India's Silicon Valley — craft beer, startup energy, and garden boulevards
Bengaluru (formerly Bangalore) is India's tech capital and one of the world's fastest-growing cities — home to the headquarters of Infosys, Wipro, and hundreds of global technology companies. Yet beneath the glass towers lies one of India's most pleasant cities: tree-lined boulevards from the British cantonment era, a genuinely thriving craft-beer scene (India's first microbrewery opened here), some of the country's best South Indian food, and a young, cosmopolitan population that keeps nights alive. The city sits on the Deccan Plateau at 920m elevation, giving it a year-round mild climate th…
Bengaluru was founded in 1537 by Kempe Gowda I, a feudal lord under the Vijayanagara Empire, who built a mud fort and laid out the city's basic street grid. The city passed through Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan's Mysore Sultanate before the British East India Company took control in 1799 and developed a military cantonment that would shape the city's bilingual, bicultural character. The post-independence Indian government established public-sector aerospace and defence research organisations here (HAL, ISRO, DRDO), which seeded the technical workforce that attracted private IT companies from the…