Mysore Makeover

Small Start ups ,Malls and Multiplexes and new Apartment Blocks are ushering in change in the once sleepy Town of Mysore

In a garage-turned-lab furnished with modular racks, Nagendra Setty shows off some of the electronic magic he has been brewing for the last few months. A CFL light on his desk comes on when he steps into the work area, and turns off when he steps out. The first commercial product developed by Setty’s startup, Ideas Unlimited, the movement sensor switch automatically turns on all electronic devices in a room—consuming up to 1,000 watts—when its infrared sensor detects a human presence, and turns them off when one leaves the room. It comes at a cost of Rs 3,500-Rs 5,000, depending on the size of the room. Setty is busy setting up a dealer network for the product and talking to builders—he hopes to sell 400-500 units by next year—but his real passion lies elsewhere. It is in a white metal box hidden among papers on a wide windowsill in his office.

Called Braille Tutor, the box is an interactive learning device that spells out a selected letter while also forming a corresponding Braille pattern by electronically popping out the wooden beads arranged in a cell on top of the box. A remote with options to change language and navigate to the next letter or to the first and last letters of the alphabet makes the device easy to use in blind schools. Mass produced, the product will cost Rs 7,500-Rs 8,000, says Setty, who wants his lab to churn out “100 innovations in the next 10 years”.

Each of these innovations will come from neither Bangalore nor Pune, but from Mysore, a once-sleepy town that is witnessing slow but certain change—change that is tucked away in its small startups and splashed across its new malls and multiplexes, change that grows taller with each apartment complex and wider with each Mysorean returning home.“Ten years ago, there was just one traffic light in all of Mysore. Today, there are any number,” says SV Venkatesh, MD and CEO of Raman International Institute of Information Technology, India’s first finishing school for engineering graduates. In a conference room at RIIIT’s plush campus in the Hebbal Industrial Area, Venkatesh says time has plotted a dramatic graph for Mysore, touching almost every aspect of a life that RK Narayan once described as “unruffled, free from the fret and fury of modern city life”.

“In 1990, there were only three engineering colleges in and around Mysore, today there are about 20. From one business school in the Mysore-Mandya region in 1990, we now have 18. And where there were only a handful of IT companies, today there are over 40,” he says.

Outside, students in full-sleeved shirts and salwar-kurtas walk meekly into a lecture hall next door. A new batch of students from colleges across India is reporting today, says Venkatesh. His school, set up in 2007 to make engineers employable, is part of the grab bag of developments Mysore has seen in recent years. RIIIT now churns out over 400 students trained in technical and soft skills every year. Of these, 88 per cent get picked up by industry.“Being in Mysore makes sense for a school like ours. Land is cheaper than in Bangalore so one can afford a bigger campus, and there are fewer distractions for students,” says Venkatesh, who hails from Shimoga.

Two-and-a-half hours from Bangalore, Mysore, with its wide shady avenues and planned public spaces, is inching closer to its canonical age, which many say will mark the rise of a successful satellite city. The moment of decisive change came in 2005, says K Sriram, a real estate developer who has keenly followed the growth of the town.

“With the four-laning of the Mysore-Bangalore road, real estate prices shot up and for the first time, we saw money flowing into Mysore. Now, prices have rationalised but the town continues to grow, with peripheral areas like RT Nagar coming up well. Further developments are expected—Shapoorji Pallonji, for instance, is planning a huge Infocity, an integrated township, behind the Infosys campus,” he says.

Mysore now has an airport, with a single Kingfisher flight connecting it to Bangalore. Big hospitals blocks—Apollo and Columbia Asia among others—have sprung up to service not only the town’s nine-lakh-strong population, but also a small army of medical tourists. Traditional yoga hubs like Gokulam are now dotted with serviced apartments and hotels that cater to foreigners. In Jayalakshmipuram, a new Bharti-Walmart store stands out among reposeful houses; on MG Road, The Mall of Mysore, the town’s first big shopping mall, threw open its doors for Dussehra. Adjacent to it, the arches of a cream-coloured Radisson Blu Plaza welcome you into a hotel with 140 guest rooms, large conference space, and chic cocktails.Says Kunal Narang, who runs Fluid, a five-month-old disco-bar and restaurant on Kalidasa Road, Jayalakshmipuram, “The people of Mysore are now starting to spend more on eating out. With the result, several new restaurants have opened in the last two years. There are only a couple of good pubs, though,” he says. At the bar, half-a-dozen youngsters sip cocktails and converse in Hinglish; the women, in off-shoulder dresses and high heels, are dressed to the nines. “Don’t take a picture of me. I’m not supposed to be here,” says a young lady in black. The floor, lit up in rainbow colours, throbs with house music. Edison Lazar, the 24-year-old DJ, says club culture is picking up in Mysore.

