Sitting under the ceiling fans at Koshy’s Restaurant, a fixture in this city since 1952, it felt like nothing had changed. Waiters in white uniforms with silver buttons on their tunics attended to elderly customers in pressed shirts.
Even the items on the menu seemed like artifacts from another era: vegetable soup, pineapple steak and onions, glazed mutton. They harkened back to the years after India’s independence, when Queen Elizabeth and Jawaharlal Nehru visited Koshy’s – at least according to the menu – and Bangalore was a green, temperate city of 750,000, favored mainly by middle-class retirees.
I first joined Koshy’s in 2006. By then, Bangalore was the center of an extraordinary economic boom that was transforming India. The city had grown to six million people, attracted by the growing IT industry.
I was working on a screenplay – completed but never produced – set in one of the city’s call centers. It seemed to me an extraordinary moment. An old India, slow, bureaucratic, poor, conservative, religious, was modernized with incredible speed.
In 2006, I visited a charity school that educated children from the slums of Bangalore. One classroom was full of children of snake charmers – essentially a form of pest control in India. The snake charmers were all unemployed because the sheer amount of construction in the city had scared away the snakes. Every kid in the class wanted to be a software engineer.
I went to inbound call centers where young employees studied the films Notting Hill and Bridget Jones’s Diary to attune their ears to British accents. They might spend their days in a traditional Hindu home where arranged marriages were the norm, but at night they answered the phone under assumed Western names, trying to help callers whose lifestyle was completely foreign to them.
The training they received included lessons about British culture. I noted these wise words from one of the so-called soft-skilled trainers I met at the time: “The British need a lot of time to open up. They are very commanding. Once they get angry, they can’t calm down. They don’t like Americans, even when you mention America.”
The shiny, air-conditioned campuses where the young workers worked seemed proof that India was irrevocably changing. When I came back 18 years later, I wondered if I would recognize anything in it.
First of all, it is no longer Bangalore. The old name has been retired – not completely, people still use it routinely in conversations – but Bengaluru is the official name. It is now a megalopolis with at least 13 million inhabitants. It has a new metro system. And the new airport, which opened last year, is an architectural masterpiece. Billed as an airport in a garden, it is full of living walls, plants and giant hanging baskets.
I had flown in on one of Virgin Atlantic’s first direct flights from Heathrow. These daily flights, which connect onward routes to San Francisco and beyond, are further evidence of the city’s economic power.
When I arrived at night and drove from the airport along the elevated highway to my hotel, I didn’t see a single autorickshaw. In the distance was a row of gleaming tower blocks and a new luxury shopping center – the Phoenix Mall of Asia – that wouldn’t look out of place in Dubai. We were heading to the Leela Palace Hotel, a five-star Indo-Saracenic behemoth built on the outskirts of the city.
Although it looks like a palace, the Leela is actually not much older than Bengaluru’s economic boom. Opened in 2001, it is vast and opulent, with an army of solicitous staff, a spa, a swimming pool – and even a Tokyo-themed speakeasy in the basement, said to be the sixth best bar in India. I can’t comment on that as I was rejected for wearing flip flops.
Flip-flops, however, were no obstacle to enjoying a club sandwich and non-alcoholic cocktail at the Library Bar – named after the library of rare spirits – under a huge alabaster lamp the size of my car.
It was the Leela Palace Hotel that hosted the wedding reception of our current Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak and his bride Akshata Murthy in 2009. I rather wish I had had my wedding reception at the Leela Palace. Unfortunately, my in-laws did not have as deep pockets as Mr Sunak’s.
Ms Murthy is the daughter of NR Narayana Murthy, one of the superstars of the Bengaluru software boom – a multi-billionaire businessman who co-founded the tech company Infosys.
It is difficult to overestimate the impact of the software industry on India. In 2021, India earned more from software exports than Saudi Arabia did from oil exports: $178 billion. Thanks in large part to India’s tech industry, an economy that was considered a basket case for decades is now the fifth largest in the world.
By the time I left the hotel, I expected to find a subcontinental version of Miami: palm trees and flyovers, maybe even a few daring tech entrepreneurs traveling to work on jetpacks. Imagine my surprise when I was immersed in a very familiar world of dusty streets, honking autorickshaws, female passengers in shalwar kameez, riding side-saddle on overloaded motorcycles, chai sellers and even cows occasionally wandering through the traffic.
But even this familiar-looking India was not quite the same. I was able to use Uber to hail an auto rickshaw. A driver called Naveen took me to Khoshy’s for 86 rupees – less than a pound. It felt a lot like old India in some ways – just better. There was still the thrill of whizzing through the streets, but there was no more haggling over price, no more worrying about unexpected side quests to a relative’s curio shop, and no more arguing over whether the notes that I paid for were torn or dirty. Naveen’s rickshaw was one of the latest models, powered by compressed natural gas and much cleaner than the old diesel rickshaws.
Of course, Bengaluru’s tremendous growth has come with its share of problems. Traffic is a nightmare. The city’s sleepy charm, the carefully managed greenery that shades the streets and the municipal water supply are all under strain. But there is something intoxicating about the energy of Bengaluru and the strange contrasts between the new India and the India that hasn’t changed at all.
While walking through the Krishnarajendra Market, I saw a man sitting in a booth with half a lotus, painstakingly stringing tuberose blossoms onto a string to make garlands. Nearby at the 300-year-old Shree Kore Venkataramana temple, sacred to Vishnu, a bare-chested priest performed a sacred ritual – and a QR code for electronic donations.
At a microbrewery called Toit, I watched local tech bros sample the range of craft beers. Down the road from Khoshy’s, a sign outside the Lit gastropub advised me: “Go inside because it’s going to be lit up tonight”. I walked up behind a young man on the phone who said loudly, “We are going to invest more money in this specific sector and rethink our overall approach.” The Lalbagh Botanical Gardens, an oasis of greenery first created in the 18th century with fountains and a greenhouse, was home to loving couples, families and Instagrammers posting content for their followers.
While riding the subway – clean, cheap, fast – I struck up a conversation with a young entrepreneur named Clinton Baptist. He owed his unusual surname to a Goan ancestor. He was dressed in the uniform of today’s global citizens: jeans, a plaid shirt, sneakers and a backpack, and he carried a business plan in a roll of paper like a treasure map.
Like many newcomers to the city, he had moved there hoping to find seed capital to start his business and copy the success of Infosys’ founders. Clinton’s big idea was to use artificial intelligence to transform India’s education system. He spoke passionately about AI and how we were at a historical moment, comparable to the birth of the internet or the industrial revolution.
He was on his way to a place where he liked to brainstorm. It turned out to be an independent café-bookstore called Champaca, overlooking a garden. The tables were full of young Bangaloreans working on tablets and laptops. Despite opening just before the pandemic, the bookstore’s founder, Radhika Timbadia, had found a devoted customer base and strong demand for her carefully curated selection of novels and nonfiction books.
Champaca would be a jewel in any neighborhood. It was quiet and, as Clinton had promised, conducive to working and brainstorming. The youthful customers drank kombucha while they read or chatted or put the finishing touches on business proposals.
Champaca also reminded that India is a country of youth. Half of the 1.4 billion inhabitants are younger than 30 years old. And while in the past, ambitious young citizens had to move abroad to pursue their dreams, today Bengaluru represents a promised homegrown country.
Essentials
The Leela Palace Hotel Bengaluru (00 91 80 2521 1234; theleela.com) has doubles from £206 per night. Virgin (virginatlantic.com) flies from London Heathrow to Bengaluru from £499 return.