Bangalore Audio Tours

Kempe Gowda founded a mud fort here in 1537, and for most of the next four centuries Bangalore existed as a temperate, leafy city on the Deccan Plateau -- high enough at 900 meters to make the British comfortable, green enough to earn the name Garden City. Lal Bagh Botanical Garden, established in the 1760s under Hyder Ali, still covers 240 acres in the city center with a 19th-century glass house modeled on London's Crystal Palace. Cubbon Park adds another 300 acres of shade and pathways. The combination suggests a city that once valued its breathing room, and still has enough of it to remember what it felt like.

What happened in the 1990s was something else entirely.

India's economic liberalization coincided with the rise of software outsourcing, and Bangalore became the country's technology capital almost by accident. Infosys and Wipro built their campuses here; IT parks multiplied along Hosur Road and into the Electronic City district. The city now runs on strong filter coffee, masala dosa from Vidyarthi Bhavan (open since 1943, queues mandatory), and an improbable number of craft breweries that have made Bangalore's pub culture the most elaborate in India. The old and the new operate at the same volume here, which is to say: very loud.