My Lost World

The man had been watching me from his balcony for several minutes. He was curious, perhaps even a little worried. Finally, he came to his door and shouted, "What do you want?" I smiled apologetically. "I'm looking for my home," I said. "I think you're living in it."

With a frown, he listened. My family, I explained, had built a home here in the neighborhood of Kodialguttu just before I left Mangalore in 1991. This was the first time I had come back, and I wanted to see that house again. I had been searching Kodialguttu for half an hour, but I hadn't found it. In fact, I didn't recognize the neighborhood at all. Our house had been built on a paddy field, and you could see it from a couple of miles around. Instead of that paddy field, I now saw shopping malls, colleges, apartment blocks and a giant convention center sheathed in glass. The man's house was the only thing that looked anything like my old home. Had he bought it from my father? "I'm sorry," he said. "I built it myself eight years ago."

He put on a shirt, and together we went looking--in vain--for my house. I told him how bewildered I was by the way Mangalore had changed. It happened so fast, he said. In the beginning he had been proud that Mangalore was becoming a city, but now he gets confused. "Even we wonder sometimes what city this is that we're now living in," he said.

The pulse of India beats fastest in megacities like Bombay. But to understand how quickly the economic boom is creating a new country, you have to visit places that few foreigners have heard of--places like Mangalore. Back in 1991, when I left, about 300,000 people lived there. Since then its population has doubled. But that doesn't begin to describe its transformation. A decade of rapid growth has produced shopping centers and high-rise apartments--and most of the construction has taken place in the past five years. Old houses have been uprooted, replaced by bars and restaurants. The city's first multiplex cinema is about to open. A giant Smirnoff poster in the center of town announces, LIFE IS CALLING. In Indian cities like Mangalore, answering that call has brought consequences no one could have foreseen.

Located on India's southwest coast, Mangalore is hot, hilly and carpeted in coconut palms. When I was growing up, young men of all religions were united by shared values of hard work, enterprise and a desire to get out of Mangalore as quickly as possible. My brother left when he was 18. I left when I was 16. Many of those who got out never returned. There was no need to go back because the place never seemed to change.

But the past decade has seen extraordinary change--and extraordinary excess--in Mangalore. The fastest-growing industry is education. During the 1980s, higher education became the only way out of a broken system for many frustrated young Indians. The best doctors and computer engineers had a fighting chance of nabbing a lucrative job offer from Silicon Valley or Manhattan. So boys and girls throughout India streamed into colleges and institutes, where they studied calculus and organic chemistry with a passion that was probably unrivaled anywhere in the world. In recent years, the trend has accelerated. Mangalore had one medical college when I left; it now has five as well as at least four dental schools and 14 physiotherapy colleges. Some 350 schools, colleges and polytechnics are listed in its yellow pages.