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.
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). This piece will report how the model travelled from TI India to the industry that followed.
Find and interview people at the companies that studied TI. 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 will appear near the end of the book and is written for people working in GCCs today.