How Bangalore became the Silicon Valley of India

Sitting under the ceiling fans at Koshy's Restaurant, a fixture in this city since 1952, it felt like nothing had changed. Waiters in white uniforms with silver buttons on their tunics attended to elderly customers in pressed shirts.

Even the items on the menu seemed like artifacts from another era: vegetable soup, pineapple steak and onions, glazed mutton. They harkened back to the years after India's independence, when Queen Elizabeth and Jawaharlal Nehru visited Koshy's - at least according to the menu - and Bangalore was a green, temperate city of 750,000, favored mainly by middle-class retirees.

I first joined ...