A tier 1 city, delivered from Temu

I live in Bengaluru, the silicon valley of India. The "of India" part is doing enormous work in that sentence — it is less a descriptor and more a disclaimer, a backhanded compliment baked into the city's own identity. Silicon Valley: the original. Bengaluru: the version that arrived slightly damaged, packaging half open, a note tucked inside that says we are working on it. We have been working on it for a while now.

I did not choose this city. I want to be clear about that — not as a complaint exactly, but as context that matters. Bengaluru was where the opportunity landed, and I needed an exit badly enough that I took it. That was years ago. I am still here. The city and I have reached a kind of détente, which is a generous way of saying I have stopped expecting it to become something it is not.

India, as a country, has a particular genius for the gap between the stated and the actual. We are a superpower, supposedly — a civilization where gods reside everywhere, where rivers are worshipped as bringers of life. Those same sacred rivers are also the most convenient dumping ground for sewage and industrial waste, while every middle-class household quietly installs a reverse osmosis purifier and does not think too hard about it. I have one too. It hums in my kitchen. Everything is fine.

Roads are named after great freedom fighters, kings, visionaries — people who presumably deserved better than to have their names attached to stretches of potholed concrete that flood after ordinary rain. Not storms. Just rain. The kind that happens every year, on schedule, as if the city is perpetually surprised by monsoon season. At this rate Bengaluru will graduate to hovercrafts and boats within the decade. I am not entirely joking and I do not think the city planners are either, at this point.

The tech industry arrived and decided this was India's answer to Silicon Valley, and in some narrow sense it delivered — there are campuses here that would not look out of place in Cupertino, full of smart people doing real work. Step outside the campus gates and the city reminds you where you actually are. The contrast is not charming or ironic. It is just exhausting. You cannot build a world-class industry inside a city that has not figured out world-class water pressure, and yet here we are, doing exactly that and calling it a success story.

The salary question is where the superpower narrative really falls apart. Salaries here are low because there is always someone more desperate than you for your job. That is not a bug — it is the entire economic logic. A billion-plus people, a job market that cannot absorb them, and a corporate culture that has learnt to pay exactly as little as the desperation gradient allows. The "of India" qualifier is not just about infrastructure. It is about what your labour is worth when supply is infinite and leverage is not.

This is the part that the silicon valley branding is designed to obscure. If you squint at the campus hard enough, if you focus on the ping-pong table and the cold brew on tap and the all-hands where leadership talks about impact, you can almost forget that the whole arrangement depends on there always being someone behind you willing to do it for less. The desperation is structural. It is load-bearing. The moment it goes away, so does the pitch.

I am an outsider here in the way that does not show on the surface. I do the job, I know the streets, I have made the apartment mine in the ways I can. But the city never got under my skin the way a place is supposed to when it becomes home. Bengaluru never enticed me — that is the plainest I can say it. Not a bad place, just never my place, and the difference between those two things is the difference between a life you built and a life you ended up in.

There is a specific kind of loneliness in being slightly misplaced. Not dramatic, not crushing — just ambient. Watching other people have a relationship with a city that you never developed. Being, in the most ordinary sense, not from here, not going anywhere soon, and not sure the destination exists yet anyway.

India is a country where the promised superpower status keeps getting pushed to the next decade, where the gap between the India of speeches and the India of daily life is wide enough to build an entire middle class inside and still have room left over. The sign promising completion by next year is sun-bleached and still standing from three years ago. The roads are still named after people who deserved better. The rivers still flow in both directions — sacred in the morning, sewer by afternoon.

I have a reverse osmosis purifier. I did not ask for it. It came with living here.

Written by someone who never asked to live here and has stopped pretending otherwise.