My Impressions of Bangalore.

Bangalore has a history that very few people know of, me being one of them. Well who knew that a place like Bangalore, which is now called ‘The Silicon Valley of India’, was once called ‘The Bean Town’. One of the presentations talked about the growth of Bangalore as a city over the years and how it has two sides to it, one being the traditional side and the other being a metropolis.

The story behind the origin of the name of this place is quite interesting. It was first called ‘Benda-kaalu-uru’ which basically means ‘the village of Boiled Beans’ in Kannada, later called ‘Bangalore’ and now Bengaluru. Talking about the history of Bangalore there were three kings associated with the founding of the city and its surroundings. Veera Ballala Raya, from the Hoysala Dynasty, named Bangalore Benda-kaalu-uru after being offered boiled beans on one of his hunting expeditions, Kempa Gowda who set the four watch towers in and around Bangalore and built ‘The Mud Fort’ which is now popularly known as ‘the Bangalore Fort’ and Hyder Ali a common foot soldier in Mysore and his son Tipu Sultan who both came up with the idea of ‘The Garden City’ and created a beautiful looking 40 acre piece of land.

Bangalore is also a city quite famous for its contributions towards the defense services of the country, which only a handful of us knew before today. One of the examples being The Madras Engineering Group (MEG), which is one of India’s first army associations to be formed and one of the most efficient associations too. They became particularly famous for inventing ‘The Bangalore Torpedo’, which was used in the World War I. We always wondered why the roads in the main city area had names such as Brigade Road, Infantry Road, etc.

Bangalore has done quite a remarkable job over the years and has worked hard to attain the status of one of the main IT hubs of the world today and is expected to do even better in the near future. The opening up of Indian multi nationals such as Infosys and Wipro as a result of the liberalization policy has been a great achievement in the IT sector for the country and has also encouraged other Indian companies to come up in the market and compete against each other and also other multi nationals to get exposure, thus further benefiting the economy.