Raghav walked the three format directions: Field Notes, Company File, Artefact. All three now live on the Visual Direction tab, each with its reference shelf. The shortlist and the in-person reference-books session carry into this call.
All three briefs went out. Pranav V S is confirmed on Bangalore-1985. Two approached writers declined on timeline, so the politics and GCC pieces are back in search.
Every recorded session is now in hand and coded: the last thirteen files arrived 28 July, including the 30 January group discussion, and the whole archive went through the pipeline the same night. The full ledger is at the bottom of this page. The artefact hunt continues. The working title still awaits the group's reaction.
Drishti met the group after spending the previous week watching the interviews. This section covers each agenda item. The detailed decisions and owners appear below, followed by the group's editorial notes.
The accounts register, contributor details and commercial terms are maintained in the private project files.
Pranav V S is confirmed and has asked to read the interviews himself, so we are curating a Bangalore-1985 set from the archive for him. Two approached writers declined on timeline. The search for the open pieces continues, with the GCC investigation the critical one. Commercial terms stay in the private briefs.
The city before the future arrived: the pensioner's paradise and public-sector town, written in a distinct voice for the photo-led city chapter.
Pranav V S wrote the Kencha piece in LURU Issue 4; his Bangalore Cantonment work draws on interviews with women who grew up there in the 80s and 90s (the Cantonment series).
The political and policy reporting: Delhi's machinery, Hegde's Karnataka against a young Chandrababu Naidu, the SEZ and STPI lineage, transfer pricing.
Writer needed. We are talking to Bengaluru political journalists now. This is the piece where a funder introduction moves fastest, because the reporting runs through Delhi and Vidhana Soudha memory.
The investigation: find the companies that toured the fishbowl and copied the template, and interview the people who did the copying. Funder leads wanted.
Writer needed; the call sharpened the brief. Arun's framing, taken into the search with thanks: infrastructure can be bought in two days now, so the piece has to dig into why TI India worked. The vision, the political climate, the culture, the young people who didn't know what was impossible, the Indians at the top. Sharada's point stands with it: much of that is already on tape, so whoever writes this should hear the widest cut of the archive. Drishti is talking to senior tech-beat reporters (ten to twenty years on the industry) and hopes to put a name against the piece by Monday 3 August.
The brief pages carry no links back to this working room and none to each other; each writer sees only their own. Please don't forward one writer's link to another. The two open briefs get fresh links before they go to anyone new.
We brought three options for the two open pieces (hold the dates and shrink; give them a later draft date inside the locked structure; bring one in-house). The room did not pick one. Drishti's read is that the GCC piece needs a seasoned writer more than a fast one, and nobody objected. So the search runs first, with a name hoped for by Monday 3 August, and the draft date gets set with the writer at signature, inside the locked structure. Writers may also want to interview some of you directly; Arun and Sharada have already offered, and we will coordinate timings once a writer is in.
The group reviewed the schedule from the archive handover to the BLF launch. There are only a few spare days before M7. The outcomes below list what the funder group needs to send in August. Fortnightly calls will continue to review progress and make decisions.
