'My name is Ivy Timberwoods?'

"There is no way around it: Bangalore has no Grand Narrative in its interstices. It has been a middling, moderate city, short on ambition..." writes N Kalyan Raman, a lone voice in an anthology that, like an interesting magazine, has essays and extracts and fiction put together higgledy-piggledy in no discernible order. It shouldn't work but it does, like Bangalore itself""different things to different people, yesterday's pension town that has transited so fast into a boomtown, its residents haven't had the time to complain.

The tradition of one-in-two coffee might have faded, the tree-lined roads may be choking with traffic, development might have caused changes in its salubrious climate, and politics may be threatening the city's newfound confidence, but Bangalore is liberalised India's voice and pulse.

For India's young (and for many Americans), Bangalore isn't the pensioner's paradise it was touted to be till just a few decades ago. This is India's (even Asia's) own Silicon Valley, a gargantuan factory that churns out fortunes and accents in equal measure, a mythic Riverdale where real Indians make and spend a lot of real money. Despite renaming fiats, it is no longer possible for it to turn back into Bengaluru, the City of Boiled Beans. Its infrastructure might be struggling with the invasion of the youth from around the country for whom its multinational jobs and liberating atmosphere is like a breath of America itself, but, like India, it will self-correct rather than self-destruct. For now, all those freshly minted millionaires and their success might be guilty of avarice as they seek peer comfort in brands and pubs and nightlife, but in time they will discover the arts and the heritage and the gentility (and possibly genteelity) the city has to offer.

Great literature will then follow, but for now the itinerant writer is in the city as part of the gold rush, whether Thomas Friedman profiling the city 24x7 call centres, or Mike Marquese chasing India and Pakistan's World Cup match, Anthony Spaeth who chances upon the person whose chance ruby collection is probably the richest in the world, or Annalee Saxenian making sense of the IT boom. Jeff Greenwalk comes looking for Star Trek aficionados and the impact it might have had on "Hindustani hackers", cyber geek Bob Hoekstra does a reality check on the people of the city, Po Bronson writes on Bangalore boy Sabeer Bhatia and the idea (and sale) of Hotmail, Joe Roberts finds a fauji family in Bhagpur Extension, William Sutcliffe suffers from food paranoia, and Martin Buckley discovers that Bangalore has possibly become "more sophisticated, more anonymous".

If these accounts are about the new reality of the city, other writers seem less inclined to the discovery of chips and gigabytes, more involved with its human stories. There's Shashi Deshpande a trifle bewildered by "the pace of change", Jayant Kaikini amazed at its paucity to absorb so much sambhar, Sunil Khilnani who sees it as just another "stopping place in a global employment market", and Suresh Menon who analyses the city's links with traditional classical music as well as rock concerts that serve as links to a past about which R K Narayan writes with great felicity, and to which Winston Churchill's diary paints a portrait of life in a mofussil town. Because successful cities have their dose of crime, there's also a gripping real-life piece by special investigators D R Kaarthikeyan and Radhavinod Raju on the hunt for Rajiv Gandhi's assassins""who collectively choose suicide by cyanide rather than succumb to the hands of the CBI.

The bulk of the Indian contributors turn to fiction, Bangalore merely the location for their storytelling. Yet, these stories are uniquely set into its changing cultural paradigm, knitting it into its fictional skeins, chimerically evolving with each author's interpretation of its people, its lanes and bylanes and restaurants, its migrants and residents...as seen by Anita Nayar, Shefali Tripathi Mehta. Vivek Shanbag, Shinie Antony, Timeri Murari and Uma Mahadevan-Dasgupta, among others.

Kalyan Raman may lament the city's lack of greatness, but for every such critic, there's a Yusuf Arakkal who writes, "... I believe Bangalore is the best city in the world. It's a city that made me what I am, a city that transformed a shy sixteen-year-old into a tough man ..." Of course, there are many who believe that Bangalore is the world, as Friedman faithfully reports: "Woman operator in Bangalore giving directions as though she were in Manhattan and looking out of her window: 'Yes, we have a branch on Seventy-fourth and Second Avenue, a branch at Fifty-fourth and Lexington...'."

A city, you might say, with ambition.

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Beantown Boomtown
Bangalore in the World of Words

Edited by Jayanth Kodkani and R Edwin Sudhir
Rupa Price: Rs 295; Pages: 339