The full picture

Bangalore is a notoriously tough city to pin down. With no clear defining narrative, the spirit and essence of what drives this city has always been maddeningly elusive. Is it a pensioner&rsquos paradise A land of monotonously great temperate weather Or one that is overrun by a tragic oversupply of mall rats, software start-ups and hive-like high-rise apartments

Many of these thought-provoking questions, coupled with entertaining nuggets of anecdote, humour and comment joust for space in Multiple City Writings on Bangalore, an engaging and very readable anthology of essays, personal recollections, translations from Kannada literature and short stories edited by Bangalore-based writer and journalist Aditi De.

Penned by a widely disparate group of writers spanning over a century (R.K. Narayan, U.R. Ananthamurthy, Pankaj Mishra, Winston Churchill, Mahesh Dattani, Thomas Friedman, William Dalrymple and other less familiar names) the book&rsquos 51 selections range from Bangalore&rsquos amorphous geography to its peculiar festivals and social rituals, its lost multi-lingual communities and its recent transformation into a glossy hub of India&rsquos technology boom &mdash all of which almost startle the reader into an appreciation of the city&rsquos boggling diversity.

Multiple City contains all the obvious signposts in R.K. Narayan&rsquos &lsquoThe Town of Boiled Beans&rsquo and Suryanth Kamath&rsquos &lsquoA City Yet Unborn&rsquo, for instance, we&rsquore introduced to Magadi Kempe Gowda, a warlord who rose to be the founder of Bangalore. Contrast Geeta Doctor&rsquos lyrical, charming piece on the history of the Bangalore Cantonment Area against Sham Banerji&rsquos &lsquoBit by Byte&rsquo and you will be able to map the city&rsquos metamorphosis from a once-elegant city for retirees to one that now thrives on a 24/7 culture.

But for someone who has grown up in Bangalore, or for the rootless wanderers who have recently made it their home, it is the intimate stories &mdash Ramachandra Guha&rsquos moving portrait of Mr Shanbhag, the reticent owner of the famous Premier Bookshop, Shashi Deshpande and Janaki Nair&rsquos evocative memoirs of the places they frequented as young girls &mdash that reveal the real pulse of the city.

Taken together, this collection represents what is possibly one of the fullest pictures that you will see of Bangalore, a city that continues to be a wellspring of material for regional writing.