Articles by Meera Iyer

“You know you’re in Bangalore, you know you’re in the Silicon Valley of India, when you go to play golf and the caddy on the first tee says you can either aim at the Microsoft building or the IBM building. You know you’re in Bangalore when you see the Pizza Hut advertisement says ‘gigabytes of taste’,” famously said the US journalist Thomas Friedman in 2004. Ever since, reams have been written on outsourcing, the software boom and the rise of the uber-smart, uber-rich new technogeeks of Bangalore. But whatever happened to the other Bangalores, the ones that shun the arc…

ICSE, CBSE, IGCSE, IB, SSLC…If these seem like random combinations of letters to you, you probably do not have a child of school-going age. Most parents would instantly recognize these as abbreviations of the various school boards that exist in Bangalore today. In the quest of the perfect school for their child, parents of children as young as three begin to choose from among the plethora of not just schools but also school boards, each professing a different philosophy and vision. Science is all around us: A biology class at Prakriya. (Pic: Prakriya) With the majority of parents, the preferred…

The morning of Sunday, 22 June, saw a motley bunch of people assemble at the entrance to Bangalore Fort. Architects, housewives, techies, photographers, writers and scientists, among others, gathered to learn more about Bangalore's heritage and its past from one of the city's leading historians, Dr S K Aruni. The event was organised by the Bangalore chapter of the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH) as part of its Parichay (meaning ‘introduction') programme, an initiative aimed at raising awareness of Bangalore's heritage among its citizens. Participants in the INTACH Parichay event at the Bangalore Fort. Pic: MB…