Alright Bangalore I Get It - You Win

I used to call Bangalore a ticking time bomb.

That the curtains on all the glamour and enamor behind the electronic city would eventually be lifted and people would see it for what it really is - an overpriced, overhyped, over-inflated land mass of commercialized population built on top of has-been techies of the dot-com era and the wannabe Zucks of this new one.

I have never been more proud to be more wrong.

I was at Third Wave yesterday - Cafe No. 003 (Fun little detail added to make the customer feel a connection with the brand. Props to that)

Seating capacity: 60 ; Average order value for two people: INR 650/-

Seats empty out at a 2-hour interval. We were there for 3 hours, but the average was 2 really, and the cafe had to turn down a lot of eager customers who wanted to spend, but just couldn’t find the seats to.

“Is premium coffee really a thing in India?“ was my first thought.

The math seemed to be favouring it.

“Huh, who knew“ was the smirky follow-up thought.

I was waiting for an acquaintance to show up. Overlooking the road, I sat there at that table looking out to the people rushing from wherever they came from to wherever they were going.

Behind me towards the coffee place were a bunch of voices - funds, churn, retention, demo show ups, his startup this, her company that…..

I don’t drop in on other people’s conversations, but when the smell of the rich notes of opportunity reaches you faster than those of roasted coffee beans, your ears tend to perk up a little.

And in a place where every third chair has a company sweatshirt, a hackathon hoodie, or a Macbook with an open Zoom window waiting on potential money to join the call - you’d do well to pay attention to what’s happening.

And so I did, but I was also looking out to the road. Not because those conversations behind me by the 60-odd people were boring (only a tenth of which were couples squibbling), but because the road ahead told me equally as much about why Bangalore is the way it is.

I counted on one hand the number of people who rushed in on these funky little cabs that you wouldn’t find anywhere else but this city, just to catch their regular Yoga class at the Cult next door (ironic, I know).

Delivery partners on their little Yulus scooting and honking their way through the traffic, Green-yellow autos driving around like it’s the end of the world to drop people off at places where they would be spending just as much money as they spent to get there.

On the Workspace opposite my fancy little coffee place, I saw people pacing from one end of the balcony to the next. Calls after calls after calls. On a Saturday evening.

The floor above them, a team was going crazy building TikToks for their brand. Creators build art. It goes viral. People like the ingenuity of it. Marketers jump in. Milk the cow till it bleeds, ruin the fun for everyone, and jump on whatever creators are doing next. Both parties make money, and the vicious cycle continues.

If you’ve been to Bangalore before, you’d read all this and smile.

And if you haven’t, you’d laugh at the doltishness behind it.

Regardless of which side you are on, however, one thing you will not do is be amazed by the energy of this place.

The hustling and the bustling and the eagerness to create cool shit and fail and run and keep going in the pursuit of something alive and fruitful…..

It all builds up to this frothy layer of commercial, capitalized Bangalore that we see before our eyes.

But the bitterness that comes from the churning and burning and grinding of the beans is where the energy comes from. The people are where this energy comes from.

My acquaintance arrived after 55 minutes.

100 minutes later, we became friends.

But that’s just Bangalore for you, I guess :)