My Lost World

(2 of 3)

A lot of the new colleges, predictably, focus on computer education. They tempt young recruits with the prospect of rewards that would have been inconceivable before the outsourcing boom. A few outsourcing companies, including tech giant Infosys, have opened shop in town. A flood of new money has arrived, thanks to outsourcing jobs, surging real estate prices and expatriate remittances. As a result, many locals have become middle-class, upper-middle-class or even rich. One ad for "premium luxury apartments" promises, IF YOU'RE IN LIMELIGHT, THIS SUITS YOU THE BEST. AND IF YOU'RE NOT, THIS PUTS YOU IN LIMELIGHT.

The city's new affluence manifests itself in subtle ways as well. Leo Fernandes, one of my old teachers, told me, "All the other teachers have bikes. Some even have cars. Only I still walk." Others spoke in a similar manner of a simpler life that was disappearing. I met neighbors, relatives and classmates, and each had done well in some way--one had his own house, another a car. But each also had some sorrow we could hardly have imagined. A Catholic friend's daughter had married a Hindu, and her family no longer spoke to her. A Hindu friend's daughter had been divorced by her husband. Divorce, extramarital affairs, interreligious marriages, homosexual flings--the doors of experience had swung open in Mangalore. The small city had grown up.

At the Nehru Maidan, an open space in the center of town, I watched kids playing cricket. Among the spectators was a group of drifters and homeless men, some carrying rolled-up mattresses. Most Mangaloreans I spoke with shrugged off the arrival of so many poor people and said they were itinerant immigrant workers, drawn by the construction boom. Nobody, it seemed, was ready to acknowledge that the city might have a permanent underclass that the boom had left behind.

For better or worse, Mangalore's fate is in the hands of outsiders. "Tier 2 cities" like Mangalore are believed to hold the key to the future of the Indian outsourcing industry. With wages rising in big cities like Bangalore and Bombay, tech companies must expand fast in lower-cost cities. But Mangalore shares the problem of other small cities with big aspirations: it's not an exciting place to live. "Lifestyle is a challenge when you're trying to get people from outside to stay here," Sudhir Albuquerque told me. Albuquerque, an Infosys executive, was taking me around the company's Mangalore campus, the most significant tech presence in the city. "There are things you can do here that you can't dream of doing in a big city like Bangalore. For instance, you can still go home for lunch, which I do on most days." But even that may become a thing of the past. Infosys is planning to move to a new, larger campus soon. From there, Albuquerque said sadly, he wouldn't be able to pop home at lunchtime.