| Wasn't it rather far away, some of them enquired. The unit of measurement was how long it took to get there by train from Kolkata, which was, of course, the centre of their universe. |
| Others, who were more broadminded, affirmed that it was a pleasant place, the sort of reaction that would have also greeted me had I announced I was moving to Italy. |
| Real distances and distances in the mind were two different things. The consequences of being far away in the mind were that friends and relatives came visiting less often and maids from Kolkata were more difficult to outsource. |
| Even our driver from Bihar regretted that it took him so much longer to go home than it did from Delhi. Hence, it was that, when we dropped anchor in Bangalore, we didn't exactly feel like frontiersmen but still regretted that we were much further away in the minds of many friends and relatives than we were in Delhi. |
| But the pulls that Bangalore exerted on the rest of the country, the east included, began to surface soon after we settled down. The first magnet was CET, "common entrance test" for the non-initiated. |
| CET is the symbol of Karnataka's educational entrepreneurship that has over the years enabled the state to become a destination for seekers of professional education. |
| Come CET time, trainloads of youngsters and their parents, notably from the east, land in Bangalore, ready to try their luck at seeking a decent professional education. And among them would be friends and relations chaperoning their wards. |
| One spin-off for the city and its economy, we realised, was the shopping that these visitors did, after the test was over and the day before going back. |
| For a couple of days, locals would be advised to keep away from M G Road and Commercial Street, leaving the field open to the hectic shoppers running through their lists before boarding the return train. |
| The next round would be the parents coming to leave their successful wards in their hostels. Naturally, their numbers would be far fewer but this time the visits would often be longer "" the parent deciding to stay for a few days in order to "settle" the ward before leaving, full of anxieties over the unknown and entreaties to the "local guardian" to please keep as careful an eye on the youngster as possible. |
| A totally unexpected bonus from this was my son having a happy reunion with some of his old school friends whom he had left behind in Delhi. They had also finally landed up in Bangalore, in pursuit of the Holy Grail of a bachelor's in mainstream engineering or more focused computer applications. |
| My wife has also not been let out. Around admission time last year she was overjoyed to receive a call from a childhood friend who was camping in a little hotel near her son's hostel, getting him to settle down the first time away from home. |
| But none of this prepared me for what I have been witnessing these past few months. First, it was a close relative calling from Kolkata to say we could expect a visit from his younger son, whom we had last seen as a boy. |
| After Atlanta, Chennai and briefly Hyderabad, he was now coming to take up a job with the software subsidiary of one of the biggest names in American financial services. |
| The subsidiary had quietly started operations well over a year ago and was well on its way to having a headcount of hundreds, not processing financial work in an outsourced back office but developing and maintaining software for the global financials services business. |
| My brother-in-law explained that such youngsters don't "settle down" but his son was still looking forward to staying on in the city for some time, and could we please look up this family and see if the elder daughter, herself in software, would vibe with our kind of folks. |
| That was fun, being able to look forward to one of my favourite cousins and her husband also developing an attachment to Bangalore and coming here periodically. |
| It has not been raining but pouring in Bangalore this season, in more ways than one. Shortly after my brother-in-law's call, came another from a close college friend, whom I had sadly been meeting no more than once in every few years, depending on whether one of his client's cases needed an appearance at the Supreme Court or I landed up in Kolkata. He asked if I remember the school topper in our year. How could I not, considering I had virtually topped the list from the other end. |
| Well, he would be visiting Bangalore to see if his daughter, first time out of home to take up a job with a global bank, was settling down well. She was not a software person but a top-flight statistician, spending her hours fitting statistical models to mountains of data and creating profiles of the bank's potential clients who could then be canvassed. As my friend explained and as I could guess, this was top-end BPO work. |
| As if this were not enough, there followed another phone call from another friend, also a college batchmate and one of the early settlers in Bangalore, asking if I remembered so-and-so who would be here accompanying his son coming to take up his first job with an absolutely top American software firm. |
| So it was that last Sunday, we four friends from the Presidency College batch of 1969, sat around reliving old memories, asking if anyone knew where so-and-so had disappeared, unlike so-and-so who unfailing came visiting periodically from the US and remained the mammoth eater that he always was. |
| We casually discussed if we should form an informal alumni association of our batchmates in Bangalore. The more serious suggestion was to form a non-resident fathers' association with someone like me as the local contact. |
| And as we boisterously exchanged jokes as only 50-plus friends do on catching up after years, I realised in bemused wonder that none of these top-flight jobs engaging these bright youngsters existed a few years ago, as also did not Bangalore's traffic jams. |
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