed him up for a writing course with Mumbai-based writer and podcaster Amit Varma, host of the popular weekly podcast The Seen and the Unseen. “When I did the course in 2020, the first thing he (Varma) said was that if I wanted to write, I should try and write as much as possible,” recalls Deepak.

To sustain this writing habit, he began a weekly newsletter capturing the first year of the pandemic, the compilation of which would become his first book, Home for the Hallidays, which came out in 2022. Talking about the structure of this first book, which he decided to self-publish, he says it is divided into 52 chapters, one representing every week of that rather memorable time period, taking its reader on “abumpy Bangalore auto ride through the Zeitgeist of 2020: Encounter Killings that have better plots than Race 2, Donald Trump and the horses of Philadelphia, IPL matches with no crowds, breaking a fixed deposit to buy petrol and much more.”