The Manipal Story.

 

I was going to work in Udupi is what my boss told me and I was to shift from Mangalore the next day, the posting came as a surprise to me and my mind was flooded with thoughts.

I had heard about Udupi Restaurant and I always wondered what it was all about and then discovered that Udupi town was famous for its thirteenth century Krishna Temple where different kinds of food was offered to the Lord and served to all the people and it was something very tasty and different. There was a huge “langar” type of service conducted every day in the Krishna Temple where various types of food was prepared in the community kitchen of the temple. The variety of food prepared may be due to the significant migration of Brahmins to this region and the famous Udupi Restaurants were subsequently run by cooks and priests trained at Krishna Temple in Udupi. Therefore this rustic town became the “vegetarian hub of Karnataka”. However non-vegetarian dishes like Kori Roti and Chicken Sukka ,Neer Dosa and Fish Curry and Fish Fry are equally famous in Udupi since it’s a coastal town with a huge fishing community.

I mentally made up my mind that I would make the best use of this posting by trying out different types of food.

All this thinking about Udupi Restaurants made my mind wander towards the funny story of Dosa’s origin, legend has it that a Brahmin cook from Udupi, to escape his religious expectations, wanted to consume alcohol to feel free and wild and in his endeavor to feel what he imagined to be “high”, he set out to ferment his own alcohol using rice, as alcohol was unavailable to Brahmins. When it did not work like he expected, he did the extraordinary. He poured the batter into a pan and fried it to make the delicious dosa as we know it today. Now, the reason it’s called dosa is a funnier tale. The word “dosha” in Kannada refers to things like vice, blemish and offence – which is all that this Brahmin cook performed as he tried to consume alcohol. 

I was told to drive down to KFC Manipal the next day and while driving through the town it looked like a funny isolated and rustic town which was having a small chaotic bus stand with buses raring to go to different places in Karnataka. I saw a big medical store named Radha Medicals and thought the people of this small town must be falling sick very often or a lot of people from nearby areas must be coming to Udupi to buy medicines and therefore there was a big medical store. The cab then passed through a lot of hut like structures which had the famous Mangalore Tile roof. Very soon I passed an old fashioned college which looked more than a century old and got to know that it was named Mahatma Gandhi Memorial College and I soon envisioned idealistic youths with Gandhian values walking around the college clad in Khadi Kurtas and using the spinning wheel to make their own thread and clothes in memory of our great leader Mahatma Gandhi.

We soon crossed the railway line and my thoughts turned towards the small wayside Udupi Railway Station which I had passed while going to Mangalore and the cab started climbing up and the place started reminding me of a hill station. My thoughts were disrupted when I saw a beautiful entrance to Blue tiled huts with a quaint name of “Bacchus Inn” and it looked like a cool pub which had been converted from someone’s house and I made a mental note to visit the Pub later. The cab climbed higher and I could see KFC Building and I knew I had reached my destination as my apartment was named Green View Apartment very aptly due to the beautiful forested valley of green trees located below the building.

After a few days Holi was celebrated in Bacchus Inn and there was a huge crowd and lot of loud music and dancing and Manipal made me feel good with its young, vibrant and energetic crowd as there were a lot of students.

The vibrancy gave way to gloom as suddenly a deadly Pandemic of Covid erupted and a lockdown was declared and I continued travelling to my office under special permission and that was the time both Udupi and Manipal looked like ghost towns as there was hardly any vehicle on the road except Ambulances and Cops ensuring that everyone followed the lockdown protocol.

The good thing about the lockdown was that there was a lot of silence as there were hardly any vehicles on the road and I could see a lot of birds and hear their different songs which I started identifying from the Amazon Music App with the help of Alexa and became an avid “Bird Watcher’’ due to circumstances.

The lockdown ended after a few months and to regain my health I joined the Gym next door which was named Falcon Fitness as I was bored of doing Yoga on my own in the balcony looking at the greenery all around. I happened to meet the owner who looked like a gym enthusiast who had built up a strong body and he reminded me of my cousin who was obsessed with body building since his college days. It was fortunate for me to discover that there was a nice Gym next to the apartment where I lived and commuting would be definitely easy and attendance would be regular and thus I paid for a monthly membership and joined. The first week was a sheer challenge and I thought of discontinuing the Gym membership every day but my ego told me to take up the challenge and even though I was scared as I had recently recovered from Corona, I made it a point to attend the Gym from Monday to Friday. My body took almost three months to adjust to the Gym routine as I had to wake up early to attend the morning session, however my health improved along with my focus and concentration. There was always the peer pressure of doing the complete set of exercises and I started enjoying the transformation process.

