Bangalore
Bangalore has been famous for a century or more as the only major Indian city with a comfortable climate. Lately, it's become even more famous as India's wormhole into a beckoning digital paradise. There's good reason for this, but a visitor would have to be wrapped in limos and bodyguards not to see equally a full complement of squalor and crowding.
There's plenty of colonial Bangalore still standing. Here, it's been recycled into a night club.
The royal seal, upstaged.
One of the newcomers.
India's princely states had a British "resident" watching their every move from the "residency." Ironically, the word "residency" still possesses marketing magic.
A developer with overseas experience.
Out past the old airport, Tata rents office space.
Here's a development partly funded and owned by Singapore investors.
Come closer.
Architecturally, it's nothing special. Culturally, it's spectacular.
You have to get into lavatories and basement hallways to discover that maintenance isn't up to Singapore standards.
Adjoining apartments.
A mile away, a research organization that pays more attention to Indian traditions.
The institute.
A water-tower that strives to look traditional.
Indians are not always prudish.
A granite-slab fence becomes a billboard.
Let's shop!
All the usual suspects.
Around the corner, a grocery store with wrapped-produce and frozen-food sections that nobody who knew India 20 years ago ever thought they'd live to see.
Twenty years ago, fruit juice in India was something you made for yourself—or watched somebody make with an old street-side crusher, from which the juice was poured into a glass rinsed in a bucket of water.
Good or bad? Whatever you think, there's no stopping it short of an asteroid or its equivalent.
Like China, India's pushing hard.
The Fifth Avenue Shopping Mall.
Anything unchanged from the past? How about these apartments alongside a truly foul stream.
And who's building this fine new city? Why, the same semi-nomadic groups that have been building India for decades. They themselves live in pup tents, of course.