Ramachandra Guha: Three Bengalurians who truly embody the spirit of the city

In terms of ancestry, I am a fourth-generation resident of Bengaluru. My paternal great-grandfather moved here in the 19th century from a village in the Thanjavur district to become a lawyer. His children were raised and educated in this town, as were their children, among them my father, who studied at St Joseph’s College and later at the Indian Institute of Science.

On my mother’s side, the connection with the city goes back to 1962, when her parents settled here in retirement, taking at face value the then current representation of the place as both a “non-fan station” and a “pensioner’s paradise”.

My family connection to Bengaluru thus goes back 150 years. However, I myself grew up in Dehradun, while coming down south every other summer to spend time with grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins. Although my wife (also of Tamil extraction) spent her own childhood in Bengaluru, we moved here to live only in 1995. I can now thus claim 30 years of continuous residence, a period in which the city has undergone some profound transformations, of which the change in its name (from Bangalore to Bengaluru) may be the least consequential.

On the other side, some things have remained constant, such as the temperate...

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