About Bangalore

Bangalore is a great place to live in - for many reasons For starters, it is one of the coolest cities to live in, in India - and I mean that literally and figuratively. Bangalore generally stays cool throughout the year. The people are like the weather - cool, and tolerant. Bangalore used to be a quiet, sleepy little place, where people would come and retire - but that's not so any more - it is expanding like a mushroom cloud from a nuke.

Bangalore is where all the InfoTech activity is, and is the homebase of the aerospace industry - and with my passions being military aircraft and computers , no prizes for guessing where I would like to be!

I live in an ooooold suburb called Basavanagudi, which means "Bull temple" - the suburb is built around a 900 year old temple dedicated to a bull supposedly ridden by Lord Shiva. The bull is carved out of a single rock and is about 15 feet tall and weighs hundreds of tons. I don't know if it was carved in situ or moved to its current location after being carved elsewhere. If anyone has any information on this, please email me

Bangalore has so many references to it in hundreds of home pages that there is little that has not been written about it - and here are a few links; a net search will probably reveal a lot more information about Bangalore. However, I find that most references speak of the history of Bangalore starting a mere 460 years ago with and the story of "Bangalore" being a corruption of "Bengalooru" being a corruption of "Bendha-kaal-ooru" - meaning town of boiled beans. What no -one seems to mention is that Bangalore has a history going back 3 billion years! I kid you not. Follow the link for more . . .

I am fortunate enough to live about 300 metres from Lalbagh. Lalbagh (literally "red garden") is a 240 acre botanical park which serves at a city-center picnic spot and as an area in which people can walk, jog , exercise, practise yoga, sing, relax, play, hold hands. kiss or make love. I have never found an official figure, but I estimate that Lalbagh has about 15-20 Km of paths to walk on. The glasshouse in the middle of Lalbagh houses the bi-annual flower show, and early morning walkers like me get to see the show for free every morning before entry restrictions are enforced.

The king who founded and really put Bangalore "on the map" was Kempegowda, who also built 4 watch towers in "strategic" corners of Bangalore. One of these is on top of the 3 billion year old rock in Lalbagh - as seen in the picture. The structure in the picture is actually a modern-day engineer's version of what Kempegowda's watchtower should have looked like. The original appearance of the tower before it was rebuilt can be seen here

Standing near the watch tower you can see the Bangalore skyline. The truth, of course, is that Bangalore does not have much of a skyline in the sense that New York or Paris have recognizable skylines. Bangalore has never had and still doesn't have very many really tall buildings. "High-rise" in Bangalore means about 6 floors or so. This is a good thing, but it's not good enough. The old Bangalore "skyline" was only trees, with buildings under tree cover, This helped to keep local temperatures down in summer. Now, with more and more buildings and structures poking out above the trees, the local atmosphere gets a lot hotter from heat reflected and radiated from the buildings in vast areas where the heat was previously absorbed by trees. The trees are still there, but they are lower than the buildings. The photograph below shows a view of Bangalore's "double road" from Kempegowda's Lalbagh watchtower. Many buildings can now be seen sticking out between the trees - the prominent big one is a hotel, and beyond that are the 4 towers for the floodlights in the cricket stadium. Now that's one type of high rise structure that I am not opposed to!

Oh! By the way - here is a map of Bangalore. I'll put up a better one when I can get one - as it is - this one (in greyscale) is about 189 KB and will take a while to load on a slow line.

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