'And on the weekends, what does he do, the British adult man? Where does he go? Anybody? Anybody?" I should know this one, being an adult British man myself. On weekends I generally like to ... unwind? I don't know, actually. It's a good question.
"He goes up to ..? Anybody? The British man, he goes up to ... to Scotland!"
Ram, our friendly instructor, knocks on the screen of a filthy old Compaq desktop where flickers, dimly, a map of the British Isles. They seem very far away, all of a sudden, the British Isles, and in part that's because they are.
I have for three days been prowling the rock strewn, red-mud pavements of Bangalore and now find myself in a telephone call-centre with curling carpets just to the south and the west of that Indian city's centre.
Myself and 12 of the young call-centre operatives of tomorrow are learning the fine points of Anglo-American culture so that, later on during our working lives, we can more easily relate to the faceless Westerners who we'll be reminding to pay their credit card bills.
Frankly, though, it was news to me that 80 per cent of British insurance claims result directly from soccer hooliganism. I also don't see how it could have escaped my attention that many Westerners use the same fork and spoon from childhood to death. I'm not saying it's a bad idea, necessarily. Just that it doesn't ring a bell.
"And why?" Ram continues, cocking his head and touching his chin in a gesture of quizzicality not much seen since the days of the Elizabethan stage. "Anybody? Why does he go up to Scotland on the weekend, the British adult man? He goes to Scotland on the weekend ... for the wines!"
Ram shoots me a wink and caresses his belly in a circular motion. "Mmmmm! Very delicious. Some of the finest wines in the world, they are coming from Scotland."
This is, of course, not actually the case. But there is a larger point: nearly a decade after the south Indian city of Bangalore was anointed as the symbol of globalisation and outsourcing, a gleaming beacon pointing the way to a future of frictionless capitalism, its light still flickers like the screen on Ram's beloved Compaq.
The city remains a work in progress, one that reveals the future's perennial fondness for giving the impression it's just about to arrive ... and then getting called away on other business.
A good place to watch the work progress is from the rooftop patio of Bangalore's superb Ebony restaurant. My hotel, the Ivory Tower, is just across the way and I've been starting my mornings with the traditional south Indian breakfast of idli and dosas and very strong coffee, gazing out over the chaos of Asia's fastest-growing city while being stared at by a team of six waiters who descend en masse anytime I even vaguely look like I might want something.
The view over Bangalore is impressive. Most mornings there are two or three separate buildings burning down in different parts of the city and, as if in response, the gleaming stumps of three or four new glass-and-steel skyscrapers that you don't remember seeing yesterday. The energy is palpable, but it isn't what it was.
Around the turn of the millennium, at the height of the city's high-tech boom, there was so much money and so many people flowing into Bangalore it felt like a city being built in a day. To anyone chancing to pass through (as I did myself in 2002) the pace was pretty close to unmanageable.
The potholed roads were crammed with traffic - mainly helmetless men on scooters, as I recall, balancing computer monitors on their heads - but it didn't seem to slow anyone down. In every vacant lot there seemed to be an office building growing at visible speed. I remember the sign outside one of them: MicroHard. It was that kind of heady atmosphere, when even a terrible pun seemed reason enough to throw up a skyscraper.
Returning to the city today, however, I find it hardly recognisable. The roads are still jammed with cars and scooters but the speed of the traffic - indeed of life in the city - has slowed considerably. Before the boom Bangalore was known as India's "garden city", a tag that seemed destined to join Greenland in the ranks of ironically inappropriate place names.
Nowadays the foliage seems to be reasserting itself - though I trust the splendid, colonial-era botanical gardens were never under threat - and the general mood of the place has mellowed from frantic pioneer hysteria into a sort of chic self-confidence.
There are shopping centres now, and suburbs. There are nightclubs and restaurants and bars. There is even, in the rubbled moonscape of the slum two blocks from my hotel, a wooden shack with a roof made of sari material and plastic bags whose hand-lettered awning proudly reads: laser eye surgery.
