Snippets: Bangalore Torpedo

Key in the word Bangalore on Google, as we did a few minutes ago, and you'll get 2,030,000 search results!

A lot of people seem to be interested in Bangalore. And why not? In the last few years, it has become synonymous with India; with technological advancement; with business development; with changing times and more. Bangalore is everywhere: in Fortune and Forbes; on BBC and CNN; even in theatre, where a multi-media extravaganza, Alladeen, which is about the lives of call centre employees in Bangalore, has been playing to sell-out audiences around the world and has received rave reviews from the New York Times.

The US tries to catch up
All said and done, Bangalore seems to be a city some people want to emulate. For instance, US Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. At a rally on June 21 at Denver, Colorado, Kerry outlined his agenda for building a stronger America. "Tomorrow, I will focus on the ways we can create universal access to broadband—a technology that can transform our country and create jobs. If Bangalore in India can be completely wired, then so should all of Colorado and all of America.”

“l’ve been Bangalored”
Not only has our city acquired a new dimension, its also acquired a new meaning. From being a nice noun, it's become a menacing verb: Bangalored! T-shirts proclaim the new usage with spirit. Employees hiss the word out in anger. And John Kerry uses it as a campaign promise to protect the interests of the American workforce.
To be "Bangalored" in the US is to have lost one's job…to outsourcing and offshoring.

The writing has been on the wall for a while now. Eight months ago, Fortune magazine ran an article (excerpted in Insight, Dec 2003) whose headline read, "Where your job is going…to Bangalore, India".

Points of view
To put the outsourcing/offshoring phenomenon in brief perspective, what began as programmers writing simple computer codes and call-centre processors bringing far-away customers up-to-date on their credit card balances, has evolved into a stream of increasingly sophisticated, high-end services. For instance, labs in Bangalore are performing cutting-edge research for General Electric and Texas Instruments—work that was once only done in the USA. So, depending on who you are and where you live, you may love the Bangalore of today…or resent it and wish it had stayed the pensioner's paradise it once was.

So what is the Bangalore Torpedo?
It's a small twist in our tale. The term "Bangalore Torpedo" has nothing to do with call centres, outsourcing, BPOs, Infosys or Kerry. Though you could be forgiven if you drew that conclusion.

The Bangalore Torpedo was, quite literally, a torpedo. Designed by Captain McClintock (of the British Army Bengal, Bombay and Madras Sappers and Miners) in 1912 and developed in Bangalore, these torpedoes were not intended for warfare. They were anti-personnel mines, used to explode barbed-wire obstacles and booby traps left over from the Boer and Russo-Japanese Wars.

Bangalore Torpedoes were widely used in the Second World War, largely to clear the beaches during the D-Day landings. They are in use even now and continue to be known as Bangalore Torpedoes.

Incidentally, the Madras Sappers, one of the oldest regiments of the Indian Army, are now known as the Madras Engineering Group. And a photograph of the Bangalore Torpedo can be seen at their regimental museum in Ulsoor.