Is this New York City or India?

Travel Day 931 – Bangalore, Karnataka, INDIA

When I was walking around to find the British colonial architecture yesterday, I couldn’t help but finding something else as in Bangalore: extremely modern architecture…

Mini Empire State Building in Bangalore

When I crossed Cubbon Park towards the east side to walk along MG road, I first reached an area that seemed to want to look like mini version of New York City. All of a sudden there were shiny glass high-rise buildings and even a modern mini version of the Empire State Building. I really couldn’t believe my eyes and I was asking myself the question if this really looked like India…

On the one hand this area didn’t look like India, but on the other it actually did. India was obviously a place with so many facets that it was impossible to capture the entire picture at once and so, even if not suiting my personal ideas of India, this still was apparently one aspect of the country. It was just an expensive shiny glass and steel aspect, but it was still part of India…

High-Rise Buildings in Bangalore, India

This was crazy I thought when I had my bag searched at the entrance to UB City Shopping Mall, a place that looked so expensive and posh that it actually made me feel extremely uncomfortable to just walk around in my shorts and t-shirt to have at look at things. Seriously, this shopping mall could have been anywhere else in world and as Greenbelt had seemed out-of-place to me in Manila, UB City Mall seemed out-of-place here in India…

Actually I had to notice that so far I had not really seen many modern areas in India and out of the big cities I had only been to Kolkata and Delhi and both were a rather mixed bag. In Kolkata there was really only Park street which could be considered the posh shopping street, but here in Bangalore there seemed to be a whole area of fancy stores, posh hotels and expensive restaurants. Definitely nowhere else had I seen a restaurant with a hamburger on the menu for 300 rupees…

UB City Mall in Bangalore, India

And while I couldn’t get over the sight of UB City Mall, I continued my walk towards MG road. This was obviously only to see more of the fancy new version of India, lined with all names of western shops. Bangalore really was a very mixed experience for me, but this whole posh area definitely did not feel like India to me at all…