“We have several regulars who come every weekend. Most of them are in their twenties,” he says. Not far from here, in BM Habitat Mall, a four-screen multiplex has just been inaugurated.

If young Mysore is spilling into bars, theatres and bowling alleys, it is also keenly aware of its culture and heritage. Ask MR Arun, who has inherited his grandfather’s incense sticks business. Once a thriving cottage industry, Mysore’s incense sticks have largely lost out to FMCG majors, but old-timers like Arun’s family have managed to carve themselves a niche.

“My grandfather, Narayan Rao, supplied agarbattis to the Maharaja. Ever since, celebrities like the Beatles, Peter Sellers, Dr Rajkumar and Pandit Ravishankar have patronised us,” says Arun, an MBA who started a software business in 2001.

Disillusioned with city life in Bangalore, Arun returned to his hometown in 2003 to take charge of the export wing of his family business. “Today, we supply to 25 countries—Germany is one of our biggest markets. In fact, half of our products are now exported,” says MN Ramakrishna, Arun’s father, walking us through their factory in Visveswara Nagar.In a room on the first floor of a pink building, half a dozen women in colourful saris rapidly hand-roll black, aromatic paste onto sticks, then roll them again in sawdust. “Each of them rolls about 5,000 sticks a day. Eighty natural ingredients including spices and oils go into the recipe—there are no chemicals but for a musk substitute. My grandfather called it the Special Darbar Agarbatti, we call it Aparajita,” says Arun, one of several Mysoreans who have found solace in their roots.

Mornings in Mysore are a tryst with the past. On Sayyaji Rao Road, opposite Devaraja Market, vendors sort out fresh flowers into baskets. Temple bells resound in the calm air; coffee shops open their shutters. Like pages flipping in the wind, the years roll back, and we find ourselves in front of the late author RK Narayan’s old villa on Vivekananda Road in Yadavagiri. A cream-coloured half-demolished structure with a black gate, the house, under the sprawl of a neem tree, is guarded by a man in uniform. “Some people came and broke down parts of the roof and the insides on the orders of RK Narayan’s descendants, who live in Chennai. The Mysore police commissioner immediately halted the demolition and stationed guards here to protect the heritage property where the writer spent much of his life,” says Madappa, the guard on duty. The rundown house, with a droopy coconut palm by its side, is symbolic of Mysore’s changing landscape. Mysore isn’t Malgudi, not anymore.

A town that remembers the past, Mysore is now beginning to imagine the future. Startups aiming to offer technology-based solutions to the education and social welfare sectors have spawned a wave of micro-innovation. “Mysore is an ideal Tier-II city for startups. There is a great deal of talent locally available, but not many companies have tried to capitalise on it. There has even been talk of several tech companies like IBM setting up an office here,” says Shiva P Chandra, director and CEO of MyShore IT Solutions, a year-old startup that has already made a mark by turning around a major e-governance project in partnership with the Karnataka Government. 

In 800 telecentres across Karnataka, MyShore’s kiosks deliver various certificates—birth and death certificates, income and caste certificates, land records, etc.—over the counter in a matter of minutes, servicing 75,000-1,00,000 citizens every day. Since MyShore inherited the infrastructure from Comat Technologies in March 2011, the volume of transactions has shot up, thanks to new incentives and an efficient tracking system that helps managers track down every single transaction. 

Over strong filter coffee served in delicate china at their office in the Hebbal Industrial Area, Chandra, who returned to Mysore after 15 years in the US, says the cost of living, and hence, salaries, are lower in Mysore. “If I were to hire someone with five years of experience in Bangalore, I’d have to pay Rs 10-12 lakh and even then, I’d have to worry about attrition. Here, I can get the same talent for Rs 7-10 lakh,” he says.Like Chandra, many of the senior managers at MyShore worked in the US for several years before they returned home. “They want to be in Mysore, so we don’t have to worry about them leaving,” he says. MyShore is in talks with TVS Motors to pilot an ad campaign for them at 10 telecentres. Nokia, LIC, Karnataka State Road Transport Corporation, and Bangalore Electricity Supply Company are also interested in extending their services through the kiosks, says AK Ranganathan, director, MyShore. 

