Electronics City

When we left home last May the trend in Americas high-tech industry was to outsource any possible job overseas. The manufacturing of hardware products was being sent to China, while software related projects were being moved to India, especially to the city of Bangalore. I had read the name Bangalore so often in the San Jose Mercury newspaper, and overheard it spoken during endless hallway conversations at work, that I was intrigued to find out what the buzz was all about.

Bangalore, like other big cities in India, has its share of posh restaurants, trendy pubs, genuine Western brand name shops, stylish nightclubs and large shopping malls. Shiny European cars cruse the streets while local shoppers crowd the sophisticated lifestyle shops on MG Road.

Arriving in the city, we found the absence of holy cows on the streets allowed our attention to shift to other things besides that of avoiding their excrement with each step. Bangalore, nicknamed the Garden City, has more greenery and parks than we've seen anywhere in India and the presence of so many trees helps serve as the city's lungs. As a result, pollution, while still present, is less overwhelming than the other large cities we visited. We spent a Sunday afternoon observing locals at Lalbagh Botanical Garden. Families picnicked while lovers strolled hand and hand amongst a riot of flowers in full bloom.

On two occasions, we were invited to dine with locals in their home. Their professions were varied; software engineer, real estate developer, art professor and manufacturing businessman. Our casual conversations shed light on the current state of Bangalore. Each couple was leading a modern existence similar to that of someone living in the west. The sophistication of the city offered these working professionals a comfortable lifestyle full of modern convenience.

As a result of the high-tech boom, these people were living in contemporary surroundings; however, the heart of Bangalore did not seem to reflect the new modernization as a whole. It was surprising to witness power outages and spikes in a place we'd expect to find a stable power supply. Internet cafes were still using beta versions of Windows 98 and evaluation releases of Windows 2000. The software installed on these machines would crash often and the net connection was slower than in the backwaters of Kerala. "Is this really the Silicon Valley of India," I thought. "After all that I've heard about Bangalore, this can't be true!"

Trying to get any business done in central Bangalore was as inefficient and time-consuming as anywhere in India, if not worse. Shipping a parcel in the district with all the trendy Western brand name shops and posh establishments was the worst experience that we had in all of India. Small towns like Kochi, and big cities like Ahmedabad were smooth going compared to the additional logistics and hoops we had to jump through in Bangalore. An international shipment that would routinely take not more than 30 minutes elsewhere turned into a two and a half hour nightmare here.

We noticed that a lot of people in Bangalore were left out of the new economic boom, and that the gap between rich and poor was widening quickly. The poor still line the streets begging for anything while the wealthy walk by in their latest fashions with barely a glance. As our expectations quickly wore thin, Bangalore began to look just like any other dirty, polluted Indian city. The high-tech tech firms have, for the most part, sheltered themselves from Bangalore proper, establishing their offices about 20 kilometers away in a new technology zone called Electronics City. These companies are building a new village of their own far away from the inner-city challenges of Bangalore.

Bangalore is a testimony to what so many have said about India: "It's not a poor country, but it's a country where many poor people live." The news media would have us believe that India will soon become one of the world's leading economic powers, and perhaps that will be not the case for this nation as a whole. With the economic prosperity that comes with the high tech boom as well as rapid growth in other industries, India may well reach her own glory, but only within a strictly limited population of people. Everything we hear about India's economy, modernization, and success is something that only a small percentage of her one billion strong populations will have an opportunity to experience.

While traveling throughout India over the past three months, we continue to find it difficult to describe the country in a word or a sentence. She shows us many faces and moods that change just as soon as we think we've figured her out. As to where she is headed in the future, we'll just have to wait and see. Somehow we know that Bangalore will experience drastic change, yet at the same time, it will not change at all. I believe this to be true with India as a whole.