Becoming Bengaluru · Bangalore, 1985

The book

What we are making

In 1985, Texas Instruments opened its first offshore R&D centre in Bangalore: India's first multinational R&D operation, and the template for the global capability centres that followed. LURU is producing an oral history of that founding, told by the engineers who built it. The book is titled Becoming Bengaluru.

The book will be hardbound and photo-led, with its length still being worked out. Launch is planned for the Bangalore Literature Festival in December 2026. It is an independent project, initiated and funded by founding-era TI India employees. It is not sponsored by or affiliated with Texas Instruments. Published by LURU; produced by Dead End Right Studios LLP, Bengaluru.

The commission

Bangalore in 1985

Write a portrait of Bangalore in 1985 in your own voice: the pensioner's paradise, the garden city and the public-sector town shaped by HAL, BEL, ITI, ISRO and IISc.

Give the reader the city as it actually was: who lived there, what it made, what it thought of itself.
Explain why TI chose this city: its engineering institutions, academia and talent, along with the weather.
Carry the daily texture: the streets, the cantonment, the lunch homes, the cinema, the quiet.
Stay with Bangalore as it was in 1985. Leave the later nostalgia and Silicon Valley comparisons to the rest of the book.

The chapter is photo-led; your essay runs with archival photographs of the city. Our narrators supply memory. You supply the city. You write in your own voice, and the book keeps it: this is the one chapter designed to sound different from the rest.

What we provide

Excerpts from our interview archive: the first employees on the Bangalore they found.
Our research brief on the city in the mid-1980s, with sources.
The archival photo set the chapter is built around.
An editor. You work with LURU's senior editor from brief to final.

Terms

The offer

3,000

Words, target length

Private

Commission terms

24 Aug

First draft due · 2026 · firm

Named

Contributor credit in the book

Commission terms and revision scope are agreed in the private brief.
Every factual claim is fact-checked; we will ask for sources.
The piece is written for this book under a short work-for-hire agreement with Dead End Right Studios LLP; rights in the piece sit with the project.
The draft date is firm. The manuscript locks on 31 August, the book prints in October, and launch is 11 to 13 December at BLF.