A sad day for Jayanagar

Being in a place affects you in a way of its own. It becomes part of you, of your life. You depend on it with totality, with surity that as long as you are there, the place remains; with its shops, trade, restaurants and even filth. The place around you, the environment, fills up this unknown place in your heart even without you knowing it.

On Friday night at 11 pm, fire broke out in the Jayanagar Shopping Complex area and it lasted for more than 8 hours. It burned out every shop inside the complex to black rubble. Day traders' brand new sale clothes, stationery, groceries, and other exenpsive items of sale were blackened to death. These were their sole investments. The shop was their life. Their sole path of sustenance. And by Saturday morning, everything was gone. Just like that. The heart goes out to them all.

And as for the shopping complex itself, that void in the heart can be almsot felt. It was always there since I was born. In fact, 32 years now, and suddenly seeing that it was all charred out, brings out that emotion within which cannot be expressed. One sees mortality in human beings but not in places, not in markets, not in buildings, not in inanimate worldly items. They are meant to be there, forever. But then, comes this crashing thought, that Hand of Fate, that indeed, even inanimate worldly things, including buildings, places have mortality written all over them. And it is then when such mortality occurs, that one starts feeling the love, and its subsequent loss, even for landmarks such as the Jayanagar Shopping Complex.

A sad, sad day indeed...