BANGALORE AT A GLANCE
Bangalore is a multifaceted city
that has worn multiple
identities. In its past lives, the
city has been a Cantonment
town and a quiet pensioners'
retreat with a surfeit of gardens
and lakes, best-known for its
pitch-perfect weather. In its
present incarnation, the city is a
humming and buzzing
technopolis choc a bloc with
software campuses, IT parks
and a teeming community of
techies. Gone is the sleepy
Bangalore of yesterday –
today's Bengaluru is a city with
a galloping growth rate,
bustling traffic, booming realty,
a cosmopolitan migrant
population and the tag of a
p 14
whats helpful?
global city.
Riding on the back of the IT
boom over the last two decades,
hip-new Bangalore is a feel-
good place with glitzy malls,
posh night spots, trendy
restaurants and a gushy pace of
life. But if you think it's all just
nouveau razzle-dazzle, you're
pretty far off the mark. This city
of contradictions has not lost its
abiding connection to the past.
The mamis (traditional south
Indian women) of
Malleswaram, the Benne dosas
(buttered rice and lentil crepe)
in Basavanagudi and the
Carnatic music kacheris
(concerts of classical south
Indian music) at Chamrajpet
are also very much part of the
Bangalore rubric. Alongside the
sprawling apartment complexes
and new satellite suburbs are
19 th century British churches
and streets with quaint colonial
names.
Bangalore is ultimately a
melting pot of people, cultures
and ways of life, where new
flavours are constantly
intermingling with the old in
interesting ways. This pot has
its dents for sure – creaking
infrastructure, pot-holed roads
and inadequate public
transport. But shrugging these
off and trundling along
cheerfully through the zillionth
Metro-construction-related