Bangalore, and being afraid of the dark

I do not know how we had managed to miss it in our planning but for the first time in India, we faced considerable difficulty in trying to find a roof on top of our heads and two beds to sleep in. The incessant noise of the chaotic traffic and the humid afternoon heat added to the frustration of a few hours of dragging around valuables from place to another around MG Road, downtown Bangalore. I eventually spilled my beans when a rickshaw driver took us to an address we had not asked for, presumably with the intention of doing a favour to a local hotelier in exchange for a handful of rupees. By the time I had spat a litany F- and related words at him, he too lost his wit and launched into an incomprehensible rant, shaking his tiny fist in the air in what looked like the summoning of higher powers for our extermination. This "town" was stretching my nerves.
Turns out Bangalore, alongside Mumbai, attracts such large numbers of tourists every weekend that on a Friday afternoon most hotels are jam-packed with people. And for this reason, most places downtown charge sums that border the unaffordable for those with a meagre travel budget. By dusk, we found something at the local YWCA, a long-shot from the Ritz we stayed in at Mysore the previous nights for next to nothing. In fact, it soon started to dawn on me that Bangalore itself did not quite live up to the hype it has been credited with. The city center has a distinctly western feel with glass-walled offices, malls, cinema complexes and shopping boulevards. However, I got the impression that the ambience lacked local flair. Mumbai has more than enough to offer in this sense, perhaps for having hosted foreigners for centuries and allowing for the sort of cultural melting-pot found in London, Amsterdam and New York.


A stroll around Bangalore’s renowned technology park or city centre felt like hanging out with the Joneses of the mail order catalogue. Where were the skyscrapers, tech clusters and busy bees that cause the media back home to wallow in that doomsday fatalism under the heading of „European competitiveness“? For the record, a difficult one-hour busride to the international tech park proved a disappointing exercise. Hosting a tiny mall, where Pizza Hut was the top attraction, together with and a handful of offices for 15,000 engineers and businessmen, the experience felt like gazing in childish awe at the bottom five floors of Canary Wharf trying to figure out what happened to the rest of the 45. There is no question in my mind that cities like Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad and Mumbai attract an incredible amount of foreign direct investment – failing to target the buying power of a growing consumer class within a population of soon +1billion Indians would be foolish. But so is being scared of the dark. We were anxious to return to Mumbai again.
[to illustrate the story, consider the contrast between the picture above to those below - it takes more than sorting the cows out of traffic to get the infrastructure sorted, and that is just for starters]