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20 years ago, Bangalore was a quiet place to live, and people loved to settle down in an outskirt such as Whitefield, thanks to the pleasant weather and peaceful locales. A mild drizzle every once in a while with pleasant and scenic drives throughout the city known as ‘the garden city’ made this a perfect place to live after retirement. Soon after this phase, the city saw it’s first pub, which was in fact also the first pub in the country! Bangalore soon came to be known as the pub capital of India, and well – nobody complained. The city came to be associated with a modern way of life as compared t0 the pre-globalized India of the late eighties. Around this time and for a few years to come, you’d always meet up with someone you know when you drove downtown to Brigade Road on a weekend! Bangalore was where people had more of a western influence in the modern times – pubs, discos and an elite society made Bangalore ‘the place to be’, while the rest of India was still thinking twice about ‘letting the Americans influence us so much’!

So, this quiet town evolved into a very hep place with the introduction of the first pubs in the country. Next of course, globalization happened to all of us, and what better place to absorb the entirety of the world than Bangalore, which was already a little ahead in comparison to other Indian cities, at least culturally speaking. When outsourcing became a common phenomenon, Bangalore cashed in thanks to its forward thinking community and pleasant climate to some extent. Foreigners flocked to Bangalore to set up their back offices, while they lived in villas they could never afford ‘back home’! Thanks to these companies setting up shop in Bangalore, people flocked to Bangalore from other cities in India – this place became an IT specialist’s dream. Many would start working in Bangalore, moving on to the US after proving their worth to their employers.

So much for work...another ‘biggie’ in Bangalore is currently the frequency of visits by international music performers. In the last five or six years, Bangalore has played host to classic rock bands such as Deep Purple, Iron Maiden, Aerosmith and the Rolling Stones. This just goes to show that Bangalore has made a clear impact on the rest of the world. All said and done, Bangalore has consistently found a way to keep itself on the international maps. A quiet place to retire not so long ago, Bangalore has today become a popular Indian metro, leaving all other cities with the possible exception of Bombay, far behind in terms of a cosmopolitan population and job opportunities even during the dreaded recession.