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. Working title: Bangalore Was Not Inevitable.
The book is hardbound, photo-led, 100 to 150 pages, and launches at 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.
TI India is widely credited as the first GCC, before the term existed. In the years after 1985, companies toured its office to see how offshore R&D actually worked; employees called it the fishbowl. Then HP, Motorola, Intel, IBM and the rest arrived. Today India hosts about 2,100 GCCs employing over two million people (Zinnov–NASSCOM, 2026). Between the fishbowl and the 2,100 sits a transmission story nobody has reported.
The assignment: go find the copiers. Track down the people at the companies that studied TI and interview them. We supply leads from our narrator network: the executives who gave the tours, the alumni who seeded rival centres, the companies that came to look.
The piece runs as a reported feature in the book's closing arc, and it speaks directly to the book's first audience: the people who work in GCCs today.