Yearning for the days of yore, when Bangalore was the casual Pub City? Pecos, off Brigade Road, remains the wildly popular hole-in-the-wall that it was decades ago.

From lounge bars to coffee shops, from shopping malls to exotic restaurants, from nightclubs to bowling alleys…the Garden City of Bangalore is evolving, growing at a pace that would put Michael Schumacher to shame. Rhea Saran takes a look at the metropolis' humming nightlife

The thing about Bangalore is that it eludes neat definition. There's nothing square, predictable, boring or expected about this humming near-metropolis. Bangalore is not merely the Garden City or the famed Pensioners' Paradise or India's answer to Silicon Valley or any of the other monochromic labels with which passers through over the years have tried to tag it. If anything, it is a kaleidoscope of all those things. A palette filled with daubs of multi-hued, multi-toned colours. Bangalore is racy, laid-back, aggressive, passive, cosmopolitan, suburban, dirty, beautiful, nouveau riche, old money, hip, traditional, techno-savvy and arty. It's a glorious mess of contradiction and constant change. And these days the city is really living up to its age-old mantra of 'solpa adjust madi' (just adjust a little).

The adjustment, of course, is more than just 'solpa', more than just that little bit. Gone are the days of the sprawling colonial bungalows, extravagant gardens and quiet jacaranda-lined streets that the Bangalore of old was celebrated for. Sleek high-rise office blocks, apartments, hotels and malls dot the once lusciously green skyline. The city that once slept before the witching hour now buzzes non-stop, with white Toyota Qualis taxicabs careening down flyovers at three in the morning, depositing bleary-eyed call centre operators and IT professionals at their doorsteps. Bangalore is evolving, changing, growing at a pace that would put Michael Schumacher to shame. They say that a city's prosperity is mirrored by its rate of progress. Well then Bangalore is on a crash course toward its zenith.

The range of options truly reflects the diversity of the influx that followed the Big Bang, or, in layman's terms, the rise of that behemoth, the IT industry, a few years earlier. There's a niche in this city for every yuppie, every hippie, every nerd, every glamour puss and every other conceivable form of homo sapien.

But, for all the chaos and confusion that accompanies a makeover, Bangalore has managed to retain some of its undeniable old-world charm. Koshy's, the famous eatery on St. Mark's Road, still serves up delicious plates of appam and eshtew and Spanish Omelettes to the eclectic crowd that gathers there day upon day to hold forth on the state of the world while sipping unending cups of strong filter coffee. The Bangalore Club remains as stolidly, almost snobbishly, colonial as before with its beautiful architecture, lavish lawns and persistent 'Men Only' bar. Bangaloreans are still tenaciously fighting traffic in order to take their daily constitutionals through the several hundred acres of greenery that form the local Hyde Park look-alike, Cubbon Park and the botanical gardens, Lal Bagh. And while many old buildings got acquainted with bulldozers to their peril, the Vidhana Soudha continues to shine majestically forth, every graceful archway lit with an iridescent light, lending that surreal quality to the State House that forces passers-by to stop and stare, even if just for a moment.