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this book is in English, and I prefer to use the English spelling of Bangalore. If a Kannada version appears some day, I shall insist on Bengaluru.
am struck by man’s unceasing struggle to make order out of chaos and the way he ends up making chaos out of order.
A city is a living, throbbing organism with a soul of its own and, it would often seem, a thinking mind. Cities have memories and dreams, they nurture ambition and bemoan failure.
It is perhaps woven into the texture of the human mind to build and enjoy, then to overbuild and suffer, then to collapse and complain, and then to become argumentative about what happened.
Bombay’s strength, like New York’s, lay in its ability to absorb all comers and make them draw vitality and worth from one another, together building—and taking pride in—a cosmopolitan citadel of creativity and enterprise, optimism and goodwill. But, under the crush of a covetous political class, it grew beyond its capacity to absorb people even as more people came in. Violence and mayhem turned Bombay into a provincial town.
There were scholars and professionals who dwelt in the higher realms of the mind.
water and land were not the prime elements that led to the rise of Dubai; political will was.
information technology (IT), which turned Bangalore into a world city. This attracted not only job seekers in the tens of thousands but also highly qualified Indians who had struck roots abroad and now found the idea of Bangalore alluring.
It is a fact that the changes that overtook Bangalore from the 1990s onwards were deeper, faster and more far-reaching than earlier changes.
Compared to Whitefield, Sarjapur was less frenetic because it was historically outside Bangalore’s sphere of influence. Till the very end of the twentieth century it remained rural in character, known for its traditional role as a manufacturing centre for raw silk, muslin and cotton carpets.
But information technology changed the nature of the narrative, changed even the city’s name from a noun to a verb; Barack Obama publicly objected to American jobs being Bangalored.
Bangalore Torpedo,
in 1904 Bangalore became the first Indian city to have streets lighted by electricity.
The speed at which information technology altered the sociology
The old agreeable Bangalore was now replaced by an aggressive Bangalore where no one had time for his neighbours.
Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) became the largest municipal corporation in the country.
In 2014, Bangalore ranked second in the number of murders (Delhi was first), third in robberies (after Delhi and Bombay) and third in dacoity cases (after Pune and Delhi).
The IT boom, and other forces of rapid change, had altered Bangalore from within, as though unseen hands had reconstituted its DNA. It used to be a city at peace with itself. It was now a bundle of contradictions, a battleground of competing constituencies, where going forward resembled going backward.
Jayanagar, laid out in 1948 and still described as one of the largest planned neighbourhoods in Asia.
Green Heritage Tours, Military Heritage Tours, a Medieval Bangalore Walk and so on, usually extending to three hours and costing 500 on average, except for specially customized tours.
‘As much as 85 per cent of Bangalore is built on violations.
Russell Market
Big companies like ITI, Bharat Electronics and HMT settled into their own well-planned, self-sufficient clusters where the companies assumed responsibility for their employees’ living quarters and schools and shops. IT tore this system apart. They set up fancy headquarters buildings with no thought to the living and commuting needs of their tens of thousands of employees.
National Institute of Advanced Studies’ School of Social Sciences
‘The public sector used the autonomy of its townships to create little islands of advancement.
IT people represented a kind of fashionable rootlessness.
‘The greatness of Bangalore was that it allowed simplicity and enjoyment. There was more poetry and music here before the IT boom.
Bangalore Agenda Task Force (BATF)
Nirmala toilets,
Invisible money was always part of this business.
more camouflaged cash than any other industry.
The House of Khodays,
The ground where Bangalore Breweries stood was reborn as UB City
criminal syndicates did come up, from the most unlikely quarters, college campuses, making it reasonable for the city to claim that its gangsters were the world’s most educated.
Kotwal Ramachandra,
Agni Sreedhar
M. P. Jayaraj,
Kotwal Ramachandra and Oil Kumar
The gang wars of the 1970s and 1980s shaped modern Bangalore.’
My Days in the Underworld: Rise of the Bangalore Mafia (Tranquebar, 2013)
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Aesthetes remained at the centre of things. They created public taste, raised education to a creative vocation and administration to a mission, sustained the arts and fostered on the sidelines a distinct cuisine that was to become famous.
philosopher-writer D. V. Gundappa
classical novelist Masti Venkatesha Iyengar
T. P. Kailasam,
New Modern Bombay Men’s Parlour,
It was inevitable that where writers and artists were so vigorously appreciated, there should be appreciation for good food as well.
A culinary culture developed around Basavangudi, signalling the emergence of a food protocol that was to dominate South Indian cuisine.
Mahalaxmi Tiffin Room
Vidyarthi Bhavan.
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