There was a lot of body pain and wanting to get myself properly massaged I enrolled for a ten day course in Yoga hospital in SDM Parkala which was located just outside Manipal. The program again turned out to be very depressing as my only source of joy which was good tasty food was replaced with a fruit diet. We woke up early every day and did fifty sun salutations and a lot of Yoga, mud bath, steam bath and different types of body massage. After four days of staying in the hospital I checked myself in the weighing scale and discovered that I had lost four kilograms of weight and I was feeling much lighter and younger and the depression disappeared and was replaced by a constant inner smile as I felt really happy after a long time as I was not tired or in pain and felt energized. The transformation was noticed by everyone around and I started enjoying my new healthy lifestyle. I felt really Grateful that Udupi had such wonderful facilities for improving my health.

Now things were going great when suddenly I started reading about Bioluminescence at Udupi Beach and Suraj my friend in the Gym organized a night out for us to camp in the night at Mantra Surf Club to see the Bioluminescence. It was my most memorable outing as I saw something really wonderful and got to sleep in a tent right next to the sea and that too in the sand. The night time scenic beauty was caused due to bioluminescence phytoplankton’s which emit blue light, making the water look like a sea of stars, the whole scene reminded me of the Avatar movie and I was really thrilled. I told the kids who were camping with me a lot of stories and we had a lot of fun and that was my first exposure to Surfing which I wanted to take up soon. In the morning I saw some actress wearing a wetsuit learning to Surf and a movie was being shot over there – it was interesting and I felt very happy about the whole camping experience. 

The next outing on Sunday was to Hasta Shilpa Heritage Village Museum located near Manipal Lake near my house. The Heritage Village is really very beautiful and fortunately everything about restoration and architecture was explained to us by the guide who had personally worked with the founder in creating this unique museum of different types of houses. The traditional houses had a lot of good features and made me appreciate ancient architecture. The Mangalorean Christian House with huge planters chair in the verandah reminded me of the Tea Plantation Bungalows of Assam in which I used to stay in the beginning of my career. There were some Bhuta or Ghost statues and the guide explained how the bad spirits were grounded and it is really interesting as I was to come across this concept again in the movie “Kantara” about the local culture of Udupi.

Soon it was time to practice for the Manipal Marathon and all the Gym members started practicing in the morning in Manipal Lake. It was a very beautiful experience and I got to be a hero as a few girls ran with me as they wanted me to protect them from the stray dogs. I saw a lot of birds like egrets, herons and cormorants. I personally liked the early morning runs and got to know that the lake was formed due to the clay being dug up from that location to make the famous Mangalore Tiles which was used for making the beautiful tiled roof of the huts and houses everywhere. The name Manipal came from this lake which meant Mud Lake or munn – palla in Tulu language.

The most spoken language in Udupi is interestingly Tulu, Kannada and Konkani followed by Dakhini Urdu and Beary spoken by the Muslims in the region. Udupi had Tulu and Kannada which were Dravidian Language, Konkani was an Indo-Aryan Language and Dakhini Urdu had Persian influence and Beary was said to be derived from “Byara” meaning trade and associated with sailor as Beary community had trade relations with Arab businessmen travelling to coastline of South India. From an Anthropologists point of view Udupi would seem something like a melting pot where people from different parts got stirred together to form a unique multicultural community formed through immigration and colonization.

I started imagining the Arab Traders coming and settling down here and intermingling with the fishing community and spice traders and then some Urdu speaking people migrating from the Deccan region for job opportunities and after that Konkani speaking people migrating to escape persecution and religious conversion by Portuguese who had conquered Goa and the Tulu and Kannada speaking people drawn to the Krishna Temple and its associated economy. A whole lot of scenarios played in my mind about how Udupi would have evolved with the natives assimilating all the external influences.

It seems there was a lot of cross pollination of ideas going on in Manipal as there were people from all over the country and few from outside the country studying in Manipal. That’s why there were a lot of pubs and good places to eat in Udupi, my favorite place was Pai Tiffin, MTR, Woodlands and the Egg Factory. Charcoal BBQ had very good Peshawari chicken and fish at Maachli was good. However having joined the Gym and focusing on my diet led me to avoid eating outside except at weekly outing with my new friends from the Gym.

