Four stops before the checkout

Bengaluru, India

Stop one

Lalbagh Botanical Garden

Head Lynx 18g Tennis String Reel: [arm out, hold it there] BREATHE. In. And out. You are standing in a garden begun by Hyder Ali around 1760 and finished by his son Tipu Sultan, and I want you to FEEL the ambition of a man who sent people abroad purely to bring back plants — an eighteenth-century ruler running an international botanical operation so that a leaf he had never seen could live here, in south Bengaluru, in his soil. [beat] The Glass House is modelled on London's Crystal Palace. Lovely. Adequate. But turn. TURN. That huge bare granite outcrop in the middle is three thousand million years old, one of the oldest exposed rocks on this planet, wearing a watchtower on its head like a hat. Three billion years, and we are given ninety minutes. Somebody at the back is unmoved. I can see you.

Stop two

Bangalore Palace

Head Lynx 18g Tennis String Reel: [hand to the heart] Oh, this is a PERFORMANCE. Built in the 1870s — Tudor revival, and it commits absolutely: fortified towers, battlements, Gothic windows, the entire English medieval costume, reportedly inspired by Windsor Castle, and staged here in wooded grounds in the middle of a warm and generous city. Somebody looked at a cold damp northern fortress and thought: yes. That. But with the weather rewritten. [dropping the voice] Inside, dark wood, hunting trophies, Victoriana laid on thick. And it WORKS, that is what undoes me. It is a building playing a part it was never born to, with total conviction, in front of an audience that knows exactly what it is watching. There is no higher craft. I am not crying. The turrets are.

Stop three

Vidhana Soudha

Head Lynx 18g Tennis String Reel: [from the diaphragm, and hold] BEHOLD. Massive granite — local granite — a state legislature finished in 1956, tall domed centre, floodlit at night, standing opposite the High Court like two actors refusing to break eye contact. One of the biggest legislature buildings in the country. And carved above the entrance, permanently, in stone: Government Work is God's Work. [long pause] Read it again. Every civil servant in that building has walked in underneath that line on a Monday morning, in the rain, holding a bag. Somebody APPROVED that. Signed it off. Went home. Slept. I have staged whole tragedies with less irony in the third act than that entrance has before nine o'clock. FEEL it. Thank you.

Stop four

Tipu Sultan's Summer Palace

Head Lynx 18g Tennis String Reel: [quietly now — closer, all of you] Two storeys of teak. All of it: pillars, arches, balconies, every part timber, finished in 1791, with painted floral decoration across the walls, here in Chamarajpet. And Tipu Sultan named it the Abode of Happiness. [beat] Say that aloud. Commit to it fully. That is a man setting a standard for a building and daring it to disappoint him — and the building has stood for over two hundred years and has not disappointed him yet. Wood. Two centuries. It has outlived empires and my grip lasted nine weeks. [stage whisper] Touch nothing. Look at everything. And when you leave, leave slowly. An exit is a performance too.

The Bengaluru, India track

Head Lynx 18g Tennis String Reel

Written for this world alone.

Thin base. Always thin. Head Lynx 18g is the thin base of the range: a co-polyester monofilament at 1.20 mm, the finest gauge of Head's balanced poly, on a 200-metre reel — 660 feet, roughly sixteen racquets. Thinner string cuts into the ball more sharply and snaps back faster, which means more spin and far more feel.

Bengaluru, then. Start at the bottom of it. We begin on the Lalbagh Rock: peninsular gneiss, roughly three thousand million years old, one of the oldest surfaces you will ever stand on, and on top of it one of the four watchtowers Kempe Gowda's son raised in 1597 to mark how far the city would ever be allowed to grow. It grew past them.

Around the rock lies Lalbagh itself, laid out from about 1760 under Hyder Ali and finished by Tipu Sultan, with the cast-iron Glass House of 1889 in the middle of it, modelled on the Crystal Palace.

Then Bangalore Palace, built in the 1870s: a Tudor-revival castle with battlements, turrets and Gothic windows, reportedly inspired by Windsor, dropped into a city where it is twenty-eight degrees and pleasant. Dark wood inside, hunting trophies, a great deal of Victoriana. It is a palace doing an impression, and it commits to the bit entirely, which I respect professionally.

Then Tipu Sultan's Summer Palace, two storeys of teak on stone, finished in 1791: carved pillars, painted ceilings, arch after arch and almost no wall anywhere — a building designed to be as thin as it could get away with, still standing after two hundred years.

And we finish at Vidhana Soudha, completed in 1956, four storeys of Bangalore granite in the Neo-Dravidian style with a dome on top and Government's Work is God's Work carved over the entrance, permanently, above the head of every civil servant arriving on a Monday morning.

You will cut off this reel everywhere from a court in Cubbon Park to an indoor hall on a wet Bengaluru evening, and by the way, it is also perfect for a city that plays early, because the good courts here go at six in the morning and are gone by half past.

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Head Lynx 18g Tennis String Reel

Head Lynx 18g Tennis String Reel