Nicholas Nisbett - Growing up in the Knowledge Society: Living the IT Dream in Bangalore

Series Editor: Sujata Patel
Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Pune

This series introduces a holistic approach to studying cities, the urban experience, and its imaginations. It will grasp what is distinctive of the urban phenomenon in India, as also delineate the characteristic uniqueness of particular cities as they embrace change and create ways of experiencing modernities.

Taking an interdisciplinary route, the series will assess the many facets of urbanisation and city formation, and explore the challenges faced in relation to regional, national and global processes.

The books in this series will present the changing trends in macro and micro urban processes; the nature of demographic patterns of migration and natural growth therein; spatial reorganisation and segregation in urban areas; uneven economic development of manufacturing and services in cities; unequal access to power in the context of formal citizenship; increasing everyday violence and declining organised protest; breakdown of urban family life in juxtaposition with the reconstitution of community. They will trace how new forms of socialities are replacing old forms of trust and solidarity, and how these are being institutionalised in distinct and diverse ways within South Asia.

Living the IT Dream in Bangalore

Nicholas Nisbett

First published 2009
by Routledge
912 Tolstoy House, 15-17 Tolstoy Marg, New Delhi 110 001

Simultaneously published in the UK
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Transferred to Digital Printing 2009

2009 Nicholas Nisbett

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Star Compugraphics Private Limited
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Sector 7, Noida 201 301

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-0-415-55146-5

This book has benefited greatly from the help, advice and input from individuals in both India and in the UK throughout its journey from PhD thesis to its current form. Above all, this work would not have been possible without the generosity and openness of my friends and informants in Bangalore; at the Cybercaf in Lakshminagar, particularly Karan and David and their families (to whom this book is partly dedicated); the students and teachers on my course at MITC; Anand Chhatbar and his family in Bangalore and Mumbai; and Gopinath Parayil, who hosted me on return trips, and the wide range of others who helped me either briefly or in depth on several different trips to India. I am grateful to the UKs Economic and Social Research Council for funding this work through a Research Studentship and a Postdoctoral Fellowship.

I was provided scholarly help and assistance from several sources, in Bangalore, Chennai and back home in Brighton. I am extremely grateful for the advice and support of my supervisors and my postdoctoral mentor at the University of Sussex: Katy Gardner, Filippo Osella and Geert De Neve, who helped push this thesis in directions I would not have anticipated and provided insightful guidance into the anthropology of South Asia. Other faculty, friends and colleague on the DPhil programme have provided much welcomed support during the whole process including Kathryn Tomlinson, Deborah Simpson and Martyn Rogers, who helped me through the initial conception and fieldwork, and Nicole Blum, Laura Griffiths, Rebecca Prentice, Meera Warrier, Martina Mettgenberg and Shalini Grover, who have all provided much welcome criticism and advice on various papers and chapter drafts along the way. Jane Cowan was extremely generous in lending me an office for much of a year-and-a-half during the initial redrafting of this book. Further help has been provided by numerous panel and workshop participants in Europe, India and the US I would particularly like to thank: Mark Holmstrm, who acted as a discussant on a paper presented to a South Asian Anthropologist Group annual workshop in 2005; participants in a seminar at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society in Bangalore in January 2006; and Caroline Osella, who was discussant at a workshop on the Indian middle classes held at Sussex in July 2007.