WhatsBrandNew 12. Dec | Page 16

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