| When | What lands | Gate |
|---|---|---|
| Thu 13 Aug | The M2 archive review, fixed on the call as the next call's main agenda. The Mohan Rao transcript (the last outstanding tape, received 31 Jul) coded in; the cleaned archive opened to the funders with an explorer tab on this site; the session-and-voice arithmetic Sharada queried reconciled in the review pack. Giri is travelling 11–15 Aug, so he gets a separate 20-minute walkthrough. | M2 review |
| Fri 14 Aug | The women's round-table recorded (Arun convenes): the last new session that can reach the manuscript. | |
| Fri 21 Aug | The epilogue draft in from Arun (committed on the call), with versions from Giri and others welcome; we edit and collate. | |
| Mon 24 Aug | Pranav's first draft in (the date on the briefs, one week ahead of lock). The politics and GCC drafts get their dates when their writers sign; the call's steer was a seasoned writer over a fast one, with edits running inside the locked structure. | 2 in search |
| Mon 31 Aug | Content lock. Every chapter drafted, structure fixed, no new material after this date; commissions continue in edit inside the locked structure. Narrator sign-off packs go out the same day; the window closes 14 Sep, and quotes not confirmed by then are substituted or cut, not chased. Transcription complete. | M3 review |
| Mid Sep | First complete manuscript, with the sign-off window closed, reviewed with the Authorised Representative. | M4 review |
| Sep | Design production on the locked manuscript: chapter layouts, photo treatment, graphic interludes. Fact-check closes. Printer quotes in; a white dummy (paper and binding, no ink) in hand at the in-person session. | |
| Wed 30 Sep | Design freeze. After this, changes put the production window at risk. | |
| Early Oct | Printer selected on the funders' call; print-ready files delivered; digital soft launch (site and LinkedIn) opens the public story. | M5 advance |
| Mid Oct – 5 Nov | Wet proofs approved and the run on press ahead of the Diwali break (6–10 Nov); binding and delivery by 25 Nov. Hardbound with mixed stocks needs the full window. | M6 balance |
| Nov | Advance copies to contributors; the alumni first-150 push begins; final delivery reviewed (print-ready file plus marketing assets). | M7 review |
| 11–13 Dec | BLF. The book launches at the 15th edition, featured with one of its writers in the businesses-of-Bangalore conversation. Bookstore side via Atta Galatta. |
What protects these dates: the 48-hour decision turnaround (stands through August), every recorded session now being in hand, and each gate's review meeting being fixed as soon as its deliverable is in sight. Biweekly sprint reviews continue throughout, per the agreement. Production comparisons and commercial printer discussions stay in the private project files.
Thursday 13 August, the next call, with the archive review as its main agenda. We bring the review pack and open the cleaned archive to the group, with an explorer tab on this site. Giri is travelling 11–15 Aug, so we schedule him a separate 20-minute walkthrough before he leaves.
Private administration is recorded outside the deployed working room.
Arun said "Bangalore Was Not Inevitable" reads as a double negative and takes a moment to parse. Sharada preferred "Becoming Bengaluru" among the alternatives discussed. The group left the title open until the full manuscript is ready, following Gaurav's experience with Grandmotherland.
7 September update: the book is now titled Becoming Bengaluru.
No name yet, but a sharper brief. Arun's framing of the GCC piece and Sharada's steer on archive access are in the search notes with thanks; Drishti hopes to have a writer by Mon 3 Aug. Funder introductions remain the fastest help, for writers and for GCC-company leads both.
Arun committed on the call to write ("I told Giri, which means I've committed"), and Giri asked for a structure to write against, so several versions may come in and we collate. We owe the group the brief first: structure, word target and entry points. Two questions sit at its centre: why this story matters now, and why you gave it this much of yourselves. Arun also floated a one-hour session with Giri, Praveen and Sharada to talk it through; happy to help convene once the brief is out. The Fri 21 Aug draft date stands.
The group agreed to hold the round-table with open prompts similar to those used in the other interviews. Drishti will send broad directions instead of a fixed questionnaire. Giri suggested Savitri; Sharada will invite her. She joined around 1988, per Sharada, and is still at TI, a perspective the current voices do not hold. Anchored in the first five to ten years, trend-lines to today welcome. Arun convenes; record by Fri 14 Aug to reach the manuscript.
Editorial deliverables: the commissioned-writer packet and curated Bangalore-1985 interview set · the epilogue brief with structure and word target · Drishti's round-table directions · the list of hard-to-find Bangalore books for Sharada's leads · the cleaned archive with an explorer tab and M2 review pack · Giri's walkthrough before the review call. Private administration stays in the project files.
What we need from you, in order: the last batch of photos plus the Google Photos albums, the one standing ask · leads on the 2003–07 Bangalore books once we send the list · the 30 January speaker attribution confirmed · badge numbers, joining years and sign-off emails on the info sheet.
The group discussed several possible threads for the book. These remain working notes for the editorial team.
Arun pointed us to the end of Paul Koch's transcript: asked to reflect on why it all worked, Koch gives what Arun rightly calls a fantastic answer. Sharada paired it with Mike Watson's thread, the sense that there was always a way if you dealt with things with patience on all sides, told through a personal anecdote. Both are marked for the chapters that close the arc.
Sharada's observation: the answers to "when did you leave, why, where did you go" contrast what TI India was better than almost anything else on tape. We are re-reading the exits with that lens.
