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Everybody’s talking about Pokémon Go. So am I. And unlike me, most of them are playing the game too. But from what I know of the game, Pokémon Go has created all the infrastructure necessary to soon become the world’s biggest religion. Look at their strategies. Straight from the manual used by successful religions in the past. Usurping places of worship of other religions, for example. Throughout history we have had pagan temples becoming churches, churches becoming mosques, and so on. Now they are all becoming gyms and poké stops in the game universe, thus luring players to congregate there. And with all their cute creatures, they have a pantheon that will easily appeal to this generation and — more importantly — future generations.
They also seem to have eliminated the bureaucracy of priests, purohit s, imams, and the likes that limit most religions. Everyone who plays also proselytises. And like every successful religion in the past, they are creating martyrs. People are getting arrested for trespassing while playing the game. People are dying in accidents while they are playing the game. There may soon be demands for "safe places" to play the game. Thus the new religion gets land, sanctioned by the state. Big businesses are already sanctioning land for Pokémon anyway.
I have always been irreligious, and will continue to remain so. I am okay though with Pokémon Go taking over as the world’s dominant religion. For one, the violence in this religion is at best cartoonish. And among all religions for now, Pokémon Go seems to at least treat women on an equal footing. But more than anything else, there is one thing I find incredibly attractive about this religion. So much so, that I am now beginning to see all those addicted to the game as “one of us!” Suddenly this thing I do all the time is not freakish anymore.
Walking. Not hikes, where you can feel one with nature, but walking in cities; heavily peopled cities. If I have time on my hand, I always prefer to walk. It does not matter if the route is scenic or not. I walk. It does not matter if it is 6:30 p.m. and the roads are choked. The strange cocktail of light from the setting sun and street lamps, all filtered through the exhaust of peak-hour traffic looks lovely actually. It does not matter if footpaths are obstacle courses. If I am pissed off at something, I walk until I calm down. If I am sad, I walk until I cheer up. If I have had too much for dinner, I walk until my guilt at having eaten more than I should have goes away. On the rare occasion when I am having a phone conversation, I start walking. And suddenly thirty minutes later I am three kilometers away from where I started. And then I walk back, of course. So learning that the entire gameplay of Pokémon Go is centered on people walking thrills me.
Every city I have walked around in, I have fallen in love with. Chennai. San Francisco. Los Angeles. Hong Kong. London. Bombay. Calcutta, even. You also now know why I do not like Gurgaon all that much. This probably is the most accurate explanation why I love Bangalore so much, given I have spent nearly all my life here. And walked. There is no better way to experience otherness than by walking right through this. Even in Bangalore. There are parts of the city that I have no nostalgia for, no familiarity even, simply because I have never been there before. I am not even talking of the new outgrowths of concrete and glass blisters that have erupted on Bangalore’s landscape, especially in the South and the East.
For example, a walking distance away from Vijayanagar (where I stay) is an area called Kempapura Agrahara. Unloved by land sharks for reasons that I have not entirely understood, this part of Bangalore is stuck in a time warp. Kempapura Agrahara is untouched by any sort of urban planning, at least of the sort that BDA (Bangalore Development Authority) has done all over Bangalore. Which means that roads are never in those rectilinear grids (or with diagonals thrown in as in Jayanagar) that GPS systems clearly love but makes no sense for a city like Bangalore given the lay of its land. Those whose inner compasses are not the most accurate are sure to get lost once inside. Abhimanyu had better chances with the Chakravyuha.
Not just the roads, everything about the place feels different. The kind of Kannada they speak, the kind of tiny shops that dot street corners, the BBMP wall art, even the BMTC bus that serves the area (they use a tiny Tempo Traveller as the roads are too narrow for a normal-sized bus). The peepal trees seem older. The people too. And there is no way you can experience this without walking around, and stopping once or twice for a coffee or a dosa . This seems to be happening with Pokémon Go too. A lot of Pokémon Go–related tweets I have been seeing are people, especially those new to a city, expressing joy and surprise at seeing things they have never seen in that city.
Chord Road, west of which is Vijayanagara — a place with quaint atmosphere even without nostalgia coating it with a pleasant air. | K. Murali Kumar
It is not just otherness that walking is most suited to experience. Nostalgia, once classified as a disease, and which can more accurately be described as a narcotic, delivers the biggest hits when walking. Bigger hits than books, movies, or music can deliver. Walking down the inner roads of Vijayanagar is always a heady shot of nostalgia for me. I grew up in various parts of Vijayanagar, which means that I spent a lot of time hiking through the urban ghat section that lies to the west of Chord Road. So every now and then, I go down the roads of my childhood. A lot has not changed. The “Shetty angadi”, the tiny office of our first cable guy from the early ’90s, the stationery store where I bought glossy brown paper to bind notebooks, they are all still around. Of course, a lot more has changed. For one, my perspective. Everything — all these roads, the buildings — has visibly shrunk. I remember them being bigger, now they seem like some cartoon version of themselves. I am sure there is some perfectly logical explanation to this, but since I have not cottoned on yet, it remains a dependable source of wonder.
There are new shops now, new darshini s, and matchbox apartments everywhere. The grounds where I grew up playing cricket, some of them have become residential “layouts” now. The swathe of land between GKW Layout and Nanjarsappa Layout, for example. Today it calls itself Vyalikaval Layout, and is choc-a-bloc with houses. But in the 1990s, it was some sort of pasture land. And of course, we kids used it for playing cricket. We needed a name for the “ground”, and because kids are morbid and there were a few gravestones scattered in those fields, we had christened it “ smashaana ground”. A few months ago, I went criss-cross across every street of Vyalikaval Layout, for that rush of nostalgia. There is no ground, and all the “ smashaana s” have been happily built over. But I did manage to successfully spot two. Mr. Nanjarsappa’s — the same man after whom an adjoining layout was named — and his wife’s. And without that walk that day, I would never have discovered this tiny bit of clout extending into Nanjarsappa’s afterlife. Or that rush of nostalgia that came with discovering a “ smashaana ” in what had become of the “ smashaana ground”. I am sure catching a Pikachu while playing Pokémon Go may give a similar dopamine rush, but I think I prefer this one.
You can enjoy all the devotional music in Carnatic Classical without having to believe in any of the Gods they praise; you can marvel at the imposing architecture of ancient churches without having to cross yourself in reverence; it is the same way the new religion of Pokémon too. You can enjoy walking without having to be a believer, without having to ever play the game. And of course, if you do play the game, you will still enjoy walking too.