Soon it was time to go for a trek and I got myself a whole lot of trekking stuff from the Decathlon store in Mangalore and made the purchases after eating in Pabbas Restaurant on the ground floor of Bharath Mall as one tends to make unnecessary purchases on an empty stomach. The Restaurant opened up a bit late and there was a huge crowd waiting to get in as Pabbas Ice-cream is very famous in Mangalore. The trek was for Brighu Lake in Himachal Pradesh and I saw people Paragliding and it occurred to me that one can climb up a mountain and instead of spending eight hours climbing down, one can easily come down swiftly in a Paraglider. I soon learned that this concept of hike and fly was very popular in Europe. I made up my mind to learn Paragliding and checked for training schools in India. The mountaineering institutes taught paragliding but the cut off age was forty and I was well above fifty years. Luckily I discovered that Paragliding was taught in Kamshet a place near Pune in Maharashtra and I enrolled myself for a ten day course. The training was excellent and I got the thrill of my life when I jumped down solo from a high mountain and experienced flying like a bird with the air turbulence lifting me up and down.

After coming back from Paragliding we went again for a trek to Kodachadri which was near Udupi and the trek turned out to be awesome as I saw a lot of birds and it was a biodiversity hotspot and a natural heritage site. The most exciting aspect of the trip was the off road jeep drive to the top of the peak. The jeep drivers on this route are some of the best drivers in the world according to me as I had never experienced such a thrilling drive where I felt the jeep would topple over at every sharp turn.

Now talking about outings really makes me want to mention the long cycle rides we had till Hoode beach and Kemmannu Hanging Bridge where we went for Kayaking and then cycled back. It was a very tough task of cycling for almost thirty two kilometers both ways and also doing all the rowing – but all this really made me fit and I really enjoyed the company of all my new friends from the Gym. 

 

On one of the outing to Hoode beach for a run organized by the Gym I discovered Shaka Surf Club and the beach in front of the club was beautiful. We all ran towards the end of the beach where two rivers meet the sea and it was known as Delta Point. The views were awesome and made me fall in love with the place and I decided to visit the place later.

So what happened was that I went and enrolled for a surfing lesson and the boys there were really good and taught me how to surf and it was an awesome experience. All the activities had made me very confident as I had an experience of Paragliding also and learning how to surf made me want to learn Kite surfing but the only hurdle was the monsoon and I had to wait for the monsoon to be over for indulging in any outdoor activity.

I wanted to try out mangrove kayaking and this was wonderfully organized by Kadal Surf School and they took us into the mangroves where we saw a lot of huge birds like Ibis, Spoonbill and many other birds which I could not identify. The mangrove kayaking led me to study the impact of mangroves and impact of high tides and low tides and how the changing water levels played a major role in the ecosystem of the mangroves and I became an avid birdwatcher.

There was an urgent need for a pair of binoculars and also I wanted to take the photographs so that I could share it on Instagram with my friends. All this sports activities like surfing, paragliding, kayaking and birdwatching fueled my desire for a lot of gadgets like GoPro, DSLR Camera and an iphone with toy flying Drone but like all children I had to curb my desires and manage with my existing mobile and a binocular at the most.

In conclusion I can say confidently that Manipal has a lot of things to be explored and the life is really cool here as it has a strange mix of being a small town stuck back in time but at the same time has a lot of good amenities like hospitals and ayurvedic health centers and a lot of water sports like surfing, kayaking, Standup Paddling and the different beaches are really nice. Manipal has almost 220 different types of birds with the maximum sighting which can be done at “End Point”.

Udupi was an important economic hub and The Corporation Bank was founded in 1906 in Udupi by Haji Abdulla Haji guided by the principles of Swadeshi Movement of Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Corporation Bank Heritage Museum has a lot of old coins and currency notes. Haji Abdullah Haji was a highly secular person and contributed a lot to the development of Udupi. In 1928 Syndicate Bank was founded in Manipal by T.M.A.Pai most well-known for building the university town of Manipal. He was a real entrepreneur and innovative man and had an interesting Pigmy Deposit Scheme for Banking. He got a Padma Shri and is recognized as the person who established the most number of educational institutions in his life time and the most famous is Kasturba Medical College established in 1953 and Manipal Institute of Technology established in 1957.

There is something here which everyone can learn about preservation and development without disturbing the ecological balance. Udupi should always be remembered for all the Udupi restaurants around the country and should remain a hidden gem and can do easily without overcrowding due to tourism.