Part 1 — Weather

Background:
As a person who was doing his schooling in Kanpur (UP) in the 80’s and the 90’s and facing innumerable power cuts for up to 2–3 days at a stretch and temperatures hovering around 45–47 degrees, Bangalore was absolutely the place to be during summer holidays in the months of April-May.
Mid of May used to be the rainy season. You could close your eyes and say May 18–20 means rains will come in Bangalore and invariably people will pull out sweaters and blankets just with 2 days of rain.
The temperatures would dip to max of 18–19 degrees.

Now one may ask what was so special then — Answer is Bangalore was not on the global map and was not known to many people within India apart from the neighboring southern states. There was no IT/BT and these innumerable MNCs back then. Yeah we had couple of PSUs like BHEL, HAL, BEML and few banks like SBI, Canara Bank, Corporation Bank. There were no HDFC, IDFC, Yes Bank, Axis, HSBC, Kotak banks.

I remember my neighbours in Kanpur asking me “Yeh Banglour kidhar aata hai?” and then if we say it comes in the southern part of India, some would quickly say “Accha woh Madras mein hain kya?” and we used to say “Madras ke paas hai — 6–7 ghante ka safar hai”. The knowledge about South India at that point of time was so less that for most of the North Indians — south means Madras and if you are a South Indian you are a Madraasi, irrespective of the state you belong to.

Since people didn’t know the place and we had lot of open spaces, lots of trees, playgrounds, the roads were wide, not much of vehicular traffic (every household had a maximum of 1 scooter or if you were a little bit on the higher side of the income you would be having 1 car and 1 scooter). Obviously the rain used to come on time, no water scarcity as there were not many multi storey apartments. Thus Bangalore was great for its weather.
So whoever came to Bangalore either on an official visit or for a family vacation — used to praise it.

When did Bangalore really change?

The transformation of Bangalore (the garden city) to Bangalore (the garbage city) slowly started/initiated I guess during the late 1990’s — early 2000’s (1998–2002). Back then, people didn’t realize, but by the time people realized its already too late. Lets move on to the next part Infrastructure.