is this the way they say the future's meant to feel

together in electronic city dreams

Nov 30, 2024

The Culture Trip’s page “The 19 Must-Visit Attractions In Bangalore, India” doesn’t mention Electronic City.

According to Wikipedia, however, it started as one man’s dream:

Electronic City was the brainchild of R. K. Baliga, the first Chairman and Managing Director of Keonics, Karnataka Electronic.^[4] He dreamt of making Bangalore the Silicon Valley of India when he developed the concept of Electronic City. In 1978, Keonics established Electronic City on 332 acres of land in Konappana Agrahara and Doddathogur villages. The liberalisation of the Indian economy in the early 1990s by the then Indian Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao and then Indian Finance Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh helped Electronic City to become what it is today — the outsourcing capital of the world.

Sounds like my kind of place. So I thought I’d take a walk around it. Since it was almost two hour’s drive away from my hotel, I decided to do the sensible thing and Uber there.

As a starting location, I thought I’d pick a pub. You know, one of those jolly places full of Bangalorean techies getting cheerfully sloshed together, discussing Series A funding and product-market fit. I picked the BLR Brewing Company, known, burbled ChatGPT, “for its extensive beer selection and delectable food, thus perfect for a relaxed evening.”

Hm. Not quite the vibe I was expecting. Turns out it’s on the fourth floor. So I elected to forego a cleansing ale and set course for the front gate of the famed Infosys Campus.

Electronic City is big, wide, dusty roads, with sparse traffic, with huge gated office complexes on either side. Not really designed for people - I was the only person walking.

And much of it is still being built, which gives it a very Back-To-The-Future 1954 “Lyon Estates” vibe.

The site was surrounded by a parade of aspirational signage. Someone’s been hitting the Getty Images pretty hard:

I snuck a few pictures through the gates, expecting to be chased away at any moment by the security guards.

But they were chilled - they were busy feeding a pack of stray puppies they’d adopted. We exchanged mutually supportive nods.

Lots of residential properties here too. What with Bangalore’s infamous traffic (can confirm), you want to be living really close to where you work.

Meanwhile, in the messy world around the margins, I kept passing little vignettes like this and wondering what the back story was.

Walking through what seemed like miles of “liminal space” (spaces you use to get from one place to another), and reflecting on how the most interesting life collects at the margins and interfaces between zones of different types - I was reminded of that line “see the world in a grain of sand, eternity in an hour”.

The more time I spend here, the more the idea of project moop grows in my head. I can’t see a piece of plastic or paper without thinking about whether my octopus-sucker-gripper design would handle it.

Behind a fence, an unexpected fragment of pastoral idyll, sandwiched between a road, a garbage dump, and a construction site. The kind of place you’d expect to see Krishna and a few Gopikas loitering about. But no such luck: they’re probably all beavering away in cubicles on the Infosys campus.

Civilisation at last!

Lots of colourful Lego-brick signage pointing to the various megacorp sites to be found nearby.

An Infosys outbuilding (not on the main campus). For reference, Infosys is the fourth Indian company to achieve a market capitalisation of above one hundred billion dollars, and was founded by seven engineers with an initial investment of two hundred and fifty dollars.

The inspiration from that kind of success story is woven into the space-time fabric around here. You can feel it humming under your feet, making shimmers in the air.

I passed the campus of a company I’d never heard of, called Momentive. Good name, and a charming leafy green campus. What do they do, I wonder?

Looks like I found the company that’s going to make my soft-robotics octopus-sucker-inspired litter-collecting gripper!

TO-LET! I had a momentary vision of a future me, sitting at a vast desk hovering Magneto-style behind that massive glass façade, contemplating the Bodhi tree outside, admiring the Bharat Ratna I’d received for cleaning up all of India’s roadside plastic waste, and receiving congratulations for becoming the fifth Indian company to achieve a market capitalisation of one hundred billion dollars; all while eating Chole Bhature from Gopal Jeet downstairs. A seductive thought.

I wonder if the Jagdish Sheth School Of Management would accept a 52-year-old amateur computer programmer / DJ / visual artist / founder / techno-swami? Or shall I just continue to use ChatGPT in lieu of an MBA?

Finally, I achieved my target for today’s pilgrimage: Infosys Campus Gate 4. Sadly, news of my triumphs in the world of computer programming had not reached the security guards, so I was forced to imagine what might be inside that would tempt enough people to try and climb a wall that high, that they’d have to put coils of barbed wire across the top of it. Are they keeping people out … or are they … keeping … people … in?

Too soon to tell. I will have to settle for a longing glance at the wonders within, and save that enquiry for a future visit.

In the meantime, I decided to explore the little inter-zone of type-2 commerce that’s collected outside Gate 4, presumably to serve the crowds of people planning Oceans-11-style raids on the campus.