A mix of moods
Jayant Kodkani on
Beantown Boomtown
There’s something in Beantown Boomtown for everyone. To most people, Bangalore’s status as India’s Silicon Valley was the turning point in the city’s history. However, Bangalore didn’t suddenly become
scientifically/ technologically savvy over the last two decades. The Indian Institute of Science here is over 100 years old. The city has had over half a dozen premier defence institutions and big PSUs for over 50 years now. It is wrong to say that the IT revolution has spawned the city’s cosmopolitan culture. It is the other way round, perhaps.
It took about two years to put the book together. The idea was to leave nothing unturned — examine everything that has a mention of the city and then decide whether it was worth carrying. At one time we even considered including some lesser known research papers! We also realised that an anthology is not necessarily read in any particular order. And so, even if the sequence of pieces in the book is random, there is a broad thought given to the mix of moods that the pieces convey.
We wanted to get away from the stereotyped projection of Bangalore as an IT city. We wanted to show how beantown and boomtown co-exist and at the other end also see how, in a larger sense, the beantown has given place to the boomtown.
S.K.
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