From The Gallery

Alex J. Tuss, S.M.

A Marianist brother in the Roman Catholic Society of Mary, Alex received his Ph.D in English from Fordham University in 1991 and then began teaching at the University of Dayton.  Alex first traveled to Bangalore, India to teach an English class to young Indian Marianists, which led to his coming to know the work of REDS and the Play Schools of Lakshumanarav Nagar and to his interfaith efforts with Joshua to assist and support the Play Schools and REDS.

The Road to Bangalore

To write or to talk about any road to Bangalore is never a simple matter. There is nothing simple or straightforward about any of them.  Be it the seemingly straightforward four lanes of highway between the cities of Hosur and Bangalore.  Be it the real-time, real-life thrill ride/video game that is the death-defying two lanes of perpetual peril between Bangalore and the historic former royal capital of Mysore. 

Be it the endless effort required at moments to reach someone via the Bangalorean badge of telephonic honor---the cell phone.  The cell phone that frustrates you on that road when the recorded voice repeatedly informs you in its gently modulated, computer- generated tones: “This route is busy.  Please try again later.”

Or be it the electronic roads of the internet on which—inexplicably---the Cyber-Krishna warns you that your page has expired, or that your email, poised on the brink of delivery down the internet highway to its intended recipient, falters and dies at the hands of some computerized incarnation of Kali.

All of the roads to, through, out of, and around Bangalore possess an inherent capacity to baffle, bewilder, and bedevil anyone and everyone who ventures onto them to reach some place, some one in Bangalore, in India, in the world.  This baffling, bewildering, and bedeviling endeavor crescendos from mid-morning till late afternoon when the elastic Indian lunch hour makes travel on a computer as exasperating as the midday snarls on Mahatma Gandhi Road in the city center.

Yet these same roads, made of macadam or of optic fiber, to Bangalore, to India, to the world simultaneously possess an inherent capacity to fascinate, to spellbind you with their abundant potential, their endless opportunities to astound, their multiple possibilities for invention.

For Bangalore, the Garden City, a Victorian refuge during the British Raj, indeed all of India, seethes with the potential, exults in the astounding, and invents and re-invents itself every day.  Uprooting, erecting a no longer but not yet vision of a future that eagerly reaches into the 21^st Century even as it reverberates with the ever-present  past of a myriad of cultures that reach reverently back to embrace the millennia of India’s manifold life story.  This is why any road to Bangalore is no simple matter.