Wednesday, April 24, 2013

U is for Up Above the World

This post is part of the A to Z Challenge.

My new office is on the thirteenth floor of one of the tallest buildings in central Bangalore. I only discovered yesterday that it WAS the thirteenth floor, because the builders seem to have bowed to Western superstition and named it one storey higher. (I remembered Stephen King's 1408 when I saw the lift buttons. PLEASE read that story if you haven't already.)

Thirteenth floor or not, the office is brilliant because of the view. It's only when you climb up that high that you realize that Bangalore isn't that tall a city after all. There are so few skyscrapers, and the few tall structures are all apartment buildings rather than office blocks. 

Our building is right next to some Army land, which means that we get to look down upon a scenery of green trees, empty roads and brown playgrounds - very un-Bangalore-like. I sometimes stand at the windows in the afternoons and look down upon the toy vehicles moving slowly along the roads, and the Lilleputian kids playing cricket in the playgrounds. Half a dozen eagles are always visible in the sky  - majestic creatures gliding on the wind. 

My colleagues tell me that Nandi Hills is visible on clear days. Which seems a bit of a stretch to me, to be honest. But I haven't been able to test this claim yet, because there hasn't been a clear day since I joined. 

Gray skies have greeted me pretty much every day, and there was even a mild thunder storm a couple of days ago - we had samosas to celebrate the awesome weather. The clouds started piling up in the early afternoon, and the sky went black. Sporadic lightning soon started. The wind whoom-ed so loudly I initially thought some machine had malfunctioned somewhere. Somebody opened the window, and a warm breeze blew in, carrying a few rain drops and that wonderful smell of rain.

I've tried to figure out the names of the few tall buildings I can see from the window. But the distances are very deceptive up above. I got a big shock when I realized one day that the nearby buildings I could see from the lift lobby were the ones on MG Road. MG Road seems so far away when you're at ground level, because of the signals and the traffic. But up above, it almost seems like I could hop there from the roof.

The guy I replaced in the team has asked me to make sure that I look up from my screen and take in the view every once in a while. In my case, self-confessed tree-lover and rain-lover that I am, I'm having to make myself NOT look at the view all the time. I just hope that I don't get used to the view over time, so that its beauty fails to move me.
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