There are other inspiring stories. Sriranga Digital is a homegrown digital typesetting solutions company that started out in 2003. In a short time, the company, which employs all of 15 people in Mysore and the neighbouring town of Srirangapatna, has scanned and processed eight lakh pages of old printed texts—three lakh of them in Kannada—including a four-volume English-Kannada dictionary from Mysore University, Sanskrit texts on the Vedas and Puranas, and the complete journals of the Bombay Natural History Society. Rejecting lucrative offers from Oracle and other tech companies, Arjun Kashyap, a young engineer, now director of the company, stayed on in Mysore and worked under his professor, CS Yogananda, to develop Optical Character Recognisation technology for vernacular content. 

“There are thousands of old books and magazines in vernacular languages that haven’t been digitised. Even when someone decides to digitise them, they merely scan the pages, making the content available in the form of bulky photographs that cannot be searched through. Since content that cannot be accessed is useless, we decided to develop OCR for regional languages—once the characters in a scanned page are recognised, the content can be indexed and made searchable,” says Kashyap, in Sriranga Digital’s Mysore office—a tiny room in an old house in Sunnadikeri where the afternoon light seeps in through wooden shutters left ajar. A single Atiz scanner with a V-shaped book cradle, fitted with a point-and-shoot camera on either side and improvised LED lights to improve image quality, stands next to a bookshelf. Without external funding, the company couldn’t afford another till recently.“This scanner cost us Rs 3 lakh. Now we have placed an order for a bigger, better scanner, which costs Rs 12 lakh,” says Yogananda, a former professor at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, who now heads the mathematics department at Sri Jayachamarajendra College of Engineering in Mysore. 

Kashyap has also developed text-to-speech support for vernacular content so it can be accessed by the visually impaired, and has adapted existing technology to radically compress data. “The BNHS journals, after scanning, were about 70 GB. These include 6,000 pictures, some of them taken by Salim Ali himself. Within months, we reduced the data to 2GB without any loss and brought out a DVD,” says Kashyap. Sriranga Digital plans to eventually document all literature in Kannada on their website, sirinudi.org. 

Elsewhere, in a sooty garage in the Hebbal Industrial Area, not far from the sprawling Infosys office and training centre that first changed Mysore’s landscape, Srinivas Bidare, a University of Michigan alumnus who started a design solutions company a decade ago in the US, pores over his latest invention—a Nitro Electric Regenerative Vehicle. An auto stands on one side of the garage; on another, a test rig and a table strewn with electronics take up space. NERV, as he calls it, is an innovative braking system that stores the energy dissipated while braking in the form of compressed air in a long metal cylinder, which in turn is used to propel the vehicle. 

“In countries like India, where you have to brake a lot, you could save up to 20 per cent fuel. You would essentially get your money back in a year,” says Bidare, who set up the R&D unit of his company, Intent Design, in Mysore in 2009. Mahindra and other automobile companies are interested in the technology, which is now in the testing phase, he says. Born and raised in Bangalore, Bidare, who has several patents to his credit, says a changing Mysore today reminds him of Bangalore 10-15 years ago. “Today, if I have to procure a part in Bangalore, I have to drive for an hour and a half. Here, everything is within walking distance. Mysore is still peaceful, so one can concentrate on research,” he says.Though caught in an unending ballad of change, Mysore hasn’t been conscripted into urban chaos, and perhaps never will be. “Mysore is growing slowly. And we like it that way,” says Shivananda Salgame, who founded i-Learn International, an educational content company, in 2009. From a well-lit office on the first floor of a 1945 villa in Yadavagiri, Salgame is readying to launch a tablet designed by the Panda Time Group, a UK-based company he has partnered with, in the Indian market. “The Pandroid Tablo is a seven-inch tablet that costs just Rs 3,450 for the WiFi model, Rs 4,900 for the GSM/2G model, and Rs 5,750 for the 3G model,” says Salgame, who splits his week between Mysore and Bangalore. A tablet from Mysore? RK Narayan would approve. 

150 km Distance from Bangalore 

2,994,744 Population of Mysore district 

About 9 lakh Population of Mysore city 

72.56 per cent Literacy rate in Mysore District 

* According to an Urban Development Ministry study, Mysore is the second cleanest city in the country, after Chandigarh 

* In a tribute to the late RK Narayan who lived in and derived inspiration from Mysore, the Mysore-Yesvantpur Express was last month renamed ‘Malgudi Express’, after the writer’s fictitious town