Of mains and crosses

Bangalore is city of mains and crosses - at least the older parts of the city are. I remember reading a similar description about Malleswaram in one of the hand-outs that my fac-ad gave me during our first meeting. The mains and crosses are perpendicular to each other and their intersections are called 'circles' (local slang for the intersection junction) . I was always perplxed at seeing some of the mains being smaller roads than the crosses !

Today morning I was reminded of this puzzle that is Bangalore. I had to attend a function at 8:30pm in Rajaji Nagar. I was given a postal address - complete with a door no., block, main and cross numbers. One would have thought this would be sufficient information to locate the place. Having spent twelve years in Bangalore now, I should have known better.

I was driving around, in vain , through various narrow lanes marked with yellow stone boards having the main numbers. As the numbers increased, I thought I was in the right direction and then suddenly the numbers seemed to be reset to 1 !
Asking for directions at a couple of places resulted in nebulous responses - you know should-be -somewhere-there kind of general hand-waving.
I got a straight-in-the-face response at the third place I asked.It was a STD booth and the owner had just then opened the shop. He replied in a mix of fluent Kannada and English that just asking for a main and a cross is no good here. We have been living here for the past 40-50 years and still we don't know all the mains and crosses. It is best to have an associated landmark and ask for directions. The owner looked too young too have stayed 40-50 years anywere let alone Rajaji Nagar - I guess the we included the old man, probably his father, sitting in his shop.

But as I drove on I realized that this was a fundamental truth of this city. My lesson for the day - right there. I had a landmark alright, but it was very close to being absolutely useless.
A Ganapath temple. It was as bad as looking for a Manjunath in Bangalore (or Attilla in Budapest :-) - every street had a Ganesha temple.
I felt like the leader of the forty theives in the Ali Baaba tale - hoping to find a house with a cross mark on the door and on reaching the town, finding out that every house had the same mark !

Luckily I had a phone number which was thankfully answered and I got some directions over phone. I was even more lucky to actually make it to the place. As you may have guessed I did'nt exactly follow the directions as given to me - I had got them a little wrong. But alls well that ends well.
I was pleasantly surprised to hear couple of other guests describe their 'we-were-lost' stories - especially to know that they were 'lost' in spite of having spent 30+ years in the city !

That was when the 'landmark' truth finally dawned on me.

94 Down - Angry with everybody (for e.g.) for a puzzle ? (9)

Crossword. Yes that was the answer to the clue (created by yours truly :) in title of the post. December 21st was the 94th anniversary of the crossword puzzle. To quote Wikipedia -

On December 21, 1913, Arthur Wynne, a Liverpool journalist, published a "word-cross" puzzle in the New York World that embodied most of the features of the genre as we know it. This puzzle is frequently cited as the first crossword puzzle, and Wynne as the inventor.

I had been seeing crossword puzzles from the time I had been reading newspapers. But mostly ignoring them as some black and white squares with cryptic clues that only English pundits would have any chance of filling up.
My interest in them was kindled in the third year at IISc - our combinatorics course professor, cevm, was infatuated with them. He gave us a crossword at the end of the course whose puzzles were combinatorial problems and solutions were numbers ! We could solve them but right answers did not contribute to the final grade. I had bought the first of 'Art of Computer Programming' books few months back and was pleasantly surprised to find a problem in the book that required generating a crossword puzzle given a description of the grids. The program had to be written in MIX - I wrote one in Perl that generated a Postscript file instead of just a matrix of 0's and 1's. I even sent the program to Knuth's email id - I was so thrilled at having solved at least 1 problem from the great book. I was even more thrilled to get a response back !! It was not from the Don himself but one of his students who replied saying that the next edition of the book would have the problem modified requiring postscript output. That was something.
I still did not get to solving crosswords. It was only a couple of years later when I got a job and was living couple of friends that I got my first taste of actually solving these puzzles. Sonal was my crossword guru - he taught me some of the hidden pointers in the clues that helped get to the right word. We worked on the crosswords from The Hindu. Many a 'aha' moments were experienced while wasting hours bent over the folded newspaper with blunt pencils. The crossword bug had bitten me and I am affected till date.

I have never been able to completely solved a newspaper crossword yet. I did manage to win a prize for completing a crossword puzzle at workplace - I had to use the Internet to solve some of the clues.
I also try to exercise 'my little gray cells' on the Sunday crossword - they are much more cryptic but cracking even one of the clues feels great.

Amateur cruciverbalist - I can gladly call myself that.