Arun's "Hindi movie" sidebar, which is really a chapter note: couples met and married inside TII, and, to Praveen's question, TIIers' children have since worked and interned at TI India. Names and details are in the editorial notes, to be confirmed with the people concerned before any of it reaches a page. We will also check the tapes for the on-and-off referral incentive Sharada remembers.
After watching the Titan series, people Arun met over breakfast offered introductions to a director's team and investors. Arun's view was to finish the book first. BLF could be the right time to show the collector's edition to producers. Any adaptation would require the TI and TII rights position to be settled before discussions begin.
Arun's fight-with-himself version of the question (a Delhi man who came anyway), Giri's answer (the talent, nothing else), Praveen's inversion (where would a GCC go today?), and Sharada's Tesla aside. These different answers can shape the epilogue. As Arun said, the contributors do not need to arrive at one answer.
A small shelf of Bangalore books from 2003–2007, "Network City" (2003) among them, covered some of this ground while memories were younger, and copies are hard to find. We share the list; Sharada checks for leads; physical copies gladly borrowed.
Giri checked during the call: the video existed, the transcript didn't. It does now: 1 hour 42 minutes, recorded 3 December 2025, in our hands since 31 July. The last open question on the archive is closed. The export carries unnamed speakers, so it needs the same attribution step as the 30 January group before sign-off. It joins the corpus in the next coding run, and every number on this page updates with it.
Five documents and eleven images of the TI India Linear (later Mixed-Signal) design centre he managed from the US, 1989–2002, including a written first-person Q&A he authored, "Building a World-Class Engineering Team from 10,000 Miles Away", a 1993 centre history, startup-era documents and a March 1993 TI India technical magazine. A second Koch source in his own words; we are deciding how it enters the corpus.
From the funders' 30 July WhatsApp batch: Sharada's three TI badges across the eras (756055), a TI inter-departmental envelope with her name on the routing grid, and a photographed Fortune of 14 March 1988, Jerry Junkins on the cover holding a wafer. Exactly the material the design needs. Photos remain the big ask: more sit in the Google Photos albums, the originals deserve proper scans, and we are asking CN Kumar whether he holds photographs from the era or of the city.
Every session recorded for this project is transcribed, coded twice and tagged: 38 sessions from 35 voices, 48.8 hours of interview testimony. Every archive figure on this page is computed from the coded corpus. Private administration is not published here.
Counter-evidence flags mark passages that challenge the current account. The session and hour counts are interviews only; the passage, quote, wit and counter-evidence totals span all 40 coded documents, including the three planning calls, so funder intent stays on the record. Witness counts behind each chapter use interview testimony only.
One row per voice. Click any heading to sort. "Coded ×2" means two AI models coded the tape independently, after which their disagreements were measured and reviewed.
| Voice | Sessions | Recorded | Duration | Passages | Quotes (ev4+) | Wit | Counter-ev. | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ravee Nerur | 2 | 28–29 Nov 25 | 3h 09m | 215 | 53 | 37 | 35 | Coded ×2 |
