Bangalore¹ is much, much more my speed. It’s renowned as the “Silicon Valley of India” and there’s a lot that’s similar: large Defense Department spending in the area encouraging tech startups, a highly educated workforce, inflated salaries compared to the rest of the country, a significantly multicultural outlook.²

This, coupled with rapid growth, means that Bangalore is far more Westernized than the other places I’ve visited. Brewpubs currently seem to be a big thing, with locally brewed beer and your usual mix of pizzas/burgers/nachos.³ Stores are more spacious. Malls are more glitzy. The shop around the corner from my hotel is being remodeled into a “pet spa” and that certainly implies a certain level of development where, not only do people have pets, but they have enough spare income to want to provide them vacations.⁴

I’d feel a little guilty about feeling so at home here — you only like the heavily Westernized version of India, with hipster cocktails and bougie trattorias — except, well, this is Bangalore. You can spend all your time chasing down the few remaining dive bars of “authentic” New York, but eventually you have to accept that vibrant cities constantly reinvent themselves; at this point McSorley’s is just as confabulated as the Disney Store in Times Square.⁵

Not that Bangalore isn’t still definitely India. It’s the same traffic (complete with auto rickshaws and motorbikes),⁶ same congestion, same air pollution, same kind of crazy overbuilt street scene. Just, a little more calmed down. People were honking at each other at a New York level, which was about 10% as much as they were in Delhi. It was nice.

The biggest problem is that I’m still sick. Not the “I’ll just throw away seven days of my life” kind of sick I was when I first got to India, but I was still recovering from that for a few days and then kind of fell into a weird pattern where I never really got bad but I also never got better. I’d run out for lunch on Sunday and feel queasy that night, only to recover by the morning. Monday I’d be fine, but a late afternoon snack Tuesday would have me stuck in the hotel and ordering a grilled cheese from room service at midnight. I still don’t know what was causing it. I was avoiding all the major red flags like unbottled water and food from street vendors.

But even being a little unwell really cuts down on your urge to explore. I stuck to a fairly limited area around the hotel, and that really was a shame. Not that I missed out seeing anything I really wanted to see — Bangalore isn’t known for being much of a tourist destination — but Bangalore looked like a place I would have enjoyed wandering around in and seeing what was happening. I was enjoying what I was seeing. I just never got out as often as I wanted.

I did get an opportunity to catch up with a friend who lives in the city. This is someone I knew from Ohio State nearly 15 years ago. It was particularly nice to be invited to someone’s home, to have an opportunity to share a home cooked meal and actually see what life would be like for someone actually living in the city.

We were able to catch each other up a bit on the current goings on of some of the people we knew, and then got to talking about how each of us were doing. It was particularly interesting (although not all that surprising, especially in light of current politics) to find out why he ended up back in India. Basically, it was visa problems.

This was several years before the current political situation. He was living and working in the United States, and had applied for a visa renewal. It should have taken a couple months. But it got delayed, and delayed again, and delayed again, and he ended up getting laid off from his current job. So he’s stuck with a rapidly expiring work visa, a bureaucratic nightmare trapping a new one, and no real idea when any of this was going to be resolved. So he left.

Shortly before he left, he gets a call from the United States government: your visa has been approved! Just get a letter proving your current employment and you can pick it up. Too late, he says, I’m leaving. And the people at the visa office sound genuinely shocked that anyone would pass up an already approved American visa. But he’s just no longer interested.

Now, I suppose we can argue the costs and benefits of allowing overeducated foreign data analysts come and compete for jobs against the thousands of underemployed home-grown data analysts waiting in soup kitchen lines.⁷ But I think people are vastly overestimating the appeal of America. Most of the world is catching up⁸ to the sorts of things you’d once marvel at — not just fully stocked supermarket shelves, but brewpubs and cocktail bars and that kicky cappuccino place with the cute baristas.

The United States would be a better place with my friend working there, raising a family there. That’s true whether he settled permanently or only stayed five years. But apparently basically all these contractor’s visas are getting slow-rolled, and most of them are doing the obvious thing — moving back to India, or hopping up to Canada, or taking remote jobs and leaving the States.

But this is the problem with applying 20^th century economic models to a 21^st century world. Capital can flow across borders. If workers can’t — like in manufacturing — you can make a tidy profit offshoring your production. But if your entire production line is virtual, producing white papers and software and analytic reports, well, that’s work that can be done literally anywhere.

Which means knowledge workers are getting to choose where they want to live. Lots of tech startups would relocate outside of New York City⁹ but that’s where the talent is. And I think for the first time in a very long while you’re seeing more and more people look at themselves, and look at their skillset, and ask themselves “Is the United States really a place I want to be living? Is this the life I want for myself?”

And I think the answer to that question, for increasingly large numbers of those people, is “No, it’s not. And I think it’s time for a change.”

Next: Mumbai (BOM) to Dubai (DXB)
Prev: Delhi (DEL) to Bangalore (BLR)

Footnotes

¹ As usual, there’s a naming issue here; the city’s called ಬೆಂಗಳೂರು in Kannada (or, more properly Anglicized, Bengalūru), and the local government officially renamed the city “Bengaluru” in 2014. But it doesn’t seem to have taken, really — it’s Bengaluru on official signs and airport tickets and government websites and very few other places.

² Okay, so the “multicultural” part is much less true of San Francisco now than it used to be — all those tech bros pricing everyone else out of the neighborhoods. And there are always fault lines between what’s actually welcoming to people of all kinds and what actually is welcomed. But Bangalore is far more open to people from elsewhere than Delhi seemed, at least to my limited understanding.

³ Alcohol isn’t difficult to find in India, but it’s certainly not all that common — it’s easy to find restaurants, not bars, and if they have drinks on the menu it’s likely a couple of beers and maybe a glass of wine or two. Not so in Bangalore, where in addition to brewpubs you can easily find cocktail bars and bottles at what passes for bodegas and even these weird standing-room only bars open to the street that remind me of nothing so much as a walk-up version of the drive-through liquor barns I remember from the Ohio of my youth.

⁴ I’ve had cats on and off for most of my life — rarely entirely willingly, since the last five I had were all strays or abandoned — and I’ll be perfectly honest, I never thought about taking them to a spa or boarding them when I went on vacation. I just poured a ton of food into a bowl, left a ton of water around, and left them to themselves for a week.

There’s nothing like coming home after a week’s vacation only to have a beloved pet take a half-hour to bother strolling in to where you’re unpacking, gaze disinterestedly at you, then wander off to the kitchen.

⁵ An interesting comparison is New Orleans, which relies so heavily on tourism and so heavily on a particular sort of booze-and-music-soaked experience that it’s struggled to evolve beyond that. Faulkner had a lot to say about this sort of thing.

Of course, the last time there was a real opportunity to reinvent itself with (with Katrina, aka horrific systemic governmental failure), most of the buildings got rehabbed and converted over to AirBnB rentals.

⁶ Which, by the way, I’m not telling anyone how to live their life, but I would not sit side-saddle on the back of one of those things, modesty be damned.

⁷ I don’t know the starting salary for a data analyst position, but I do know going rates for starting positions doing the sort of thing I do, and either basic economics is wrong or there’s kind of an ongoing drought for these skills.

⁸ Or surpassing, if the current American obsession with hygge is any indication.

⁹ The rent is, literally, too damn high.