Multilingual AI audio guide exhibit on WOUDiO (PWA). WOUDiO pioneered the world’s first audio guide platform with built-in donation: listeners can support the cultural venue without leaving the listening experience. The text below is the localized description, details, and narration script for this audio guide stop.
On MG Road the smell of baking bread and strong coffee drifts out of old doorways and mixes with exhaust and the rattle of metro trains. The avenue runs broad and straight, because it was drawn for marching.
It began as South Parade, the road along the Parade Ground of the British Cantonment. Regiments drilled beside it, and the shops that grew up along it served the soldiers, their families and the people who followed them in.
One newcomer came from Kerala. In 1940 P. O. Koshy, a Syrian Christian, opened a bakery called the Parade Café. A restaurant followed on St Mark's Road in 1952, and its tables would one day seat Jawaharlal Nehru, Queen Elizabeth the Second and Nikita Khrushchev. The family still runs it, now in its third generation.
Books had arrived long before. The story goes that Abel Joshua Higginbotham landed in Madras as a stowaway, put ashore on the docks with nothing. In 1844 he founded a bookshop there, and since 1905 Higginbothams has kept a Graeco-Roman building on MG Road, often called the oldest bookshop in the city. Not far off stands Mayo Hall, opened in 1883 in memory of Lord Mayo, the only Viceroy murdered in office. It once held the Cantonment's municipal offices.
Early in 1948 Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated, and the grief ran the length of the country. On the twenty-sixth of February, only weeks later, South Parade was given a new name. The parade road of an empire became Mahatma Gandhi Road.
The name changed; the stream of newcomers did not. Brigade Road, running off MG Road, and nearby Church Street filled with pubs, and the district picked up a nickname, the pub capital of India, repeated so often that no one can quite say where it began. In 2011 the first stretch of Namma Metro opened with MG Road station as its terminus, and a new generation of arrivals began stepping off trains onto the old parade.
The avenue drawn for soldiers never stopped taking in strangers. Every evening, as the lights come on along the former South Parade, another crowd from somewhere else joins the flow, and the road carries them onward into the night.
Site: Mahatma Gandhi Road and Brigade Road, in the former Cantonment
History: formerly South Parade; renamed Mahatma Gandhi Road on 26 February 1948
Key facts: Koshy's began in 1940 as the Parade Café; Higginbothams (founded 1844 in Madras) on MG Road since 1905; Mayo Hall opened 1883; MG Road metro station opened 2011 as the first Namma Metro terminus
Map:
Bengaluru map
Official Site:
Karnataka Tourism
Photo: Kprateek88 /
Wikimedia Commons.JPG) (CC-BY-SA-3.0)