| Ram | 2 | 24 Jan + 5 Feb 26 | 2h 44m | 284 | 49 | 32 | 39 | Coded ×2 |
| Charlie Simon · first MD | 2 | 23 Nov 25 + 27 Jun 26 | 2h 06m | 235 | 45 | 28 | 26 | Coded ×2 |
| Ramesh Dewangan | 2 | 12 + 25 Feb 26 | 2h 21m | 258 | 43 | 32 | 19 | Coded ×2 |
| Anirudh | 2 | 3 + 10 Feb 26 | 2h 17m | 171 | 37 | 28 | 17 | Coded ×2 |
| Geetha, Champaka & Logie · 30 Jan group, with Praveen | 1 | 30 Jan 26 | 1h 22m | 210 | 46 | 42 | 16 | Coded ×2 |
| Giri Krishna | 1 | 10 Apr 26 | 1h 36m | 201 | 40 | 29 | 49 | Coded ×2 |
| Mohan Rao · proposed the India site | 1 | 3 Dec 25 | 1h 42m | 167 | 30 | 16 | 19 | Coded ×2 |
| Mahitha | 1 | 17 Feb 26 | 1h 20m | 160 | 29 | 30 | 27 | Coded ×2 |
| Pradip Shah | 1 | 24 Mar 26 | 1h 29m | 120 | 29 | 21 | 18 | Coded ×2 |
| Praveen Prathivadi | 1 | 16 Jun 26 | 1h 30m | 148 | 29 | 22 | 20 | Coded ×2 |
| Sattam Dasgupta | 1 | 26 Mar 26 | 1h 32m | 210 | 28 | 23 | 34 | Coded ×2 |
| Srini Rajam · first Indian MD | 1 | 23 Dec 25 | 1h 50m | 118 | 28 | 24 | 17 | Coded ×2 |
| CN Kumar | 1 | 17 Jun 26 | 1h 29m | 220 | 27 | 18 | 27 | Coded ×2 |
| Paul Koch · LinASIC from Dallas | 1 | 14 Jul 26 | 1h 23m | 112 | 26 | 18 | 12 | Coded ×2 |
| Satish (Sathish Purohit) | 1 | 26 Jun 26 | 1h 10m | 141 | 26 | 25 | 11 | Coded ×2 |
| Arun Garg · 756002 | 1 | 5 Feb 26 | 1h 19m | 86 | 25 | 27 | 14 | Coded ×2 |
| Mohan G | 1 | 20 Jan 26 | 1h 34m | 187 | 25 | 21 | 21 | Coded ×2 |
| Sharada Satrasala | 1 | 15 Apr 26 | 1h 17m | 129 | 25 | 7 | 19 | Coded ×2 |
| Gans (Ganapati) | 1 | 27 Jan 26 | 1h 22m | 167 | 24 | 26 | 16 | Coded ×2 |
| Pallab Chaterjee | 1 | 13 Dec 25 | 51m | 104 | 23 | 12 | 21 | Coded ×2 |
| Uttiya | 1 | 20 Feb 26 | 1h 04m | 96 | 23 | 12 | 11 | Coded ×2 |
| Ashok Bareja | 1 | 17 Dec 25 | 1h 22m | 102 | 22 | 10 | 7 | Coded ×2 |
| Nagi | 1 | 12 Jan 26 | 1h 20m | 132 | 21 | 7 | 15 | Coded ×2 |
| Mike Watson · MD 1989–92 | 1 | 13 Jul 26 | 1h 13m | 128 | 20 | 9 | 16 | Coded ×2 |
| Bhanu Kapoor | 1 | 17 Jul 26 | 58m | 152 | 18 | 10 | 20 | Coded ×2 |
| Gangadhar Burra | 1 | 27 Mar 26 | 1h 01m | 97 | 18 | 14 | 10 | Coded ×2 |
| Jaidev | 1 | 28 Jan 26 | 1h 11m | 159 | 17 | 22 | 14 | Coded ×2 |
| Sushil Gupta | 1 | 1 Apr 26 | 1h 09m | 144 | 17 | 27 | 22 | Coded ×2 |
| Soumitra De Sirkar | 1 | 13 Apr 26 | 53m | 90 | 16 | 9 | 6 | Coded ×2 |
| Ravishankar | 1 | 16 Apr 26 | 1h 00m | 88 | 15 | 10 | 10 | Coded ×2 |
| Sanjive Agarwala | 1 | 3 Apr 26 | 1h 02m | 96 | 15 | 9 | 8 | Coded ×2 |
| Mahesh Mehendale · still at TI | 1 | 7 Apr 26 | 1h 09m | 137 | 14 | 9 | 12 | Coded ×2 |
Seven sessions joined the archive on 28 July: Mike Watson (MD 1989–92), Paul Koch (who ran the Linear ASIC centre from Dallas), Satish on facilities, Bhanu Kapoor on the DROID silicon compiler, Praveen's own sitting, CN Kumar on HR and policy, and the 30 January group discussion with Geetha, Champaka and Logie.
The Mohan Rao question is answered: Giri checked on the call, uploaded the transcript, and it is with us. Two items stand. The 30 January group came from Grain with unnamed speakers; we attributed them from the conversation and would like that confirmed before sign-off packets go out. And Sharada asked us to double-check the session and voice arithmetic read out on the call; we bring the exact reconciliation, name by name, to the 13 August review.
The people-and-archive sheet in the shared Drive is updated to match this ledger: every session dated, the new voices added, and the identity puzzles narrowed. Badge numbers, joining years and sign-off emails are still the columns only you can fill.