Bangalore, it should be said, has been wealthy before - or rather it has been home to wealthy people before, who left behind pockets of old-world colonial luxury to be colonised again by India's new "nouveaux riches"
The Bangalore Club, established in 1868, boasts a 15-year waiting list for membership and the former patronage of Winston Churchill (who still owes the club some 15 rupees, according to a prominently displayed ledger of irrecoverable debts).
In terms of sheer opulence, though, Bangalore stands in awe - and in the shadow - of the mighty Palace of Mysore. It was only finished in 1912, having been commissioned in 1897 by Mysore's then queen regent, but in its tasteful hugeness and the epic whimsy of its pink marble domes it looks more like something out of Kubla Khan.
Returning to town, I pay a visit to the trendy Park hotel, where young Bangalore allegedly comes out to play. The Park is a towering masterpiece of Terence Conran modernist architecture, and - having arrived too early for the cocktail set - I spend some time inside with the serene figure of chef Abhijit Saha, a man who rises daily to the surreal challenge of running a world-class Italian restaurant in the cradle of modern India.
If that weren't difficult enough, Saha's restaurant is named 'I-t.alia (clearly the Bangalorean impulse to hang millions of dollars on a feeble attempt at wordplay hasn't dimmed very much since the go-go days of MicroHard).
Saha's predicament, in many ways, embodies Bangalore's new precarious stability - but if his minestrone with pancetta is anything to go by, the city has nothing to worry about. Rich and oily, this is a strapping young soup that revels in its surroundings, holds fast to its Italian heritage, but keeps the greenery to a minimum beneath a coiled plume of pancetta.
Invigorated, I ask Saha about his city. He shakes his head. "It is the roads," he says sadly. "The roads here in Bangalore, they are very bad."
I've been hearing this a lot.
Indeed it is this, the quintessentially prosaic issue of "infrastructure", that has slowed Bangalore's growth from meteoric to steady, and upon which may hang the city's future.
The roads are not just bad; they are very bad. But the state government - Bangalore is state capital of Karnataka - doesn't care terribly much. Or it does and it doesn't.
AT&T, Dell and Citibank may have moved whole departments of their companies to India, but those people don't get to vote. To most Karnatakans, the ones who elect people, this is still a rural state with an agricultural economy and fixing Bangalore's roads, understandably, is a relatively low priority to those who plough the clay with iron shares
What we have, here atop the dusty Deccan Plateau, is a city stuck not between past and present - many cities are stuck there - but between past and future.
And I would not have my Bangalore be any other way. Nor could I want a better and more colourful home for those disembodied voices that I know are now there for me, to help me in my hour of need, even if that hour is 3am. And I hope, as we trained telephone call-centre operatives are fond of saying, that I have been able to be helpful.
TRIP NOTES
Getting there
Cathay Pacific, Singapore Airlines and Thai Airways fly from Sydney to Bangalore via their hubs.
Staying there
Hotel Ivory Tower doubles from $80. 84 Mahatma Gandhi Road. Phone + 2558 9333 or see http://www.hotelivorytower.com. The Park Bangalore, modern Indian boutique hotel. Doubles from $260. 14/7 Mahatma Gandhi Road. Phone + 2559 4666 or see http://www.theparkhotels.com. Villa Pottipati Neemrana Hotel, family-owned mansion with eight comfortable rooms and a charming garden. Doubles from $90. 142 Fourth Main, Eighth Cross, Malleswaram. Phone + 2336 0777 or see www.neemranahotels.com.
Each month The Sun-Herald Travel brings you an exclusive bonus extract from Travel + Leisure magazine. The September edition is the magazine's annual Asia issue and features stories on the emerging destination of Taipei, Asia's cutting-edge public spaces and a train journey to Lhasa on the world's highest railway. Today we bring you an extract of Travel + Leisure's feature on Bangalore, which asks whether this Indian city endures as the ultimate symbol of globalisation. Each month Travel + Leisure has the best travel photography and writing from around the world. The magazine's correspondents travel independently and do not accept free travel of any kind. See www.travelandleisure.com.au.
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