IT capital Bengaluru (Bangalore), the subcontinent’s fastest-growing city, is the poster boy of India’s economic ascendance. Its buoyant economy has cost the so-called ‘garden city’ and ‘pensioner’s paradise’ its famously cool climate and sedate pace, while its wealthy retirees are long gone. In their place are streets throttled with gridlocked traffic, a cosmopolitan café culture, a lively music scene and dynamic, liberal-minded people, which combine to make the city a vibrant and relaxed metropolis, one whose view of the world is as much attuned to San Francisco as to the red baked earth of the surrounding state of Karnataka.
And there’s more to Bengaluru than Wipro, Infosys and call centres: Bengaluru rivals Kancheepuram for silk; it’s the site of India’s aeronautical defence industry’s headquarters; it boasts a mammoth monolithic Nandi Bull temple; has boulevards shaded by rain and flame trees and the great green lungs of Lal Bagh Gardens and Cubbon Park; and holds a number of fine administrative buildings left over from the British. For all its outward-looking globalism, to walk around the jumbles of rope and silk shops, flower garland-sewers, tailors, temples and mosques in the ramshackle old city and the unruly bazaars of Gandhi Nagar, Sivaji Nagar, Chickpet and City Market, is to forget the computer chip had ever been invented.
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