Platform Road / Vatal Nagaraj Road
The Power Lines under which the Venus Circus tent was erected.
The only memories I have of the first circus I visited are that of its charred remains that I saw in the newspapers in the following days. It erased everything that I remembered of the first circus experience and replaced it with imagined screams of children trying to flee the inferno. About 60 (0fficially) of them, most of the them children, were killed in the fire and the stampede that followed at the Venus Circus, in February 1981. That was because the tent was erected under the power lines shown above.
It took years for Bangalore to recover from that tragedy. No circuses were allowed to perform in the city for a long time. And the place where the Venus Circus stood is silent and barren to this day, as if mourning for all the little lives that perished on that Black Day in February, 1981.
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Next to where the Venus Circus tent stood is an old Lutheran Church, which does not seem to have enough people attending these days. It was probably built for railway employees from an earlier age, who lived in the Railway Colony, a short walk away. The people who live closest to the church today are the residents of a tiny slum, behind the Church.The doors and windows of the homes in the slums are turned away from the open area where the Circus tent once stood.
However, the residents of the slum prefer to pray at the many little shrines that surround the Chruch. Even those who pray at the Church seem to prefer the small shrine with Bibles in Kannada, Tamil and English placed outside. Together, they form the unoffical memorial for the people who died in the fire.
8 comments:
loved this post..
oh...so that is what it is. didn't know. my heart aches.
Another part of Bangalore that is completely new to me, and I was unaware of the circus tragedy. Wouldn't you have thought though, that a memorial of sorts would have been erected? Life is cheap.
We just ignore the dead. :(
Sad, sad story. Didn't know about such a tragedy. Is it just me or does the church have an air of mourning around it?
This touching post IS a memorial...
Brought back memories of long long ago... my sister and cousins had gone to see the circus the same show when it burnt down. Luckily, all of them survived the disaster. I still remember bawling my eyes out when my mother wouldn't let me go with them to the circus since I was too young.
Well, Mr. Vatal Nagaraj has his own story. He is gay and is into exploitation of young boys. A waiter at a restau I frequented was an ex male hooker and was hired a number of times by Vatal Nagaraj. It is open information that he is gay. I was told that every hooker in Cubbon Park was familiar with this idiot. This boy recollected what a sick pervert Nagaraj is. People should shit on such idiots.
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