ABSTRACT
Bangalore has become something of a poster boy of the ‘information age’ of late, a city at the centre of the relatively successful Indian IT industry, filled with software companies, call centres and cybercafés; a city populated by the growing and affluent middle classes. Whilst such an image might ignore the great disparities and urban poverty that accompany Bangalore’s role at the heart of the informational economy, this is undoubtedly a city undergoing rapid social change. This chapter draws upon the author's doctoral research in a Bangalore cybercafe, explores social change as experienced by a group of young, middle-class men who are growing up in the new social spaces of Bangalorean modernity. The focus is on the role played by a number of different places – cybercafes, the Internet and a new breed of coffee shops – in the development of gendered identities for Bangalore’s middle-class male youth.
