If you´ve paid any attention to the marketing coming out of Bangalore, you know that it is the "Silicon Valley" of India. This follows a long tradition of similar attempts by cities and regions to give themselves cool titles that attract companies and wealth. There must be at least 100 "Silicon Valley of ..." cities around the world.
There are, however, almost no important parallels between the Bay Area and Bangalore. This is even true if you compare Bangalore with the Bay Area of 10 years ago. Bangalore has a tiny fraction of the technology industry that you will find in Silicon Valley. There are a tiny fraction of the software startup companies (as opposed to services startups). There is also just a tiny fraction of the venture capital available here.
The biggest single difference, however, is the type of job that has come to Bangalore en masse. The Bay was about creativity and making the next big thing. It still is to a very real degree. The growth that has come to Bangalore has mostly been about taking internal IT development and integration that cost too much to do in the US and Europe and getting someone else to do it. This is what Infosys and Wipro and TCS are all about.
Don´t get me wrong, this is important work and it´s the work that was available. These companies can do it well or poorly depending on many factors, but it is a huge degree away from being anything like a Silicon Valley.
By now you might think I don´t like Bangalore. That´s not true. I love it. I´ve lived here for two years and I find it vibrant and youthful. It is a place at odds with itself where growth and tradition butt heads. It is a city of contradictions and opportunity. It can also be a place of despair and envy and patience and hope and corruption and compassion and a thousand other things.
It is so many things that for a long time I marveled at how they had found this moniker to attach to it which is so patently untrue. Then it hit me; this is not a moniker of what Bangalore is, but what it wants to become. Or, perhaps the moniker is what it thinks it wants to become.
At some level, there is a lament in this for me. I love the spirit and flavor and pace of startup companies and I see so many of the programmers I meet here longing for that kind of environment. When it comes to taking the leap, however, that happens far too rarely. There are too few companies like Stratify, Google, StorePerform and Thoughtworks, and there is too much pressure for people to avoid risks and choose the steady path. The lament is that there are very bright people, but time passes them by and they pass on without having risked and won or risked and lost and grown.
I still think that Bangalore may yet become the Silicon Valley of India, but it will take a few real visionaries and risk takers to make that happen. I hope it does.
| 
