I asked Girish Karnad what he made of Bangalore’s IT transformation. “Actually, I became comfortable financially because of Infosys,” he said. He’s vaguely related, he explained, to Nandan Nilekani, one of the company’s founders. Back when they were getting started, and no one understood what IT was, Nilekani had urged Karnad to buy shares in the company. “I said, no, I don’t want to buy shares, I’m not interested in investment,” Karnad said. “He said, take it, take it. I got very irritated; I said to my wife, look, this Nandan Nilekani is irritating me. I told him I don’t want shares, but he won’t let go. And my wife gave a very typical small-town answer: she said, you know, he has such nice parents, they’re such loving relatives to us, why don’t you buy a few shares? So I bought it for family reasons. And suddenly within ten years it had become the miracle firm, and those shares paid for this house. That really pulled me up from being a lower-middle-class family man to a comfortable economic frame. I wish I’d invested more.”

It wasn’t a boom for everyone. “A large section of the local population feels completely lost,” Karnad said....