Bangalore

Most people still say Bangalore. The official name changed to Bengaluru in 2014 but nobody really uses it in conversation. This is where India's tech industry lives. You'll find Google offices a short walk from 16th-century temples, founders eating masala dosas at 6 AM before investor meetings, and engineers from every state in the country who moved here for work and ended up staying. The weather is the first thing locals will tell you about. When Delhi is hitting 45°C and Mumbai is drowning in monsoon water, Bangalore sits between 20 and 30°C. It's why retirees moved here for decades. It's part of why the tech companies stuck around too. The shift since the 1980s has been hard to overstate. Infosys and Wipro set up when the city was still known mainly for its gardens. Today Electronic City, Whitefield, and the Outer Ring Road run together as one continuous tech corridor. Microsoft, Amazon, Google all have major campuses. The city produces unicorns at a rate that surprises people who haven't been paying attention. Old Bangalore is still around if you know where to look. Lalbagh, planted in 1760, is where people go when the city gets too much. The Glass House inside hosts flower shows that draw real crowds. Cubbon Park's 300 acres in the middle of downtown still feels like a forest most mornings. Joggers, retired uncles with newspapers, couples on benches, the same scene every day. The food is genuinely good. Vidyarthi Bhavan has been making the same masala dosa since 1943. MTR opens before sunrise and there's already a queue by then. Koshy's is the old cafe where writers and artists have set up shop for decades. But the city also has Korean BBQ, more craft breweries than anywhere else in India, and farm-to-table places that wouldn't look out of place in Portland. Shopping looks different in each part of town. Commercial Street is loud and crowded and you bargain for everything from sarees to phone chargers. Brigade Road is fixed-price brand stores. KR Market is wholesale flowers and vegetables, run the way it has been for generations. The neighborhoods each have their own feel. Koramangala and Indiranagar are where younger people drink and work. Jayanagar is more traditional with its numbered blocks and good South Indian restaurants. Whitefield is expats and tech parks. Malleswaram still has the filter coffee and old houses that feel like the city from thirty years ago. The best thing about Bangalore is that it pulls people from everywhere. On one street you'll hear Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, and English. The food reflects this. Traditional Karnataka cuisine sits next to every regional Indian style you can name, plus a serious international scene. There's also a real cultural life. The National Gallery shows decent contemporary art. Theatre matters here, Ranga Shankara and Jagriti both run regular shows. The Literature Festival in December pulls in big names. IISc and the engineering colleges keep something academic always happening. If you want pre-tech Bangalore, it's still visible. Tipu Sultan's Summer Palace, made entirely of teak, sits squeezed into the old city. Bangalore Palace looks lifted from England but feels Indian once you're inside. The Bull Temple in Basavanagudi has a giant Nandi carved from a single piece of granite. Now the parts nobody is going to sugarcoat. Traffic is bad. A 30-minute drive can take two hours during rush. The metro keeps expanding but slower than the city needs. Water gets scarce in summer. Some lakes are polluted, though cleanup efforts are underway in a few. Rents are higher every year. None of it has slowed the city down. People keep moving here. Startups keep launching. The cafes are still full of laptops and arguments about valuations. That's what Bangalore is. Crowded, messy, mostly cheerful. The guy drinking filter coffee at a hundred-year-old restaurant is probably also writing code that'll get used by millions of people.