Invasion of nerds leaves India’s high-tech capital yearning for its old identity

‘This is a celebration of the nerd in each of us,’ declared Partha, the pony-tailed co-founder of Mindtree, an information technology consulting firm, flashing a nervous grin at thousands of young software engineers ranged in a marquee in front of him and going on to read out a dictionary definition: ‘an unstylish, unattractive, or socially inept person, slavishly devoted to intellectual pursuits’.

He might well have been welcoming Gordon Brown, whose recent visit to India’s IT capital, Bangalore, made more headlines than it might otherwise have done because of the hullabaloo about Celebrity Big Brother. But in fact Partha was on the podium a few weeks earlier to launch Osmosis, Mindtree’s annual get-together in Bangalore’s Global Village business park — and his clarion call for nerd-solidarity has deep roots. Bangalore, once the leafy garrison town where the young Winston Churchill spent a charmed year playing polo and reading Gibbon, has been transformed utterly by an invasion of nerds and geeks, and tension with the locals is rising.

‘I resent people who’ve come into Bangalore after 1993,’ says Ganesh, who works for Cricinfo, a sports website. ‘I hate the fact that they don’t respect the cultures which already exist.’ Mindtree hires a few hundred annually, but giants such as Infosys, Wipro and Tata Consulting bring many thousands of graduates to Bangalore from every corner of India. With them have come crazy working hours, hideous congestion, frenzied construction that has razed much of the city’s colonial past, and all the spiritual and health fads that spring up in places where money is swilling around and everyone’s a newcomer.